The legends of the city of Astrakhan are full of mystery and romance. All of them are directly related to the history of the city itself and its environs. Many of them formed the basis of mystical stories and stories, because none of the available legends ever appears from scratch. Astrakhan has its own haunted houses: for example, the former merchant mansion of the fish merchant Mikhail Shelekhov, who bequeathed his house after his death to a medical institution. This house once housed a TB dispensary, and its patients often saw the ghost of a woman in white robes in the corridors and wards. It was rumored that this was Shelekhov's daughter, Masha, with whose spirit he communicated after she passed away due to tuberculosis. The mansion is decorated with a sculpture of a young girl installed on the roof slope. This statue was commissioned by an inconsolable father in memory of his daughter in Italy. The ghost of a woman in white robes was also seen in the Regional Museum and in the Kremlin. In the 90s of the last century, there was a real boom in the search for evidence of its existence. Enthusiasts with cameras and kerosene lanterns climbed into the rooms of the Trinity Cathedral closed for restoration at night, tracked down the ghost by the moonlight near the walls of the fortress, and even talked about their meetings with a mysterious stranger - a woman in white clothes up to her heels, a beautiful face and piercing eyes. Who she is, why she appears in the Kremlin is unknown. Some suggested that she be considered the White Widow, whose grave is actually located in the Old Cemetery of the city. And it is familiar to almost everyone as the grave of Maria Schmidt. This legend was inspired by the beauty of the white marble tombstone, which is called the "container" of the ghost.
Another legend says that in the Kremlin you can meet not only a White woman, but also a Black Monk. Moreover, they may turn out to be three completely real historical characters at once: Metropolitan Joseph, who was martyred by the Razin people, Saint Theodosius, who exposed False Dmitry during the time of troubles, and Cyril the Builder, sent to us by Ivan the Terrible himself at the end of the 16th century. The Cyril Chapel was erected over the grave of the latter, and miraculous healings of the sick were constantly taking place at the grave of Metropolitan Joseph. Now his relics, like the relics of Theodosius, rest in the lower church of the Assumption Cathedral of the Astrakhan Kremlin.
There is an opinion that in terms of anomalous zones Astrakhan and its environs are not among the latter. Surely many have heard of "wormholes": these are, as physicists suggest, the intersection of spaces.
That is why all sorts of incomprehensibility occurs in such places: strange plants grow, or, on the contrary, a hopeless desert, strange smells and sounds come from nowhere … There are several such wormholes in Astrakhan. For example, four Zelenginskaya streets (not far from the Old Cemetery, by the way). Quite often, there time seems to slow down: an ordinary pedestrian feels as if he is not moving anywhere. There are other unusual places too. We are talking about underground passages, which, according to the Astrakhan people, run along the former walls of the posad - the White City, under the Kremlin and even under the Volga, connecting its banks. Monks, and metropolitans, and Razin rebels, and even the very first builders of the Astrakhan fortress are called their creators.
Another unusual phenomenon that the Astrakhan people had to observe happened 4 years ago, in July 2015. According to witnesses, glowing objects appeared in the sky over Astrakhan, tentatively towards the Solyanka market, presumably UFOs. Flying orange objects either approached each other or diverged in different directions, rapidly flying away. At some point, one of the objects fell sharply to the ground, after which it gradually began to rise and flew away towards residential buildings. The press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergencies of Russia of the Astrakhan Region could not comment on this. There are no data on flights of military aviation at that time over Astrakhan. However, documentary evidence in the form of photographs of this phenomenon exists.
Kazhetta Akhmetzhanova