The Smolenskoye cemetery, located on Vasilievsky Island, is one of the largest and oldest cemeteries in St. Petersburg. Its name is presumably associated with the fact that here, in a swampy and swampy area, not far from the seaside, migrants from the Smolensk lands settled, who came to the construction of St. Petersburg. But this is only a version. The name of the cemetery, like the Smolenka River (formerly Black River), was fixed after the construction of the temple in the name of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God.
At the source of the Malaya Neva, the Black River in the 1710s, there was a prison of the military chancellery. Prisoners were buried nearby without taking off their chains. These were the first burials of the future Smolensk cemetery, the official mention of which first appeared in the Decree of the Synod of October 23, 1738.
The Smolensk cemetery has a complicated history, which keeps many secrets and legends. Viktor Sergeev, a resident of Vasilievsky Island, told about one amazing case at the Smolenskoye cemetery. Here is his story.
“As a child, I lived at 62 Detskaya Street. It is opposite the Smolensk cemetery. The guys and I often went there for a walk. We watched people come to the chapel of Xenia the Blessed (although it was closed), pick out lime from the walls and chew on the spot. They wanted to be cured. They say it helped some.
But mostly they carried notes, in which they sometimes wrapped money and shoved them into the slots. And we pulled these notes with tweezers and money - 10, 15, 20 kopecks, or even fifty kopecks - we took and spent on ice cream, and the notes were read and thrown away. What were they asking for: health, money, things, hand over the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or help in love, and sometimes such nonsense that it is inconvenient to say.
Once, however, the wish from the note came true. Sergey Aksenenko studied in our class. Before some exam I asked Ksenia to help him get ticket number 6, because he had just learned it. And pulled it out! Got my top three.
But I remember another case with horror. I was in fifth grade then. It was late September 1963. In the evening, my friends Vitya A. and Sasha F. went to the cemetery to collect sulfur from the destroyed gravestones. We plucked it out with penknives and set it on fire, watched it burn beautifully with a bright blue flame.
Promotional video:
That time, after picking sulfur in matchboxes, we decided to climb a tree to shelter from the rain. While we were climbing, there was no one around. And then suddenly we look - a woman is walking towards us. For some reason we became quiet at once and began to watch her. She was wearing a raincoat with a hood, short rubber boots on her feet, and two large bags in her hands. The woman went to the grave shell about eight meters from us and put the bags on the ground. She did not see us, because we were at a height of 2.5-3 m. Vitya suddenly dropped his box, he hit a tree with a noise and fell to the ground. The woman raised her head and looked at us.
We were dumbfounded - there was no face under the hood, only a black hole, emptiness! In the same second, she disappeared, dissolved, as if she had never existed. My hair stood on end and goosebumps ran all over my body. The guys were shaking too. Trembling with fear, we went down to the ground, almost falling into a reservoir that was a crater either from an aerial bomb or from a large shell. They wanted to run, but could not, their legs seemed to be numb.
Sasha said that we must have dreamed it. With difficulty we forced ourselves to approach the place where we had just seen the woman. There were no tracks on the path, but from the tree we could clearly see the prints of her boots. Here we started from the cemetery and for several days we did not appear there. They were afraid to even talk about it.
Later, I repeatedly visited the place where the woman disappeared, but I never saw anything like it again. Meanwhile, strange things began to happen.
One of my then companions, after finishing the 8th grade, during the "Scarlet Sails" holiday, was thrown from the bridge onto a barge sailing along the Neva, and he crashed. Another “registered” for a long time in places of detention. And I started having big disagreements with my health, and not only.
Once I almost drowned, entangled in fishing nets. Another time, a TV set crashed right in front of my nose, falling from the ninth floor as I walked by. The oncoming man turned white and said: "Well, guy, you're lucky!"
I do not know if all this is connected with that case, but sometimes for some reason I think about it …"
This story was commented on by psychologist Boris Prokhorov
- How can one rationally explain where ghosts and ghosts can come from? The most successful, in my opinion, the emergence of phantoms is explained by the Canadian neurophysiologist Michael Persinger. He collected 203 reports of ghost events over the past 37 years and matched them with geophysical data on magnetic activity on the corresponding days. It turned out that, as a rule, phantoms appear in front of amazed or frightened people during high geomagnetic activity, during periods of magnetic storms.
The researcher believes that hallucinations are caused by the action of a magnetic field on the temporal lobes of the brain. To test this, he placed the volunteers blindfolded in an isolated room and occasionally passed a magnetic field through their temporal lobes, without the subjects knowing when the magnetic field was turned on. It turned out that when it was turned on, people often saw something in the dark that resembled a human figure.
The fact that all three boys "saw" the same ghost may have happened because before that there was a conversation that could "inspire" such a vision. And it was just a phantom, not a living person - no traces, according to them, remained on the soft dirt track.
From the book "Phenomena, Secrets, Hypotheses" Potapov. A. V.