There are haunted houses in almost every city, and Taganrog is no exception. In our city, as it turned out, there is also a house with evil spirits, and it is located at Chekhov Street No. 129. The people called this house “The House with Ghosts”, “The House with Devils” or “General Kirsanov's House”.
In the 1820s, the Cossack general Khrisanf Kirsanov began to live in a one-and-a-half-story building. It was for him that this house was built. In those days, the place was quiet and calm, and then there was no market. General Kirsanov lived in the house until the 1860s, then the building became the property of General Aleksandrovsky. The new owner laid out a garden near the house, which he planted with trees, laid out a flower garden there and decorated this newly appeared paradise with white marble sculptures brought from Italy.
Three statues are still presentable and are kept in the courtyard of the Art Gallery.
After the death of the general, his widow sold the house for 23 thousand rubles. The city bought the building and placed an artillery brigade and an infirmary in it.
In 1911, the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross was located here and the bishop was settled with his services.
After the house fell into disrepair, the garden was overgrown, many trees died and only lonely standing white statues frightened lonely passers-by in the dark. It was at this moment that stories about ghosts that lived in an empty house appeared. Among the Taganrozh residents, rumors spread about a white woman who walks through an abandoned garden and groans on quiet evenings. Local residents tried to bypass the house.
For the first time, Vasily Zelenenko, an old-timer from Taganrozh, mentioned the ghosts in the house. Before the outbreak of World War II, he wrote to the historian Pavel Filevsky:
“… The mention of Kirsanov’s house“a house with women”evoked a vivid idea of this gloomy house, which was inhabited by the folk fantasy with devils and ghosts, its own view and gloomy walls surrounding the garden, with female figures on the walls, it exactly reminded of those abandoned and empty houses where some crime was committed and where the fantasies of the bazaar gossips devils and ghosts built a nest for themselves, and I remember, as a junior high school student, passing near this house late in the evening, I felt some embarrassment, a grave voice would be heard, and then one of the batteries of the 5th reserve artillery brigade, which returned after the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, settled there. and settled for a long time in Taganrog."
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