Believe it or not, ghosts do exist. They especially like living in museums created from mansions and castles. Apparently, their former owners love to remember the time when they were people, not ghostly creatures
This story was told at the Nesterov Art Museum. The house in which the museum is located was built in 1913 by the architect Shcherbachev. The family of the timber merchant Mikhail Artemyevich Laptev lived in this mansion. There are even bricks here - with the inscription "Laptev".
When the Bolsheviks came to power, Laptev realized that the house would be taken away from him, but he dreamed that not some headquarters would be made out of the dwelling, but a library or museum.
A terrible time was approaching. In the bloody year 1919, the merchant Laptev and another 500 people were taken out on a barge and drowned. He left a family, who moved to the stable. At the request of the widow, some family belongings were returned to her. But this is only the beginning of our story …
Steps and rustles
Anna Arnoldovna Hardina is a senior researcher at the museum, a restorer of ancient Russian painting, an honored cultural worker of the Republic of Belarus. She has been working in the museum for the 27th year. He knows about ghosts firsthand:
- In the early 90s, many employees, in order to somehow live, had to earn extra money here as watchmen. I myself was on duty at night for eight months in the company of a large St. Bernard.
And then one night I heard footsteps - someone was walking along the corridor and flipping switches. But the switch was turned off, so the light didn't turn on. Suddenly I hear - this "someone" went out onto the porch and after a while came back! And again - footsteps in the corridor and clicking … Yes, it was scary.
Once my dog jumped up in the middle of the night terribly frightened. The fur stood on end, the teeth bared. Usually such a friendly St. Bernard barked sharply at an empty corner.
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Footsteps, sighs, rustles I heard every night. In general, I was scared to be on duty. And then I was advised … to make friends with a ghost! And so, during the next night shift, I turned to the ghost aloud, said something like: "Please do not frighten me, I will go to work tomorrow morning!" And imagine - it helped! The rustles subsided for a while.
Similar stories were told by other employees. In winter, the ghost knocked on the window, sat on the sofa, so much so that the watchman dozing on it felt that the seat underneath him creaked and sagged.
A rumor spread throughout the museum that the ghost was nothing more than the soul of the tragically deceased owner of the Laptev house.
“I didn’t believe these tales until I myself spent the night in the museum,” says the chief curator of the museum Valentina Sorokina. - There were no more people who wanted to be on duty. Students had to be hired, and they also dared to guard the museum in pairs.
Something had to be done. In the late 90s, a priest came to the museum and served in one of the halls a prayer service for Mikhail Laptev. Since then, the ghost has calmed down forever.
BTW
According to urban legends, the most famous ghost of Ufa lives not in the Nesterov museum, but in the house-museum named after Aksakov - in the office of the writer's grandfather Nikolai Zubov. Sergei Aksakov wrote that as a child, it was there that he saw his grandfather in a dressing gown. They say that the spirit still lives in this room …