This story was published in the book of the Russian writer and priest Dmitry Bulgakovsky entitled “From the Underworld. Phenomena of the Dead from Ancient Antiquity to the Present Day”, published in 1902. In it, the author has collected several dozen stories about contacts with the dead, collected by the author of the book.
Below is one such story. It was told to Bulgakovsky by someone O. D., who himself was an eyewitness to the anomalous phenomenon.
“Twenty versts from our estate there lived a priest in the village of Vishnevets, Volyn province, who was in great friendship with my father. This priest, widowed, remained with his sixteen-year-old daughter. At his request, my father released his daughter Stepanida for a short time in order to distract the orphaned girl from the difficult impressions on the occasion of her mother's death.
About two weeks passed, Stepanida did not return, and therefore my father (I was then about ten years old) went to Vishnevets in order to visit his widower friend and take my sister home.
We arrived in Vishnevets in the evening, about ten o'clock, and there were only girls at home, my sister and the daughter of a priest. I wanted to run around the garden, but I was afraid to go deeper into the garden and sat down on a bench not far from the house.
I saw a lady in a black dress walking down the alley. When she drew level with me, she looked at me with a smile and went to the priest's house through the porch, which directly overlooked the garden. I ran to the other porch where my father and girls were sitting.
“A lady entered the house through the garden porch,” I said.
The sister and friend looked at each other at these words and seemed alarmed, so the father asked them what was wrong with them and what they were concerned about. They replied that according to my description and dress, this lady is a deceased mother who goes to the house every day, and everyone sees her. Since my father did not believe in this kind of phenomenon, he laughed at the girls.
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The priest did not return for a long time. Stepanida suddenly screamed and said that the deceased had flashed next to her.
Without waiting for the owner of the house, we went to bed. I lay down with my father in one room, next to the priest's office, and the girls in another. At about two o'clock in the morning I woke up, I don't know why, and I heard a conversation in the office.
A male voice spoke:
- Why did you come so late today?
“I've been here before,” a woman's voice was heard in response. - I saw your guests, I wanted to hug the little boy in the garden, but he ran away from me. Then I wanted to thank Stepanida for her friendship with our daughter, but she was scared of me …
- Why didn't you prepare her?
- We are strictly forbidden to appear to those who are afraid of us, under the threat of deprivation of the right to further meetings with the living.
Hearing this, I was terribly frightened, because I guessed that the conversation was between the deceased and the priest, her husband, and jumped straight onto the bed to my father, who, like me, did not sleep either. And he warned me not to interfere with him listening to the conversation of the afterlife with the living.
The next day, at morning tea, my father directed the conversation to a night visit and expressed doubts about him, suspecting something completely different.
“Believe it or not,” the priest answered, “but I, as an honest man and a minister of the holy altar, tell you that I am in spiritual communion with many dead, including my wife. They often turn to me with requests to pray for them, and when I fulfill their requests, they personally thank me. My late wife, on the other hand, visits my house almost every day and often expresses interest in everything around her, like a living person. She always evades direct answers to all my questions about the conditions of the afterlife, declaring that they, the dead, are forbidden to answer all the questions of the living, especially idle ones."
