At the end of September 1888, an invisible person appeared in the hut of the village head Ivan Timofeevich Chekanov from the village of Silino, Ardatovsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod province, who spoke loudly in a rough, hoarse male voice.
He declared himself a grandfather brownie and introduced himself as Ivan Ivanovich Varlamov.
Soon his sister, Mashenka, joined him. She had a thin female voice, and she spoke in a pure, masterful language, while Ivan Ivanovich clicked, that is, he pronounced the letter "Ch" as "Ts".
The Chekanov family, in addition to the owner himself, forty-five years old, consisted of his forty-two-year-old wife Anastasia and three daughters: Alexandra, fourteen years old, ten-year-old Anyuta, and the youngest daughter, four years old. Chekanov's elderly father also lived in the house. The bearer of the phenomenon, as it soon became clear, was Anyuta - a ruddy, dark-brown, gray-eyed, not bad-looking miniature girl; in appearance, she can be given no more than seven years.
In the Chekanov family, before Sergiev's day - September 25 - it was wrong ', the father and son decided to share. And then one night, September 23, 1888, Anastasia noticed that the door to the hut opened by itself. The hostess locked it, but it opened again. Then she tied the door behind the brace with her long sash, but with the same result; I repeated it once more - the belt was untied again.
In fright, she called her husband, he tied the door to the bracket in several knots, and it opened again - all the knots were self-unlocked! Then a knocking was heard on the counter and the beds, like a stick, began to be heard some sighs. Ivan, the owner, asked: “What is this, for better or for better? Isn't that you, grandpa brownie?"
He was answered in a hoarse voice: “Don't be afraid, it's me - your grandfather brownie. Let me warm myself on the stove."
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From that day in the Chekanovs' hut began conversations with the invisible. They lasted an hour or two, were always conducted in the dark, and concerned ordinary peasant affairs. Either the voice forbade Ivan to share with his father, angrily threatening to ruin, then ordered not to sell the horse, calling it by color.
- Are you the headman? - asked Ivan's voice.
- I, - he answered.
- You do not put the peasants under arrest, let the sergeant.
One evening a voice said:
- I don’t want to talk anymore, but Mashenka will come.
Soon they heard that someone had entered.
“You live well, God help,” a thin female voice sounded. The speaker calmed the baby, who seemed to be in her arms and crying like a child:
- Don't cry, I'll give you sugar!
The woman who appeared in the hut asked:
- Yours, perhaps, daughter?
- Shameless, - answered the voice, - do girls have children? This is my mother's daughter, my sister.
Ivan Ivanovich entered conversations more often. During the conversation, everyone in the hut heard noise and fuss. When the others in the hut sang, the voices sang along. The voice called by name of people standing on the street, so loudly that they could clearly hear it. The answers to the questions were often joking. To the question "Why are you wheezing?" to one he answered that he was at the holiday, to the other that he was tired, he was turning the logs …
Conversations began only when Anyuta was sitting on the stove: if she was not in the hut, then no voices were heard. Once they put Anyuta to sleep on the floor, among the family, to check whether she was speaking herself? The voice reacted to it like this:
- That you covered the whole hut, there is nowhere to spit!
Ivan Ivanovich announced that he saw everything that was going on in the hut. Once at dinner, the older sister hit Anyuta on the head. In the evening, a voice spoke to Alexandra:
“Why are you hitting Anyuta, I’ll beat you myself with a scraper for that!”
Ivan Ivanovich said that, in addition to his sister Mashenka and her child, he had a father and a soldier brother. It seemed to Anyuta that the voice was coming from the wall, to the others it was heard in the hut itself, close to them. When the fire was lit, the voice fell silent, extinguished - it began to sound again. Ivan Ivanovich read and repeated the prayers, when they sang the Cherubim, he sang along.
Among the curious in the hut was the local blacksmith Chitagonov. Hearing the voice, he said:
- What it is! Give me a gun, I'll kill him!
The answer came:
- I'll kill those myself! - And in the face of the blacksmith flew a footcloth lying on the bench.
Naturally, a local sergeant also came, worried about strange phenomena in the area entrusted to him and feverishly pondering measures to combat them. But as soon as there was a knock in his presence, he ordered to light a fire and immediately jumped out of the hut …
In the village, they said that Anyuta's mother "Ali cursed her daughter, or scolded her badly," that an evil spirit had become attached to her. Peers and even adults began to avoid the girl. Old man Chekanov drove out evil spirits by the local method - he beat on the walls of the hut with linden baskets. Did not help.
The son of a local priest left very interesting testimonies. According to his observations, voices were heard near Anyuta, mostly from the stove, when she was there. If the girl was on the bench, then above her head, at the ceiling, or under the bench. At first there was a quiet, barely audible old man's voice. Then it became louder and louder and was perceived from another room. The words were pronounced clearly, distinctly, Mashenka's voice was clear. In the dark, the invisibles recognized who was sitting where. One peasant, holding a cross in his pocket, told Mashenka that he had brought her an apple. She:
- You are cheating, you have not an apple in your pocket, but a cross!
To the question "Whose are you?" answered:
- We are local, Povalishinsky.
- From what house?
- Varlamov.
Their house really stands in the village, but everything was calm in it, and they did not know anything about Mashenka.
In the presence of Anyuta, on the orders of her father, the clock stopped and started running again. Clothes were thrown from the floor onto the floor, but the lamp hanging from the ceiling was not touched. It knocked most often on the floors, so much so that once a board was broken. Ivan Ivanovich usually announced his arrival with a knock, after which a conversation began. Sometimes the peasants called him themselves:
- Grandpa, are you here?
The sergeant, naturally, did not come to Chekanov for the sake of curiosity. Judging by his behavior, he feared that evil spirits, but his official duty overcame his fear of the unknown. Having collected all the necessary information, the guardian of the law drew up an act on bringing the peasant Ivan Chekanov, Timofeev's son, forty-five years old, to account on the basis of article thirty-seven of the Charter on the punishment imposed by the magistrate. The article stipulated responsibility for spreading false rumors and stirring up minds.
Alarmed by the appearance of a sergeant in his house and, apparently, knowing from the experience of others that all this was not good, Chekanov decided to take drastic measures to get rid of the misfortune. On November 1, 1888, he went on a pilgrimage to the Ponyatayevsky convent. There he was advised to serve at home a prayer service with the blessing of water and to pray earnestly, which Ivan Timofeevich did, after which all the strange phenomena in the house stopped.
A. N. Aksakov, who described in detail the Chekanov case in 1895, remarked on this occasion: "In such a case, prayer turned out to be more effective than police measures."
