...continued from part thirteen.
12. Stories About Phenomena on the Farm of A. V. Shchapov (Ural region) in 1870–1871
All this (set forth in the above-mentioned letter of Shchapov) was nothing to us, compared to what we had already endured, if only that had been the end of it; but imagine our horror that as soon as we moved to the farmstead in the first days of March, this force began to roam the house again from the very first step. And this time the phenomena occurred even without the presence of my wife. Thus, once, before evening, a large heavy sofa began to jump on all four legs before my eyes, and what's more, at the time when my old mother was lying on it, frightened, of course, in the most terrible way. This incident has a special significance for me because before that I seemed not to be able to check myself in many things that I had seen and heard, since there were strangers around all the time, and I could have been under someone else’s influence, although, I repeat, there were no doubts even then, but here, after all, the entire sofa was in full view, since it was daytime, there was no one and nothing under it, my old mother was lying on it completely calmly, in the room, except for me and the boy at the door in the hall, there was also no one, and meanwhile the five-six pood sofa, with the old woman lying on it, jumped up three or four times, as I said, on all its legs at once - it is clear that this is in no way a hallucination.
Then, that same day or the next, in the evening, when we were sitting in our sick room - suddenly, in full view of us all, from under the washstand standing in the hall - a bluish-phosphoric spark flew out with a crackling sound in the direction of my wife's bedroom (where she was not at the time) and, simultaneously with the rapid flight of this spark, we saw that something in the bedroom instantly flared up. Rushing there headlong, I saw that a cotton unfinished dress lying on a table in the front corner was burning. My mother-in-law, who was alone in this room and managed to pour a jug of water on the flared flame, warned me to put it out. I, having stopped in the narrow doorway and not letting anyone pass ahead of me into this room, began first of all to investigate: was there anything else that caused the dress to ignite, apart from the spark we had seen, such as a fallen candle, a match, etc. But there was absolutely nothing like that near this place, and meanwhile at the same time a rather strong and foul smell of sulfur could be sensed in the room, emanating precisely from the drenched dress, the burnt spots of which, despite the fact that they were wet from the water that had been poured out, were still hot to the touch, and steam was coming from them, as if the water had been poured onto hot iron, and not onto calico.
No matter how hard and dangerous it was to leave my family at such a time - two old women and a wife with a child, I had to go to town for one day on urgent business, and so that the family would not be afraid to remain alone (since we had all begun to be seriously afraid of these phenomena) - I asked a young man, our neighbor A. I. Portnov, to stay with them. Returning a day later, I found the whole family getting ready with things already packed on a cart; they told me that it was impossible to stay any longer, because spontaneous combustion of various things in the house had begun, and it got to the point that yesterday evening the dress of the mistress of the house (i.e. my wife) caught fire by itself, and Portnov, rushing to put it out on her, burned all his hands, which turned out to be, indeed, bandaged and almost completely covered with blisters. This is what Portnov told me about it. In the evening, on the day of my departure, the phenomena, in addition to the knocking and so forth, were complicated by the appearance of luminous meteors, which appeared in front of the window facing the outer corridor; there were several of them and of varying sizes, from a large apple to a walnut; round in shape and dark red and bluish-pink in color, not quite transparent, but rather matte. According to him, this amazing flying of luminous lights, replacing one another, continued for quite a long time. Such a ball would fly up to the window, spin around on the other side of the glass for a while, without any noise, and as soon as it disappeared, another, a third would take its place from the opposite wall of the corridor; then two, three together, etc. This playful change of lights continued, as if wanting to penetrate into the house. My wife was not sleeping at this time. The next day, towards evening, they had just gone out to sit on the porch (it was already warm), when Portnov immediately returned to the room for some reason and saw that the bed was on fire. He called for help, they threw off the bedspread and sheets, which had already burned through quite a bit, and, having carefully extinguished everything and looked around to see if there was any fire left anywhere, they again went out into the air from the smoke in the room and were perplexed as to where the fire could have come from on the bed, when there was no lit candle or anyone smoking a cigarette... when suddenly they again heard a sooting sound in the room. This time it was the hair mattress that was burning, on its lower side, near the corner, and the fire had already penetrated so far into the thick hair (without any admixture) stuffing of the mattress that, in their opinion, this could not have happened due to an oversight when extinguishing the first fire, because the burning spots were completely extinguished, and there should not have been any fire left, especially since the hair stuffing is a non-flammable material - not to mention bast or cotton wool, which were not there.
But that was not the end of it, and it ended that same evening with such a catastrophe that it was decided to leave the house altogether and move somewhere, despite the fact that the snow was already melting and spring streams were running all around.
Portnov related this incident to me thus: “I was sitting,” he says, “playing the guitar, and the miller who had been sitting there before left the room, and soon after him Elena Efimovna (my wife) came out, and as soon as the door closed behind her, I heard from somewhere, as if from afar, a dull and drawn-out, plaintive cry. The voice seemed familiar to me, and, dumbfounded for a moment by the inexplicable horror that had seized me, I rushed out the door and in the entryway I saw literally a pillar of fire, in the middle of which, all engulfed in flames, stood Elena Efimovna, her dress was burning from below and the fire covered her almost completely. I immediately realized that the fire was not strong, since her dress was thin and light, and I rushed to put it out with my hands; but at the same time I felt that they were burning terribly, as if they were sticking to burning resin; there was some kind of cracking and noise from under the floor and at that moment the whole floor was shaking and trembling violently. The miller ran from the yard to help, and the two of us carried the victim in our arms, unconscious and her dress burnt."
The wife told the following story. She had just stepped out the door into the entryway when suddenly the entire floor beneath her began to shake, and a deafening noise was heard; and at the same time, from under the floor there flew out with a crackling sound exactly the same bluish spark that we had previously seen flying out from under the washstand, and she had just managed to scream in fright when she suddenly found herself completely ablaze and lost her memory. It is quite remarkable that she herself did not receive the slightest burn, while the thin gigonette dress she had on was scorched all around above the knees, and there was not a single scorched spot on her legs.
The miller told me this. Leaving the room, he went through the garden to the outbuilding and, before reaching it, he heard first a noise behind him, and then a scream, and, looking back, he saw that the entryway was on fire. He was so frightened that his legs gave way, and he barely had the strength to run to help.
What was really left to do? In front of me was Portnov, with his hands crippled from burns, a burnt dress, on the thin fabric of which there was not the slightest trace of any combustible material – it was clear that there was nothing to do but flee! This we did that same day, moving to the neighboring village to the apartment of a Cossack, where we lived throughout the flood without any further alarm. There was no repetition upon our return to the house, which, however, I had ordered to be torn down that same summer. Fortunately I had thought of moving from my estate to another place before that, but probably would have taken another year or two to get ready; this catastrophe forced me to speed up the fulfillment of my desire.
And so these phenomena ended and were never renewed; and we, I confess, even avoided talking about it among ourselves, both because of the heavy impression left by these phenomena, which even led us to fear for our existence, and because of the unpleasantness we suffered from slander and gossip.
I also forgot to mention in its place that there were two cases of seeing what is now called materialization (at that time we simply called it a diabolical delusion).
So, the first time my wife saw in the window, from the outside, a delicate, pink, as if childish, hand, with transparent, luminous nails, with which she drummed on the glass. Then in the same window she saw two dark-colored living creatures like leeches, which frightened her to the point of fainting. And another time I myself, being alone in the house and trying to spy for several hours who and how (whether it was my wife herself, pretending to be asleep) was drumming on the floor in her bedroom, - several times I quietly crept up to the bedroom door, where the knocks on the floor were continuous, but each time, as soon as I looked slightly into the bedroom, the sounds stopped and immediately resumed again when I walked away or only took my eyes away from the interior of the bedroom, as if teasing me. But then, I suppose for the twentieth time, or even more, I suddenly burst into the room, just as the knocking began there and... frozen with horror, a small, almost childish, pink hand, quickly jumping off the floor, darted under the coverlet of my sleeping wife and buried itself in the folds near her shoulder, so that I could clearly see how unnaturally quickly the folds of the coverlet moved, starting from its lower end to my wife's shoulder, where the hand had hidden. And it seems there was nothing particularly to be frightened about, but I, as I say, was frozen with horror, because the hidden hand was not my wife's hand at all (although that hand was also small in size). I noticed this clearly, and, besides, the very position of the sleeping wife was such (on her left side, turning away to the wall) that with her immobility, before my eyes, it was impossible to lower her hand to the floor and then raise it so unnaturally quickly in one vertical line with her shoulder. What was there to think – a hallucination? But no, a thousand times no! I am not subject to this at all. Deception on the part of the wife, her painful predisposition to this? But the shape, the color, the size of the hand itself, which I saw?
Finally, the deceased was a quite respectable, serious, loving mother and wife, strictly religious and did not undergo any painful attacks until her death (from childbirth, in April 1879). And yet almost all the phenomena, such as the flying of things and the knocking, seemed to hide behind her, so that it seemed to many that she herself was doing it, especially in those cases when they watched with distrust or doubt, although at the same time it was possible to cite a hundred chances against one for the impossibility of doing what was done to her, because often things flew out, for example, from closed rooms - wardrobes, chests, etc., which she did not touch at the moment. So one day, when our commission, consisting of three people and the same number of us outsiders, sat down to dinner, and my wife was returning from the storeroom with her hands full of jars of pickles, then, as soon as she began to open the outer door from the entryway, opposite which the dining table was, with difficulty from her hands being occupied with her load, at that very moment various small things began to fall on our cutlery and on the table: lead bullets, old rusty nuts and other junk in the amount of several handfuls, which had been previously (as I barely remembered) in a closed box filled with various bulky old junk, in the same storeroom, which, however, according to the servants' certificate, the lady had not touched. And it was impossible to throw such a quantity of things directly on the table across the room to her, with her hands occupied.
It was also strange that, despite the force with which these heavy things fell onto the plates, not one of them was broken. And yet it seemed that she had thrown them, although everyone, seeing her entering the door, could not notice the slightest gesture or effort on her part (see A. N. Aksakov, “Harbingers of Spiritualism”, St. Petersburg, 1895, pp. XIX-XXI, 229-230; 185-197; 165-174).
PART FIFTEEN
12. Stories About Phenomena on the Farm of A. V. Shchapov (Ural region) in 1870–1871
All this (set forth in the above-mentioned letter of Shchapov) was nothing to us, compared to what we had already endured, if only that had been the end of it; but imagine our horror that as soon as we moved to the farmstead in the first days of March, this force began to roam the house again from the very first step. And this time the phenomena occurred even without the presence of my wife. Thus, once, before evening, a large heavy sofa began to jump on all four legs before my eyes, and what's more, at the time when my old mother was lying on it, frightened, of course, in the most terrible way. This incident has a special significance for me because before that I seemed not to be able to check myself in many things that I had seen and heard, since there were strangers around all the time, and I could have been under someone else’s influence, although, I repeat, there were no doubts even then, but here, after all, the entire sofa was in full view, since it was daytime, there was no one and nothing under it, my old mother was lying on it completely calmly, in the room, except for me and the boy at the door in the hall, there was also no one, and meanwhile the five-six pood sofa, with the old woman lying on it, jumped up three or four times, as I said, on all its legs at once - it is clear that this is in no way a hallucination.
Then, that same day or the next, in the evening, when we were sitting in our sick room - suddenly, in full view of us all, from under the washstand standing in the hall - a bluish-phosphoric spark flew out with a crackling sound in the direction of my wife's bedroom (where she was not at the time) and, simultaneously with the rapid flight of this spark, we saw that something in the bedroom instantly flared up. Rushing there headlong, I saw that a cotton unfinished dress lying on a table in the front corner was burning. My mother-in-law, who was alone in this room and managed to pour a jug of water on the flared flame, warned me to put it out. I, having stopped in the narrow doorway and not letting anyone pass ahead of me into this room, began first of all to investigate: was there anything else that caused the dress to ignite, apart from the spark we had seen, such as a fallen candle, a match, etc. But there was absolutely nothing like that near this place, and meanwhile at the same time a rather strong and foul smell of sulfur could be sensed in the room, emanating precisely from the drenched dress, the burnt spots of which, despite the fact that they were wet from the water that had been poured out, were still hot to the touch, and steam was coming from them, as if the water had been poured onto hot iron, and not onto calico.
No matter how hard and dangerous it was to leave my family at such a time - two old women and a wife with a child, I had to go to town for one day on urgent business, and so that the family would not be afraid to remain alone (since we had all begun to be seriously afraid of these phenomena) - I asked a young man, our neighbor A. I. Portnov, to stay with them. Returning a day later, I found the whole family getting ready with things already packed on a cart; they told me that it was impossible to stay any longer, because spontaneous combustion of various things in the house had begun, and it got to the point that yesterday evening the dress of the mistress of the house (i.e. my wife) caught fire by itself, and Portnov, rushing to put it out on her, burned all his hands, which turned out to be, indeed, bandaged and almost completely covered with blisters. This is what Portnov told me about it. In the evening, on the day of my departure, the phenomena, in addition to the knocking and so forth, were complicated by the appearance of luminous meteors, which appeared in front of the window facing the outer corridor; there were several of them and of varying sizes, from a large apple to a walnut; round in shape and dark red and bluish-pink in color, not quite transparent, but rather matte. According to him, this amazing flying of luminous lights, replacing one another, continued for quite a long time. Such a ball would fly up to the window, spin around on the other side of the glass for a while, without any noise, and as soon as it disappeared, another, a third would take its place from the opposite wall of the corridor; then two, three together, etc. This playful change of lights continued, as if wanting to penetrate into the house. My wife was not sleeping at this time. The next day, towards evening, they had just gone out to sit on the porch (it was already warm), when Portnov immediately returned to the room for some reason and saw that the bed was on fire. He called for help, they threw off the bedspread and sheets, which had already burned through quite a bit, and, having carefully extinguished everything and looked around to see if there was any fire left anywhere, they again went out into the air from the smoke in the room and were perplexed as to where the fire could have come from on the bed, when there was no lit candle or anyone smoking a cigarette... when suddenly they again heard a sooting sound in the room. This time it was the hair mattress that was burning, on its lower side, near the corner, and the fire had already penetrated so far into the thick hair (without any admixture) stuffing of the mattress that, in their opinion, this could not have happened due to an oversight when extinguishing the first fire, because the burning spots were completely extinguished, and there should not have been any fire left, especially since the hair stuffing is a non-flammable material - not to mention bast or cotton wool, which were not there.
But that was not the end of it, and it ended that same evening with such a catastrophe that it was decided to leave the house altogether and move somewhere, despite the fact that the snow was already melting and spring streams were running all around.
Portnov related this incident to me thus: “I was sitting,” he says, “playing the guitar, and the miller who had been sitting there before left the room, and soon after him Elena Efimovna (my wife) came out, and as soon as the door closed behind her, I heard from somewhere, as if from afar, a dull and drawn-out, plaintive cry. The voice seemed familiar to me, and, dumbfounded for a moment by the inexplicable horror that had seized me, I rushed out the door and in the entryway I saw literally a pillar of fire, in the middle of which, all engulfed in flames, stood Elena Efimovna, her dress was burning from below and the fire covered her almost completely. I immediately realized that the fire was not strong, since her dress was thin and light, and I rushed to put it out with my hands; but at the same time I felt that they were burning terribly, as if they were sticking to burning resin; there was some kind of cracking and noise from under the floor and at that moment the whole floor was shaking and trembling violently. The miller ran from the yard to help, and the two of us carried the victim in our arms, unconscious and her dress burnt."
The wife told the following story. She had just stepped out the door into the entryway when suddenly the entire floor beneath her began to shake, and a deafening noise was heard; and at the same time, from under the floor there flew out with a crackling sound exactly the same bluish spark that we had previously seen flying out from under the washstand, and she had just managed to scream in fright when she suddenly found herself completely ablaze and lost her memory. It is quite remarkable that she herself did not receive the slightest burn, while the thin gigonette dress she had on was scorched all around above the knees, and there was not a single scorched spot on her legs.
The miller told me this. Leaving the room, he went through the garden to the outbuilding and, before reaching it, he heard first a noise behind him, and then a scream, and, looking back, he saw that the entryway was on fire. He was so frightened that his legs gave way, and he barely had the strength to run to help.
What was really left to do? In front of me was Portnov, with his hands crippled from burns, a burnt dress, on the thin fabric of which there was not the slightest trace of any combustible material – it was clear that there was nothing to do but flee! This we did that same day, moving to the neighboring village to the apartment of a Cossack, where we lived throughout the flood without any further alarm. There was no repetition upon our return to the house, which, however, I had ordered to be torn down that same summer. Fortunately I had thought of moving from my estate to another place before that, but probably would have taken another year or two to get ready; this catastrophe forced me to speed up the fulfillment of my desire.
And so these phenomena ended and were never renewed; and we, I confess, even avoided talking about it among ourselves, both because of the heavy impression left by these phenomena, which even led us to fear for our existence, and because of the unpleasantness we suffered from slander and gossip.
I also forgot to mention in its place that there were two cases of seeing what is now called materialization (at that time we simply called it a diabolical delusion).
So, the first time my wife saw in the window, from the outside, a delicate, pink, as if childish, hand, with transparent, luminous nails, with which she drummed on the glass. Then in the same window she saw two dark-colored living creatures like leeches, which frightened her to the point of fainting. And another time I myself, being alone in the house and trying to spy for several hours who and how (whether it was my wife herself, pretending to be asleep) was drumming on the floor in her bedroom, - several times I quietly crept up to the bedroom door, where the knocks on the floor were continuous, but each time, as soon as I looked slightly into the bedroom, the sounds stopped and immediately resumed again when I walked away or only took my eyes away from the interior of the bedroom, as if teasing me. But then, I suppose for the twentieth time, or even more, I suddenly burst into the room, just as the knocking began there and... frozen with horror, a small, almost childish, pink hand, quickly jumping off the floor, darted under the coverlet of my sleeping wife and buried itself in the folds near her shoulder, so that I could clearly see how unnaturally quickly the folds of the coverlet moved, starting from its lower end to my wife's shoulder, where the hand had hidden. And it seems there was nothing particularly to be frightened about, but I, as I say, was frozen with horror, because the hidden hand was not my wife's hand at all (although that hand was also small in size). I noticed this clearly, and, besides, the very position of the sleeping wife was such (on her left side, turning away to the wall) that with her immobility, before my eyes, it was impossible to lower her hand to the floor and then raise it so unnaturally quickly in one vertical line with her shoulder. What was there to think – a hallucination? But no, a thousand times no! I am not subject to this at all. Deception on the part of the wife, her painful predisposition to this? But the shape, the color, the size of the hand itself, which I saw?
Finally, the deceased was a quite respectable, serious, loving mother and wife, strictly religious and did not undergo any painful attacks until her death (from childbirth, in April 1879). And yet almost all the phenomena, such as the flying of things and the knocking, seemed to hide behind her, so that it seemed to many that she herself was doing it, especially in those cases when they watched with distrust or doubt, although at the same time it was possible to cite a hundred chances against one for the impossibility of doing what was done to her, because often things flew out, for example, from closed rooms - wardrobes, chests, etc., which she did not touch at the moment. So one day, when our commission, consisting of three people and the same number of us outsiders, sat down to dinner, and my wife was returning from the storeroom with her hands full of jars of pickles, then, as soon as she began to open the outer door from the entryway, opposite which the dining table was, with difficulty from her hands being occupied with her load, at that very moment various small things began to fall on our cutlery and on the table: lead bullets, old rusty nuts and other junk in the amount of several handfuls, which had been previously (as I barely remembered) in a closed box filled with various bulky old junk, in the same storeroom, which, however, according to the servants' certificate, the lady had not touched. And it was impossible to throw such a quantity of things directly on the table across the room to her, with her hands occupied.
It was also strange that, despite the force with which these heavy things fell onto the plates, not one of them was broken. And yet it seemed that she had thrown them, although everyone, seeing her entering the door, could not notice the slightest gesture or effort on her part (see A. N. Aksakov, “Harbingers of Spiritualism”, St. Petersburg, 1895, pp. XIX-XXI, 229-230; 185-197; 165-174).
PART FIFTEEN
