The Spiritual World: On the Existence of Demons (16)

Yelets Monastery in Chernigov

...continued from part fifteen.

14 . Mysterious Phenomena in Chernigov in the 1840's*

The following took place in 1843 or 44 (I don’t remember exactly), in Chernigov, in the house of my uncle (on my aunt’s side), the priest Father John Gerasimovich Menailov.

Father John was known and revered in Chernigov as a priest of the strictest life, always ready to be there and with those to whom he was needed; he was considered a saint.

At the same time, I was in the district theological school and was a singer in the Yelets singing choir (the rector’s choir of the seminary), which lived in the Yelets Monastery in Chernigov.

As a nephew of Mother Menailova, I went to them every Sunday and feast day and spent the whole day with them until evening. The Menailov family consisted of a husband, wife, two sons, two daughters, and a niece, my cousin, Anna Emelianovna Kornukh, who lived with them temporarily. There was one servant, a tall, healthy girl, not in her first youth, a local native.

The Spiritual World: On the Existence of Demons (12)

The Dagg House as it appears today.

...continued from part eleven.

18. Phenomena in Restless Houses, Proving the Existence of Dark (Demonic) Forces

1. In 1874, in the village of Shakoldany, Vilnius province, in the house of a peasant named Begansky, stones, firewood, etc. were thrown, and a bottle of milk was walked around the hut; they tied it with a rope to a nail – it came loose and walked around again; they threw it out into the yard – it returned to the hut. Suspicion fell on the farrier Bardadym, who whispered to this bottle of milk for Begansky’s sick child. A case was opened. The Vilnius joint chamber of the criminal and civil court, by its ruling of May 28, 1874, released the peasant Bardadym from trial on charges of fraud, but the sworn testimony of six witnesses to the former apparitions did not lose its significance because of this. The ruling of the chamber was published in full in "Rebus Magazine" in 1894 (p. 182).

2. In 1873, Simbirsk province, Ardatovsky district, in the village of Barashevo, in the priest's house, from December 23 to December 28, "various self-movement and flying of objects" occurred; a samovar with boiling water rose from the floor and flew about two arshins; bricks were torn out of a Russian kitchen stove and smashed to pieces; household dishes and utensils flew in different directions and broke. "The moment of lifting any object from a certain place and its flight was never noticed under my careful observation, but only its fall," writes Priest N. P. Tsvetkov in his letter to A. N. Aksakov dated June 14, 1874, which was published in "Rebus Magazine" in 1882 (p. 391).

The Singing Toy Bear

The following is the testimony of Panagiotis Betses from the village of Kypseli in Zakynthos:

"On Christmas Eve in 1998, I was working late at my bakery. I went home very tired and lay down to sleep. My wife told me to get dressed so we could go to church, because it was the holy day of Christmas. I refused, due to my exhaustion. My wife was upset and she decided also not to go to church.

Suddenly at that moment, a little toy bear from the other room began singing on its own, without there being a clock to set. It shocked us both. We then both immediately got dressed and went to church.

Later when I asked a spiritual father at Mount Athos about this, he told me that the devil was happy that he achieved in preventing us from going to church on such a day, and he demonstrated this happiness by starting the song from the toy bear without anyone having touched it."

Source: From the book Ascetics in the World, vol. 1. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.