Everything mysterious and incredible has always sparked people’s interest. Numerous legends and tales about witches and ghosts in Sloboda Ukraine, as well as in our city, can be found in books, newspapers, and magazines from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The subject of Sloboda mysticism is simply a bottomless treasure trove. This summer, I finally returned to researching the legends and myths of Sloboda Ukraine.
People wrote all sorts of things about witches back then! For example, in the 1850s, the Kyiv historian Nikolai Dmitrievich Ivanishev recorded a story about a witch who lived in Zhuravlevka, a suburb of Kharkiv. According to local accounts, she was a blacksmith’s wife. She engaged in typical witchcraft: she harmed cows and “ruled her husband with an iron fist.” It was precisely because of his wife’s domineering behavior that the husband decided to hang himself, but he was pulled from the noose just in time. Hmm, maybe the rumors weren’t entirely unfounded…
In the early 1980s, an incident occurred in Babai that was even reported in the Kharkiv newspapers. The local residents considered an elderly woman (over seventy years old) to be a witch. Naturally, they blamed all the misfortunes that had befallen the village solely on her evil spells. One day, a rumor swept through Babai: “The witch is dead!!” The entire village gathered outside her house to see the dead witch. They brought a coffin, sent for a priest, and right then, startled by all the commotion, the old woman woke up with a loud scream and demanded some honey. Needless to say, after that incident, the locals became even more afraid of the “witch.”
In 1886, local newspapers reported that a rumor had spread in the village of Osnova—then a suburb of Kharkiv—that a witch had been visiting a local 20-year-old man named Pavel Onishchenko regularly at night for the past four months. She appeared to him in the form of a white dog with human fingers on its paws. And no matter where Pavel spent the night, she would find him and instantly transform into a beautiful young woman, then begin to embrace and kiss him… Of course, such rumors seriously alarmed the local peasants. So much so that on June 4, around 10:00 p.m., such a large crowd armed with aspen stakes gathered near the Onishchenko house that, according to eyewitnesses, there wasn’t even room for an apple to fall. However, the seductive witch was never caught. There are also no reports of any injured white dogs.
Here’s a story about the “Sloboda Ukraine Little Red Riding Hood.” Back in the 1880s, a rumor spread through the city of Sloviansk that a boy wearing a red cap, about three-quarters of a person’s height, had appeared in the garden of a local resident near the mineral springs. This boy was said to possess supernatural abilities: for example, he could suddenly appear and just as suddenly vanish. He was supposedly invisible to adults. The locals, however, interpreted this last detail in various ways. Some said he emerged from a tree hollow and was visible only to men. Others claimed he leaped from tree to tree. Still others asserted that the boy spoke, but only to another boy—the son of the garden’s owner. The latter, a boy aged 8–10, insisted that he had already spoken more than once with the mysterious boy in the red cap. On July 4, a crowd of curious onlookers flocked to the site where the strange figure had appeared. Pious old women had already begun bringing pies to the tree’s hollow, along with money and wax candles. The tree was eventually cut down, and nothing was found inside the hollow; but the boy, the owner’s son, swore that he had spoken with the miraculous boy. The child’s account was corroborated by an 18-year-old man who claimed to have once seen a boy in a red cap and tried to catch him, but the boy suddenly vanished.
Not long ago, my article “The Sloboda Ukraine Poltergeist: On Mysticism and Historical Documents” was published. It dealt with the most famous mystical site in Sloboda Ukraine. However, the story of the Lipetsk poltergeist lacked a proper beginning and a strong opening. And so, not long ago, while working with a certain publication, I finally found the missing link that makes the story truly captivating.
I heard this story from an old man: about thirty years ago, in the village of Lyptsi in the Kharkiv District, there was a transit prison in the home of a local resident. One prisoner, feeling wronged for some reason, said that he would be remembered in that house for a long time, and indeed, shortly after he left, mysterious knocking sounds began in the house, and stones began flying in all directions, so the house had to be consecrated, and administrative officials came from Kharkiv to inspect it…
What is most interesting is what Nikolai Sumtsov—whom we know well—wrote in 1891. Let me remind you that Alexander Nikolaevich Aksakov’s book *The Forerunners of Spiritualism Over the Last 250 Years. Notable Cases of Spontaneous Mediumistic Phenomena Since 1661 and the Transition to Experimental Phenomena in 1848,” in which he published the “Lipetsk Case” in its entirety, was published in 1895. Well, now let’s talk, perhaps, about the most mystical place in our city, shrouded in quite a few legends. It is known that the site of the current Mirror Fountain was once home to the old Myronosytske Cemetery. It was closed in the late 18th–early 19th century. Over time, Myronosytska Square emerged on the site of the defunct cemetery, so people began not only walking but also driving through the cemetery. In “Memoirs of a Night Watchwoman,” which appeared as a series of short notes and was later published as a separate book in 1933 and 2012, Vasily Parfentyevich Karpov, who lived in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, vividly describes those places:
On Myronosytska Square, beyond a long fence running from the corner of the street, stood a small house with three windows, belonging to Slivitsky and overlooking the wide square, densely filled with monuments, fences, small chapels, tombstones, and simple burial mounds with crosses at their head. There were quite a few cast-iron, stone, and marble slabs with gaping holes—like wounds—where the earth had caved in into the crypt. This entire scene of utter ruin and disregard for the resting place of the once-deceased—and even for order and decorum—had stood for many, many years, instilling fear and horror in the inhabitants of that patriarchal old town, both day and night. From the beginning of spring, people of evil intent and dissolute morals would take up residence in the chapels, shrines, and various crypts left to the mercy of time’s destructive ravages, living there as if it were their own private domain. At times, at night, so as not to keep their refuge so openly in plain sight of everyone, these people would take refuge in underground crypts, built of brick with vaulted ceilings resembling small cellars. There, sitting on the coffins of the deceased, they played “three litas” by the light of a tallow candle or a nightlight (kagants). On dark nights, a reddish glow could be seen coming from these burial chambers, and smoke rose, shrouding the crypts and graves. It was in these crypts that dinner was prepared; the marble tombstone served as a kitchen table, and there, above the coffins of the dead, food was cooked for the upcoming meal of the hungry inhabitants of the tombs. Sometimes, the unpretentious and merry company in these burial chambers would hold bacchanalian revelries together with the fairer sex, and then, in addition to the light, one could also hear the sounds of a bandura played by a blind beggar, hired to perform for such a lavish ball…
Karpov goes on to point out that it was Myronosytska Square, in particular, that served as a hotbed of superstitions and various legends in those days. People in Kharkiv said all sorts of things about those places back then. Supposedly, the dead would climb out of their coffins to chase after passersby. Some of them demanded that people pray for them, while others asked that their resting places be protected from the world’s filth and turmoil. And the stories that every night at the Myronosytske Cemetery a dead girl rises from her coffin and wanders throughout Kharkiv, searching for the one who desecrated her grave and stole the cross from it, struck the residents of our city with wild terror.
But, be that as it may, people still walked across this square at all hours of the day to reach, for example, the end of Nemetska Street or the streets adjacent to it. It is worth noting that, according to contemporaries, during rainy weather this place turned into a “mini-tundra.” Therefore, it was not uncommon for someone walking through the old cemetery to fall into a grave. Karpov himself describes a very interesting incident in his book. One autumn evening, a woman named Irina Fedoseeva and her twenty-year-old daughter, Matrena Bezrukova, were returning home late. Wanting to take a shortcut, they walked diagonally across the square. Suddenly, young Matrena accidentally stepped with both feet onto a grave mound and sank into it. Her attempts to climb out of the grave were in vain. Her mother, hearing her daughter’s screams that a dead man was holding her by the legs, rushed off, shouting for help. But alas, the young girl was destined to spend the entire night in a grave in the cemetery, since none of the townspeople dared to help her until dawn—so strong was their belief in wandering ghosts and the dead. After her rescue, the girl, having suffered a severe fever, lost her mind. Of course, Karpov himself may have embellished some details in his memoirs—and perhaps even made others up.
However, the main value of all these stories lies in the fact that they were recorded in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries; they are an integral part of our city’s past and offer insight into what our ancestors believed. So, as you sit on the benches by the Mirror Fountain in the evening, you can now tell your visiting friends some old “cemetery tales”…
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