Poltergeist. Russia

It was in the twenties of the last century. My great-grandmother Natalia Andreevna and great-grandfather Dmitry (I'm ashamed, but I don't remember his patronymic) moved from Voronezh to Lipetsk. They had just got married and therefore were looking for a suitable home for family life. I don't know what kind of wind brought them to this city, but they wanted to stay there seriously and for a long time.

Grandfather Dmitry was a practical man and tight-fisted in Russian, so he would not agree to buy a house that would cost more than what he gave. They needed a simple wooden hut, and all the "realtors" were selling for some reason some boyar mansions. But suddenly they found out from someone that there is an old house on the outskirts of the city, which enjoys a bad reputation and which is being sold for some pennies.

The October Revolution had just rumbled off, the barricades were still smoking, and there were some dilapidated houses that everyone bypassed. Grandfather was not a communist, he believed in God, but only grinned in response to such stories. There were talkative people who told Dmitry and Natalia everything about the house, they say, an old woman lived there recently, they said, a witch.

Everyone shunned her, and when she died, the whole street poured out to look at the dead witch. And what a shock they had when they saw a huge beetle, probably three times the size of a crunch, fly out of the mouth of the deceased! With a screech, the people ran everywhere, and the very next day some smart relatives of a grandmother from a neighboring town came and sold a house to someone. After the death of this old woman, some strange things were happening there, and no one wanted to live there. During the year, there were probably twenty customers there. Grandfather waved off the narrators and said that he was buying a house because it was cheap and looked like it was still strong.

The devilry began on the first night after the purchase of the ill-fated hut. The grandfather and the woman went to sleep on an iron cot, the sheet on which is always tucked under the shell net. The door, of course, was closed with a strap, a latch and a bolt. There were glasses of unfinished tea on the table. It was quiet. And suddenly, around midnight, someone opens the door with a bang. Sleepy Dmitry and Natalia thought it was the wind that opened the door, but it was quiet behind the wall, the weather was sultry and windless, the month of July. Grandfather got up, closed the door and went back to bed. Then someone began to walk around the house, first in the loft, then trampled around the kitchen and continuously groaned and sighed like an old man.

My grandmother was no longer alive or dead, and my grandfather didn't care. She shook him awake, and they both began to listen. Someone invisible began to shake the table, causing the glasses to rattle as if from the pitching in the train. This something moved closer to the bed where the grandfather and the woman slept.

Everything seemed to have quieted down, but suddenly it abruptly tore the sheet from under the people and began to pull it to the floor. Grandfather jumped up, but he didn't see anyone. He walked around the upper rooms three times in a circle, walked around the house, but did not find anyone. Dmitry and Natalia spent the rest of the night in the light and without sleep.

They lived like this for about a month, and every night the fun was repeated. Then someone started pouring water from a bucket into a bucket and into another bucket, then bricks in the stove suddenly began to fall from the chimney into the mouth of the furnace itself, as if someone from above was disassembling the pipe and throwing bricks down, then someone oohed, ahed and creaked the floorboards.

There were invariably only three things: this nonsense always started around midnight, the sheet, as Natalia's woman did not tuck it under the mattress, was torn from under her with her husband anyway, and this something simply could not live without knocking on the wall from the outside and rattling dishes. Grandfather, a fearless and brave man, was simply tired of such a rigmarole, especially since his wife was seriously scared.

He, unable to figure out the annoying pest, did it very simply: insured the house for a tidy sum, and then one night he took out all the things, poured kerosene over the tent and set fire to the ill-fated hut. They say it burned nicely. Then, as if nothing had happened, the grandfather received the amount due to him, saying that the house burned down because of the heat, and moved with his grandmother to Veliky Novgorod.  I don't know if any other house was built on the ashes, because Dmitry and Natalia never returned there.