The Kremlin is haunted

Even today, rumours circulate that the ghosts of the Romanovs guard the heritage of their dynasty.Workers of the State Archives of the Russian Federation, tell stories about a woman in a white robe who appears between shelves of the Tsar’s archives.

What is even more interesting, is that these stories mainly hint at the ongoing illness and poor health of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. For instance, historian Sergei Kuleshov in his article "Poltergeist at the Kremlin," in popular daily newspaper Trud, wrote that Lenin allegedly started haunting the Kremlin even before his death. Although the world proletariat leader lived in Gorky outside Moscow, the incurably sick Lenin paid his first visit to the Kremlin in October 1923 to dig about his notes and books, before he died.

Indeed, Russia has perennially been haunted by the evil spirit of Soviet leader Stalin, under whose ruthless repression thousands of Russians were sent to the firing squads. There are at least two haunted buildings in Moscow where people were killed en masse during the Stalin regime. One is a large gray house at UlitsaSolyanka, and another at the crossing of Ulitsa Pokrovka Pereylok.

The ghost of Beria, Stalin’s feared secret policeman, reportedly haunts his house, which currently belongs to the Tunisian Embassy at Malaya Nikitskaya. It is here that Beria’s men brought hundreds of people opposed to Stalin, to torture and kill them in the dungeons with heavy doors underneath the house. The sounds of footsteps and the cries of people tortured, still hang in the rooms.

Topping the list of buildings and places haunted by ghosts, is the notorious Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NK VD, the precursor of the Soviet KGB (currently Federal Security Service), where people were tortured to death by Stalin’s secret agents in an underground prison.

Although it’s unexpected, according to some rumours, there are also churches in Moscow haunted by ghosts, especially those destroyed by the Soviet regime. Among them, the Church of Assumption on Pokrovka, in whose vicinity there is a house where the NK VD reportedly killed those whomit suspected of being opposed to the Soviet State, according to a Moscow historian Willy Melnikov.