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The Real Story Of Dancing Ghost Of Orensburg

Published

2 years ago

March 28, 2021

The Real Story Of Dancing Ghost Of Orensburg

On November 16, 1870, a wealthy landowner named Shchapoff found his household in an uproar over a dancing ghost, when he returned to his large country estate near Orensburg, in the Russian province of Uralsk.

According to Helena, his 20-year-old wife, their baby daughter had been fussy on the night of the 14th and had not been at all eager to go to sleep. Mrs. Shchapoff asked Maria, the cook, if she would see to the child. Maria entertained the girl with her harmonica, while her mistress and the local miller’s wife gossiped in the living room.

When Mrs. Shchapoff heard the sounds of the cook’s feet tapping the floor in a brisk three-step dance, she remarked that when all else failed, Maria danced for the child, which always put the little one to sleep.

The miller’s wife was in the act of nodding her head in agreement when she suddenly opened her mouth in both surprise and terror, and screamed that there was someone looking in the window.

Mrs. Shchapoff turned and saw nothing to cause the woman so much alarm. The awkward moment was interrupted as Maria entered the room and told her mistress that her child was now sound asleep. Mrs. Shchapoff thanked the cook and dismissed her for the evening.

A few minutes later, as the two women sat chatting, the miller’s wife once again claimed that she saw something at the window. Mrs. Shchapoff rose from her chair to investigate, but she was halted in her journey to the window by the sound of an uproar in the attic above their heads.

At first it seemed to be a flurry of wild rappings that had the two women staring at one another in wide-eyed confusion. Then the pace of the sounds slowed until they began to sound like the three-step Maria had been dancing for the child.

Mrs. Shchapoff was perplexed. The miller’s wife questioned how the cook could have gotten up to the attic without their seeing her pass. Then the two women left the sitting room and walked quietly back to the cook’s quarters. Opening the door just a crack, they were able to see Maria sound asleep in her bed.

Determined to see who had gone up to the loft unnoticed, Mrs. Shchapoff grabbed a lantern from a kitchen shelf, and the two women walked up the stairs to the attic.

Although the sounds of the dancing continued, their lantern plainly revealed that there was no one in the loft. Then, as the women beat a hasty retreat down the stairs, the rapping seemed to race ahead of them, rattling the windows and pounding at the walls.

The miller’s wife fled the manor to get her husband and the gardener, and Mrs. Shchapoff went to the nursery to check on the welfare of her daughter.

By the time the miller’s wife returned with her husband and the gardener, the rappings and dancing had attained such a volume that both Mrs. Shchapoff’s mother and mother-in-law, as well as Maria, had been awakened by the racket. The two men searched the house and the grounds and found nothing that could explain the bizarre disturbance, which continued until dawn.

At 10:00 P.M. the next evening, the dancing ghost once again began its spirited interpretation of the three-step. The Shchapoff’s servants patrolled the house and the grounds but could find no trace of the invisible dancer who continued to perform and to evade the searchers until dawn.

When Mr. Shchapoff returned that next afternoon from his business trip, he scoffed at his young wife’s account and jokingly accused her of getting into his brandy while he had been away. Shchapoff was a no-nonsense landowner who had little patience with superstitious folktales and accounts of ghosts, dancing or otherwise. He grew very impatient when his mother and mother-in-law warned him that something supernatural had visited the house in his absence, substantiating Helena’s story of a dancing ghost.

In a gruff and irritated manner, Shchapoff scolded the ladies for having sat around idly in the evenings, concocting a ghost story that had frightened the servants and distracted them from their work. He sent Maria to fetch the miller, a man he regarded as completely sensible and reliable, to set the matter straight.

The miller didn’t disappoint him. While he admitted that there had been strange noises that had disturbed and confused the entire household, he stated that he had, that very day, removed a pigeon’s nest from under a cornice of the house. It seemed likely to him that the bird had somehow been responsible for the weird noises that had so upset the women and the servants.

That evening after the rest of the household had retired to their rooms quite early, exhausted from their nocturnal ordeals of chasing the eerie tapping sounds, Shchapoff sat down in a chair in his study to read for a while before going to bed.

At about 10 o’clock, he was distracted by scratching noises from above his head. Thinking at first that the pesky pigeon had come back to roost under the cornice, he became puzzled when he listened more closely to the sounds. He soon realized the sounds were not those of an animal; rather it sounded as though someone in the room above him was dancing a three-step.

Believing that Helena was having a bit of fun with him, Shchapoff put down his book and began climbing quietly up the stairs to his wife’s room. He stood outside the door for a moment to be certain that he had accurately traced the sound of the dancing. Then, convinced that there was no doubt that the sounds were coming from Helena’s room, he pushed open the door and stood ready to deliver a stern lecture to his young wife.

She lay in her bed, her eyelids closed, in deep sleep. The sounds of dancing had ceased the moment that he had opened the door. There was something strange going on here. Confused and more than a little baffled, Schchapoff started to close the door when a series of rappings sounded from above his wife’s bed.

He walked quietly to the wall, thinking he might catch a hidden prankster in the act of hammering on the bedstead. Just as he bent to listen more carefully to the noises, a rap sounded with such force next to his ear that it nearly deafened him.

His wife sat up in bed, screaming in shock and fear. She calmed when she saw her husband standing near her bedside. “What was that?” she demanded. “Did you hear it?” Not wishing to alarm his wife, Shchapoff insisted that he had heard nothing. As if to call him a liar, two explosive knocks seemed to shake the house down to its very foundation.

The angry landowner took his pistol from a drawer, slipped on his coat, and declared that he was putting a stop to the nonsense. He got his dogs, roused the servants, and told them that they were going to find out who was responsible for the outrage against his home.

However, Shchapoff found no prankster that night on whom he might vent his spleen. The next day, he enlisted the help of his neighbors as well as his own servants. The crew searched the entire house and examined every foot of the grounds.

That night, at Shchapoff’s request, his neighbors stayed to witness the disturbances. The uninvited invisible guest performed well. It danced above the heads of the searchers all night long—and, for a finale, it struck a door with such force that the heavy wooden planking was torn from the hinges.

A month later, on December 20, the Shchapoffs were entertaining guests who openly expressed their skepticism of the phenomena their hosts described as having been active in the house.

Angered that their guests would doubt his word, Shchapoff summoned Maria to the parlor and commanded her o perform a three-step, announcing in a loud voice that probably all the ghost needed was a little coaxing and it would come back.

At her master’s insistence, Maria danced a brisk little three-step. The cook completed the dance, then looked around the room fearfully as a rapping began at the windows. The assembled guests listened incredulously as they heard an exact replication of Maria’s dance coming from the attic overhead.

The skeptical guests accused Shchapoff of having planted another servant up in the loft, but when a group of doubters went up into the attic to investigate, they found no one.

On New Year’s Eve, 1871, Shchapoff again ordered Maria to dance a three-step in order to induce the dancing ghost to follow her with an act of its own. The country home was filled with guests who heard for themselves the ghostly echo of Maria’s dance coming from the ceiling above their heads.

The invisible performer became so animated and enthusiastic that for the first time it made some attempts at vocalization and sang some garbled snatches of Russian folk songs.

Ghost

After such remarkable phenomena had been produced at two holiday parties, the stories about the mysterious goings-on at the Shchapoffs’ country place spread across Russia. Soon, scientists and spiritualists sought an audience with the dancing ghost, using widely diverse methods of communicating with the strange force.

An investigator by the name of Dr. Shustoff explained the whole phenomena by invoking the magic name of electricity. He maintained that the soil conditions at the country place had produced the weird phenomena. He also theorized that somehow the electrical vibrations might be coming from Mrs. Shchapoff.

Dr. Shustoff’s theory of prankish electrical currents was doomed when the phenomena began to give evidence of increasingly advancing intelligence that could respond to conversation and questions advanced by investigators.

A psychic investigator named Alekseeff devised a series of knocks that he claimed allowed him to communicate with the entity haunting the country estate.

According to information gathered by Alekseeff, Mr. Shchapoff had been cursed by the servant of a neighboring miller. For whatever reason, this angry servant so despised Shchapoff that he had maliciously set a devil on the wealthy landowner.

The provincial governor, General Vervekin, appointed a group of individuals to be the official investigators of the disturbances that plagued the Shchapoff estate. The team included Mr. Akutin, an engineer; the aforementioned Dr. Shustoff, an electrical theorist; and Mr. Savicheff, a magazine editor.

This committee eventually decided that Mrs. Shchapoff had been producing the so-called supernatural effects by means of trickery, and Mr. Shchapoff received a sharply worded letter from the governor, warning him not to allow his wife to produce the phenomena again.

In spite of the governor’s demands, the violence of the disturbances at the Shchapoff estate continued to increase. The ghost had acquired incendiary abilities, and Helena Shchapoff was the one who bore the brunt of the attacks.

Balls of fire circled the house and bounced against the windows of her room, as if seeking to smash into the house and set it aflame. Dresses that hung unattended in closets burst into flame. Once, a mattress began burning underneath a guest as he readied himself for bed.

The ghastly climax of the haunting phenomena occurred when Mrs. Shchapoff appeared to become a veritable pillar of fire in front of the horrified eyes of the miller and another houseguest.

A crackling noise had come from beneath the floor, followed by a long, high-pitched wailing. A bluish spark seemed to jump up at Mrs. Shchapoff, and her thin dress was instantly swathed in flames. She cried out in terror and collapsed into unconsciousness.

The houseguest leapt to his feet and valiantly beat the flames out with his bare hands. The most curious thing about the incident was that the courageous guest suffered severe burns while Mrs. Shchapoff received not a single blister, even though her dress was nearly completely consumed by the flames.

The Shchapoffs had had enough of their encounters with the dancing ghost. When the entity had contented itself with a nightly performance of the three-step, it had merely been a noisy nuisance. Now it had become a vicious terror, quite capable of dealing out fiery destruction. Mr. Shchapoff closed up his country place and made arrangements for a permanent move to the city of Iletski.

The phenomena ceased at once after the Shchapoffs had taken up residence in their town place. Although Helena Shchapoff recovered the health that had been rapidly waning under the onslaughts of the ghost, she died in childbirth eight years after their move.

The Orensburg haunting is an unusual case in many ways. Perhaps, as some have theorized, there actually was a curse levied on Mr. Shchapoff by a disgruntled servant of a neighboring miller.

The projected hatred of such an individual may somehow have intensified what had begun as rather ordinary haunting phenomena (e.g., the face at the window, the imitation of the cook’s dancing, the raps on the walls) and transformed them in a force of malicious evil.

Sources: Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places by Brad Steiger

General

“Cursed charity shop painting ruined my life”, says British woman

Published

4 weeks ago

August 28, 2023

A British woman purchased a portrait of a young girl from a charity shop and now asserts that the picture is cursed, reports mirror.co.uk.

Zoe
Elliot-Brown, aged 36, spotted an artwork by an unfamiliar artist at
the Hastings Advice Representation Center in St Leonards-on-Sea, East
Sussex, a month ago.

Simultaneously, the seller cautioned Zoe
about the painting possibly being cursed, revealing that a prior
purchaser of the same artwork had returned it to the store with the
statement “it ruined my life.”

Out of curiosity, Zoe captured an
image of the painting on her smartphone and shared the photo with her
68-year-old mother, Jane Elliot-Brown. Her mother seemed to be entranced
by the painting.

Instantly,
she began urging Zoe to acquire the painting. Yielding to her mother’s
persuasion, Zoe paid £20 for the artwork. However, as soon as she
introduced it into her home, strange occurrences commenced taking place.

As
Zoe entered her home and positioned the painting in the living room,
their dog named Cilla leaped up and started growling at the artwork.
Cilla deliberately kept her distance, refraining from approaching the
picture. Subsequently, Zoe’s mother’s health took a sharp decline. She
began experiencing alternating spells of fever and chills, requiring her
to wear four sweaters to keep warm.

Concurrently, Zoe’s mother
seemed to be captivated by the painting. She continuously gazed at it
and even caressed the painted girl’s cheek. During the night, she heard
peculiar knocks emanating from the room where the picture hung, despite
the room being unoccupied.

Zoe managed to persuade her mother that
the painting held negative energy and was cursed. However, Jane
staunchly defended the painting, reluctant to part with it.

“I’ve
never seen my mother yearn for something so intensely. She was
entranced by it, but not in a positive manner. She guarded it. She
frequently gazed at it. She ran her fingers over the painted girl’s
cheeks and polished the surface, although the painting didn’t require
polishing.”

“Each time I mentioned disposing of the painting, she
became exceedingly irritable. It transformed into a sort of family
heirloom for her, something she began cherishing.”

“My mother
flatly refused to get rid of the painting. I think it’s a bit like the
magic power of the Lord of the Rings ring. It definitely works in an
attractive and charming way, it seems to pull you towards it.

“My mother became a bit like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings,” says Zoe.

Jane
herself says that it seems to her that the painted girl is very unhappy
and she stroked her to comfort her. She also does not attribute the
deterioration of her health to the purchase of the painting.

At
the same time, she admits that there were several cases when someone
seemed to knock on the door, and when she opened it, there was no one on
the threshold.

One day, Jane became so ill that she fainted right
in the bathroom. Zoe called 911, but her mother refused to go to the
hospital and was eventually left at home.

One morning, Zoe entered
the living room and saw her mother standing and stroking the painted
girl on her cheeks. And the mother could not remember how she ended up
in the living room and what she did at night.

“It
was strange behavior, especially for my mom. She couldn’t remember
anything from what happened last night. My mom is still very weird and
distracted and doesn’t want to discuss it.”

And then something
even more frightening happened. Zoe and her friend Ben went for a walk
on a hill during a thunderstorm and suddenly saw a “creepy black figure”
that suddenly appeared in front of them.

They do not know if this
is related to the painting, but they immediately ran back in fear.
Deciding to get rid of the cursed painting, Zoey eventually took it and
took it to the same shop where she bought it.

And when she drove
up to the store, she saw that in one of the tires of the car, brand new,
someone stuck a screw. She gave the painting to the seller, but then
changed her mind and took it back.

She
didn’t want someone else to buy the painting and get hurt because of
it. Now Zoe wants to give the picture only to someone who understands
damn things.

Now the painting is kept in Zoya’s house in a box filled with sage (it is believed that sage helps against evil spirits).

She also hung sage in every corner of the house, although Zoya’s mother was very unhappy with this.

“I
thought knowing my luck some idiot will go and get it and try and burn
it and I don’t really want to be left with the remainder of whatever the
hell has been going on. Technically I was the last owner. [I want it]
dealt with properly. […]”

General

Wild man with a spear in his hand was spotted in the forests of Germany

Published

1 month ago

August 25, 2023

A mysterious wild man, nicknamed by the locals “the wolf man”, was
photographed in the forested mountains of the Harz, in the center of
Germany. The man was completely naked and held a spear in his hand.

The
savage was accidentally noticed by two tourists who were walking
through the forest, not far from the city of Blankenburg in
Saxony-Anhalt, and examined the ruins of an old castle.

“When we
reached the caves in the sands, we saw this wolf-man. He stood high in
one of the caves and held in his hand a long wooden stick that looked
like a spear.

“He didn’t take his eyes off us, but he didn’t say
anything. He looked dirty and looked like a prehistoric man from the
Stone Age, like pictures in a history book,” Gina Weiss, 31, told Bild
newspaper.

According
to Weiss and her friend Toby, they observed this man for about ten
minutes. The naked man appeared to be in his forties and reportedly
these tourists were not the first to have seen him in the area.

It is assumed that he has been living in the forests near Blankenburg for about five years.

Authorities say they have received numerous reports of a person wearing a wolf’s skin or wolf costume over the past five years.

In
March 2023, a frightened eyewitness even called the police because he
thought that a wolfman running next to him wanted to attack him. In
other cases, people have seen how a savage is trying to make a fire or
building a hut out of branches for himself.

At the same time, it
is quite cold in this area in winter and it is not clear how this person
managed to survive here for several years.

According to Alexander
Beck, head of the local fire brigade, this savage clearly has the
skills to live in the wild and adapt to the changing seasons of the
year.

Where this man came from is unknown. There are many theories, from the hermit to more mystical versions such as time portals.

However, there are those who believe that all this is just some kind of prank to scare tourists or some other purpose.