The House on Nikitski Pereulic

*Since some of the people in this particular story are, at the moment, still in their country’s service, all family names have been omitted at their request.

It is one of the oddities of paranormal investigation in Russia that amazingly few hauntings or encounters with spirit entities spring directly from events surrounding what is known as the “Great Terror”. That is the time, extending roughly from 1926 to 1953, and varying in intensity, in which Josef Stalin and his various heads of state security, presided over the murder of thousands… tens of thousands… possibly hundreds of thousands… no one knows for sure… of the Russian people. Strangely, encounters with these multitudes of nameless dead and their murderers are absent from the annals of paranormal investigation here. There are very few such encounters, and practically none with what have to have been the most evil men ever to draw breath… those who were responsible for these horrendous deeds. When such a report does come to the surface, it bears immediate investigation. The house on Nikitski Pereulic is one such case.

Nikitski Pereulic is a tiny side street that leads away from Tvrskaya about two blocks North of the Kremlin. It is a quiet, residential street, surprisingly isolated from the hustle and bustle of one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, lined with beautiful old houses and apartment buildings, most of which date to the end of the last century. At one time, it was an “elite” section of town, whose dwellings were reserved for high ranking Party Officials. Today, it is still considered to be one of the most beautiful and most expensive residential areas in the central district of Moscow.

Today, just as it has been for over a century, the most prominent building on the street is the old Tunisian Embassy. Built in the late 1880’s, it was once the private home of the mistress of the (in)famous Count Orloff. Seized by the State in the wake of Orloff’s execution in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, it then became the residence of a number of prominent Party bosses from a multitude of Departments and Commissions. Finally, in the late 1950’s, it was given over to the newly independent Tunisia for use as an embassy compound and residence.

Nothing of note happened for years. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the stately old house except it’s elaborate architecture and somewhat unusual semi-gothic Victorian design. The Embassy of Tunisia went about its normal, everyday business. Personnel came and went, and a series of Ambassadors returned to their native land with wonderful stories of this ornate house with it’s oak paneling, rich, deep carpet, gold plated toilet fixtures, walk in closets and bath tub, and solid mahogany Victorian Era furniture. Uncounted diplomats told of how they strolled the lush grounds behind the mansion, protected from the outside world by the ten foot brick fence, and enjoyed the quiet and serene evenings so peacefully, yet so close to the heart of the city.

All of this stopped abruptly in the early spring of 1998, when, all of a sudden the house became plagued by not one apparition, but several, and of the most astounding and disturbing kind. It all seemed to begin when a work crew from the City of Moscow arrived to make repairs to the hot water line leading into the building. Now, for those of you who do not understand, in Moscow, hot water is provided to each building from a central plant which services an entire block. It is carried to the buildings by insulated pipes which are laid approximately seven feet underground in a sealed, cement lined conduit placed in twenty-foot long interlocking segments. The entire length of these massive pipes is not routinely serviced. It is possible, if one knows where a problem lies, to open a single segment of the conduit for repair work. In some cases it is many years before a particular segment must be unearthed and opened. The pipes that carry water into residential buildings are subjected to a pressure check twice annually by forcing compressed air into them, and if a leak, or loss of pressure shows, only then are they dug up and repaired. Such was the case in May of 1998, when a leak was discovered in the hot water main line leading into the Tunisian Embassy. The leak was located within Embassy grounds, in a section of pipe that had not been disturbed since it was laid in the summer of 1949. Since the work crew did not know exactly where the leak was located, they began at the compound wall, and started digging toward the building, checking each segment of conduit and the pipes within it as they went. The problems began almost the moment they sunk their first spade.

That night, the Ambassador’s  wife was startled out of her senses as she left her room on her way to the second floor toilet adjoining the Ambassador’s suite. As in many older buildings in Russia, such facilities are not accessible from within individual rooms. Just as she entered the hallway, she stopped cold. Running down the hall toward her, she saw a naked young girl, eyes wide with fright, screaming silently as she ran headlong down the hallway toward her. The girl, a young teen, was seemingly oblivious to her unclothed state; a look of stark unimaginable  terror on her face. Needless to say, the Ambassador’s wife, a devout Moslem, was shocked, startled, offended, and scared out of her wits as she watched the figure simply vanish at the end of the hall, after running past her, and she said later, possibly through her, with a bone-chilling blast of cold air.

She promptly forgot all about the toilet and returned shakily to her bedroom. She did not sleep. The next morning, as soon as it was light, she entered the adjoining bedroom and told her husband of the startling event. While the apparition that she had seen was semi-transparent, it did have some substance. The girl, it seemed, was blond, very pretty, and about fourteen to fifteen years of age. She had long hair, which reached almost to her waist, and was done in the traditional-style Russian braids, She was totally naked, and glaringly so. The Ambassador took the story in with somber consideration, and decided that his wife had simply had a nightmare.

The next night, in a completely different part of the house, the Military Adjutant, Colonel Mohamed Fisal B—–, encountered a similar apparition while walking down a first floor corridor, in route to his office to do some late-night book work. This twenty-five year career soldier also was startled by what he saw. This apparition was also a young girl, probably about the same age as the other, and also completely naked. This young woman also ran screaming, quite silently, down the corridor, but this time toward the front of the house, disappearing just as she reached the foyer leading to the front door. The girl was a brunette, with short, wavy hair, and, the Colonel admitted later, once he had gotten over his initial shock, quite attractive.

Over the space of the next three nights there were four other such occurrences spread throughout different parts of the building. Wailing, moaning and pitiful cries for help were heard by all in the embassy and seemed to emanate from the basement beneath the building. During the daytime hours, one or two brave souls, including Captain Karim S—–, Deputy Military Adjutant, made the trip into the dark, unused subterranean rooms to find… nothing… only to have the phenomenon resume the following night at a higher pitch and volume.

The embassy cook, a Russian employee of the Tunisian Ambassador named Elena Medvedova managed to encounter two naked girls at one time, as she made her way to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. These apparitions, like the others, ran silently screaming from the open door of the kitchen, through the dining room and into the embassy’s rear foyer before finally disappearing just before reaching the building’s back door. They were also witnessed by Sargent Pavel Krishkov, a Moscow Militia (police) guard who was assigned to the embassy at the time, and was just returning from a tour of the walled garden at the rear of the compound. Sargent Krishkov, who has since retired from the Militia, reported that the two apparitions seemed to be in their early teens, not quite solidly manifested but translucent in appearance, with one relatively short, having short blond hair in what could be described as a “pageboy” cut, while the other taller girl had brownish hair arranged into braids. Krishkov noted that while both were completely naked and seemingly oblivious to the fact, both appeared to have something dangling from their wrists and ankles. He was unable, in the short time that he saw the apparitions, to determine exactly what that was, but noted that it resembled a thin rope or some sort of elastic tie-down material such as the kind used to hold baggage to a luggage rack mounted atop a car attached to a fairly wide and heavy looking “bracelet” of some sort.

No sooner than the apparitions began to be noticed, moaning and crying began to be heard throughout the house at night, along with faint but obviously pleading female voices crying for mercy and for God to help them. Some called out for their mothers. The sounds of crying were particularly disturbing to Doctor Valentina Stalnova, a Russian physician who was retained by the embassy and lived on the premises. Doctor Stalnova reported investigating sounds of crying coming from three separate and widely spaced rooms in the embassy over a period of four nights. The sounds varied in intensity, but were, in the doctors opinion, were all the voices of young females. Although Dr. Stalnova repeatedly searched for them, no source for the sounds was ever discovered.

Needless to say, the entire Embassy was in an uproar. Local employees refused to report in for work. Tunisian employees began to go on “extended holidays” in the country. Several went on furlough back to Tunisia for extended visits. The Ambassador and several other senior employees… and their wives… devout Moslems all, began to drink rather heavily. One such occurrence could possibly be written off as too much rich food followed by a bad dream. This was six of them within a span of less than a week. Word was spreading, and the Embassy was beginning to receive a certain amount of telephone calls and, even worse, the curious were beginning to gather on the sidewalks outside and gawk at the building. It was only the direct intervention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that kept the press at bay, and even so, some elements of the press, such as the Moscow Times, did, in fact, get word of the strange happenings at the embassy and publish short stories speculating about the events.

Meanwhile, the City Water Department carried out its task. The five-man crew showed up for work each morning at seven o’clock am…. right on schedule. In five days of digging, they still had not uncovered the leak that the City of Moscow was convinced existed. Still, the meters at the central water heating plant registered low for the Tunisian Embassy, and a leak had to exist. There was only one more section to dig up, and that was the twenty foot segment leading directly into the house.

On the morning of May 16^th, 1998, the work crew removed the cement cover of the last segment and found their leak. It was a hairline fracture of the pipe, about ten inches long which was spraying water at a steady, even rate into the floor of the conduit. In order to repair the leak, the conduit had to be pumped dry. It was in doing this that the city water crew also found the cause for the apparitions in the Embassy. Laid out along either side of the hot water pipe, and covered with a substance that medical examiners later called a “caustic substance, most likely lye” were six sets of human remains. They were, according to the medical experts called in by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, those of young girls, approximately between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Each had been shot once through the base of the skull, and they were, judging from the lack of artifacts found accompanying the bodies, completely naked at the time of interment. On two sets of remains, both wrists and ankles were wrapped in what appeared to be heavy leather cuffs with brass eyelets. No identifying articles were found. The medical examiners estimated that the remains had been placed alongside the conduit at the time it was laid, in the summer of 1949.

At the time the conduit was laid, the house on Nikitski Pererulic had been the official residence of Lavrenti P. Beria, then Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs, and Director of the infamous NKVD (Secret Police), predecessor to the KGB. Beria… a name that, for over twenty years, struck fear into the hearts of anyone who heard it. A short, fat, balding little man little round glasses who looked for the world like “everyone’s favorite uncle”. Beria… the man with no soul… the “most evil man alive”. It was Lavrenti P. Beria who presided grimly over Stalin’s infamous Gulag from his plush, fourth floor balconied office in the equally infamous Lubyanka Prison. Beria… Prince Regent of what Alexander Solsynitsin called “Hell’s Inner Circle”…

No one involved was terribly surprised by the find at the house on Nikitski Pereulic. Rumors had circulated for years, even when he was alive, that Beria, who was himself the victim of a bullet soon after the death of his master Stalin, was a notorious pedophile who cruised the city in his custom made black ZiS sedan, escorted by motorcycle outriders, “arresting” young girls to whom he took a fancy. None of them were ever to be seen or heard from again…

The remains, which to this day remain unidentified, were removed and given a decent burial at the prestigious Novi Davichi Convent Cemetery. Their tombstones, provided by the Russian government, simply bear the inscription that they are “nameless victims of the Great Terror”and bear the single date 1949. Somewhere in Russia, maybe still in Moscow, there are six families whose daughters finally rest. That they do not know this simply places them among hundreds, possibly thousands more who will never know the fate of their loved ones at the hands of Lavrenti P. Beria. For them, the spirits will never rest.

The leak was repaired and the conduit replaced. The beautiful garden returned to cover the scars of digging. No further reports of sightings at this location have been forthcoming. But… on the other hand, that is quite understandable. The Tunisian Embassy moved into it’s new home, located on the other side of Moscow, approximately one month after the bodies were discovered. The beautiful house on Nikitski Pereulic is currently, and has been for some six  and one-half years, unoccupied.

NOTE: As of October 2009 this building is still vacant and no potential buyers/renters have shown the least interest in the location.

© 2009 Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless specifically granted by the author in writing.