Greetings from Afar
A Little Child Shall Lead Them
Vologda is a quiet town. It is one of the oldest towns in Russia, and a part of the famous “Golden Ring” of cities making up traditional “Old Russia”. Unlike some of the other cities on “the ring”, it is not known to be particularly haunted. The skyline of the town is dominated by the spires of one of the oldest and most elaborate Russian Orthodox Churches still in constant use, and the gabled Victorian eminence of the Vologda Children’s Home, on a sugarloaf hill on the southern outskirts of the town. The saying that “nothing ever happens in Vologda” has some relevance. However, over the years, the quiet little town has had it’s share of triumphs and tragedies, and from these, some rather peculiar incidents. While none of these quite qualifies as a “famous” haunting, several are interesting form the perspective of an investigator.
It was November 21st, 1998, and winter, along with long nights and cold had come to the little town of Vologda. Junior Lieutenant Igor Kuzminov, Night Shift Supervisor of the Vologda Police Barracks, looked up suddenly as he heard the door to his office open. It was almost eleven in the evening, and Kuzminov was not actually expecting any visitors. After all, “nothing ever happens in Vologda”, and essentially that’s correct. Volgda is by all definitions, a rather sleepy place. Expecting an adult… one of his Patrol Officers, Kuzminov overlooked the child, at first. Then the movement, just below his field of vision, caught his eye. The little girl was about five or six years old from the looks of her, and small for her age, at that. She looked upset and quite excited, and she was dressed a little strangely… but as soon as she opened her mouth, the situation more or less explained itself.
“You have to come, Tovarich Lieutenant, and bring the fire brigade with you…
she said breathlessly. “You have to come now… the barracks is burning…”
Her language sounded strange… stilted… as though it came from another time… no one used the word “Tovarich”… Comrade… anymore. It reminded Igor of cloth caps and barricades and black leather trench coats. The child had to be from somewhere out in the provinces… really “out in the blue” he said to himself.
“What, little sister?” Igor asked, not quite understanding what the girl was saying… something about a fire, but where. “What on earth are you doing out alone on a night like this little one? What is it that you want?”
“The barracks is burning, Comrade Lieutenant… You have to come now…”
“What barracks? We have the only barracks in the city…”
An orphan, he thought to himself, that figured… She had to be from the Children’s Home. Even though Kuzminov was new at his job, he was no stranger to the region. The tall, lanky, Igor had grown up in Vologda. It was his hometown. His family had lived there for generations. The young officer with the straw-colored hair and soft voice knew every sqauare inch of the city. He knew where everything was, including the State Orphanage. His mind clicked and whirred. That was it. She had to be from the Children’s Home.
The little girl persisted in her desperate pleadings…
Igor repeated himself, slightly more firmly. “There’s no fire here, little one,” he said patiently, “and this is the only barracks in the city”.
“No, Comrade Lieutenant! No!” She gasped as she ran over and tugged at his sleeve, almost pulling him out of his chair… strong for such a little one, he thought. “The Children’s Barracks… Comrade Lieutenant… it’s on fire… You must come now…”
Children’s Barracks? Now that was one he hadn’t heard in a while… a long while… that term hadn’t been used since his grandfather’s time. Some of the old people still called the Children’s Home by that name, but not many… they were rapidly dying off. The place was old though. The original “Children’s Barracks” had been built before his grandfather’s time.
Igor stood and followed the girl as she tugged him toward the door. “Why didn’t you call in, or use the alarm if there’s a fire?” He asked out loud. “Why did you run all this way to get me? Are the lines down?”
The child released her grip on Igor’s tunic sleeve and headed toward the door.
“What?” the little girl asked… She stopped and stared at the Lieutenant with round hollow eyes. For an instant, Igor thought, she looked far older than her years. “I don’t know…” Her speech was halting. “I don’t know…” For a moment she looked disoriented to Igor, and acted slightly confused. Not a good sign, Kuzminov thought.
“Never mind, Comrade Lieutenant”, she continued. “Just come now… get the fire brigade and come”.
She ran out into the night. Igor Kuzminov tried to follow her, but lost her in the night. Probably a false alarm, he thought, but better play it safe. He ducked quickly back into the lobby of the Police Barracks and picked up the telephone. He quickly dialed O3 and told the Fire Brigade to go out to the Children’s Home… that he had the report of a fire. He then roused two of his off-duty patrolmen and started toward the Home, himself… looking along the side of the road for the small figure that had alerted him as his little four-wheel-drive WaZ bounced along down the badly paved narrow track leading toward the southern edge of the city.
After about two blocks, he saw her. She was running toward the Children’s Home as fast as her little legs could carry her. The oversized boots that she wore seemed to glide just over the street, in a blur as she ran… Her long black hair trailed in the wind behind her along with the tattered scarf around her neck.
Igor now had a dread of what he would find. The Children’s Home was old… very old… it had been built in the time of the Tsars, just after the turn of the century, and the wooden structure had known several serious fires in it’s hundred-odd years of existence. The last one had been just over twenty years before he was born… the place had burned almost completely to the ground… That was… he thought… about 1950. He remembered his father telling him about it. It had been dreadful, the worst fire in the history of the city. Now the massive old building stood, with more or less modern additions marring it’s somewhat foreboding but quaint semi-Victorian grandeur atop a low hill overlooking the city. It wasn’t far from the center of the town, nothing in Vologda was far from the center of the town. But… the way the old building was situated, and the condition of the road leading to it meant that it would take quite a while for the Fire Brigade to get their trucks into position. Thinking about the possibility of a fire, and just what it could do to such an old building, Igor was glad that he had called them. “Better safe than sorry”, he muttered to himself as he bounced along the rough road.
He told his driver, Sargent Leoneid Andropovich, to pull up alongside the girl and stop. He flung the door open and motioned for the little girl to get inside. She ignored him and kept running… it was as though she had not seen him at all. Like he and his car simply did not exist to her. He ordered his driver ahead, covering eight blocks remaining to his destination, and easily beating the little girl to the Children’s Home, firmly expecting to be present at her arrival. He never saw her again.
When the little squad of police and the fire brigade arrived at the Children’s Home, all was quiet. Everyone was asleep, and the Director, Doctor Nadezhda Tushkova, roused from her slumber, vehemently denied sending a child to the Police Barracks for any reason, let alone to report a fire. They had a telephone after all, several of them, and an alarm system that alerted the Fire Brigade directly. The home even had detectors she pointed out. The very idea of sending a child to fetch the Fire Brigade was preposterous. It had to be a hoax or some sort of a prank.
The charge was serious… if it was some sort of prank… Well… the Director summoned all of the Dormitory Supervisors, who in turn summoned all of the children. All were present. All except the little girl who had been in Kuzminov’s office. He described the child to the assembled staff. None of them knew her. “No such child is here,” they informed him.
“That’s impossible. It’s not been ten minutes since I saw her on the road leading here, and less than half an hour since she came pounding into my office. My men saw her as well. He looked at Andropovich, standing beside him, who nodded agreement, as did Corporal Stefan Danielenko who had accompanied them. We stopped and tried to give her a lift back here, but she ignored us and kept running”. Both of Kuzminov’s colleagues nodded.
“There is no such child here”, Doctor Tushkova repeated. “Nor has there been since I hve been here… over ten years now”.
Igor shook his head. Maybe the girl was just a local child pulling a prank… Maybe, but her behavior was serious. The child had been agitated and apparently quite frightened. It didn’t make sense.
“I assure you Lieutenant, if you have been tricked, and it would appear that you have, you and your two companions must look elsewhere for your trickster”. The Director of the Vologda Children’s Home dismissed her tiny charges and their sleepy guardians and prepared to return to her own bed as soon as the ever-present paper work surrounding such a nuisance was completed.
As Junior Lieutenant Kuzminov and the Administration of the Vologda Children’s Home were sorting the matter out, the Fire Brigade was packing to leave. It was decided that since they were there anyway, they would make a routine inspection of the place, just in case. There was, after all, nothing to be lost by being careful, and it would save the Fire Marshal another trip back out to the Home later for the sole purpose of conducting an inspection. Slowly and meticulously they went over the old building, floor by floor and room by room. Once the actual living space had been fully checked and inspected, the Fire Marshal and his assistant went through the attic space and then, down into the basements while a separate team went into the aging furnace room. As soon as this long and tedious process was complete, they once again began packing to leave… but, once again the packing halted when someone realized that the Children’s home had one location left that had not been checked for fire… and… it was a location that had, in fact, proven to be deadly at least once before.
Yet again, Fire Marshal Vyetheslav Markov and Deputy Fire Marshal Andrei Shaposhnikov set out toward the building from their waiting trucks… This time, they did not go inside, they carefully walked around the perimeter looking for what they knew was surely present, the loading chute leading into the underground coal bunker that provided fuel for the Children’s Home’s furnace. After about five minutes of walking in the dark, their path illuminated by the yellow glare of their flashlights, they found it.
It was then that they also found the fire. The coal bunker, only partially filled, beneath the old building, was ablaze. It was not yet to the point of open flame, but it was, in fact, burning. Once the outer doors of the bunker were opened, the smell of smoke was unmistakable. If left as it was, by morning, the smoldering inferno would have reached open air on its own and would burst into an open flame Most likely it would have destroyed the Home before help could arrive. The building was old and the wood in it’s walls was dry. It would have “gone up like so much tinder” Markov later said.
Such fires were dangerous, and a constant threat in older buildings. They produced gasses… if it had hit open air in the night very little hope would have existed to halt its spread. That was exactly what had happened in the fire of 1950. And… just as it had in 1950, this fire could very well have caused a blast from those gasses that would have killed everyone in the building, even before the flames could consume the structure. Another truck was summoned, and hoses were tapped into the water main leading into the Home. The fire was eventually extinguished… but in order to put out the blaze, the entire bunker had to be emptied.
They worked until dawn. Even in the chill night air it was hot, sweaty and dirty work. The thirty-six men of the Vologda Fire Brigade formed a chain, taking the dusty black chunks out bucket by bucket as fast as the buckets could be filled by four of their companions inside the bunker. Every fifteen minutes they rotated the odious duty of filling the pails. Shovel by shovel they lifted out the coal… over a ton of it. Igor Kusminov and his two Militiamen joined the effort. All through the night Kuzminov thought of the little girl in the ragged clothes with the “quaint” dialect who had come to warn him of this budding disaster. “Who was she”, he wondered, “and how could she have known?” Was it simply a prank that turned out to be at just the right time? He wondered. Igor was very typical of his generation… He had been raised to believe only in what he could see, feel, hear or otherwise physically sense. But… he also had the typical Russian attitude that such things don’t “simply happen”.
Finally, it was done. The bunker was empty and the fire was extinguished. The Children’s Home was safe.
It was then that they made their second discovery of the night…
The current Children’s Home had been built, or rather, rebuilt, after the disastrous fire of 1950 in which several children, the exact number was never established, and at least three staff-members perished. While using most of the old foundation and some of the surviving original structure, the building was not on exactly the same spot. While digging out the coal bunker, a set of remains were found… remains most likely dating to the time of the 1950 fire. They were the remains of a little girl… about five or six years old.
Three days later, in a funeral service attended by practically the entire city, pall bearers supplied by the Vologda Militia Barracks and the Vologda Fire Brigade carried the remains of the last victim of the 1950 Children’s Home Fire to their final resting place next to the ancient structure of the ornate Russian Orthodox Church. There has not been another haunting reported in Vologda in the two years since this somber ceremony took place. But… on the other hand, there hasn’t been another fire, or threat of one, at the Children’s Home, either…
© Dr. J. Lee Choron 2010. All rights reserved unless granted by the author in writing.