Tikhvin district of the Leningrad region is known as the bear corner. The places here are remote and sparsely populated, which makes them attractive for hunters and fishermen. Last fall, Yakov Aizeman, a leading engineer at the Electrosila plant, came here to hunt. He stayed with his friend in the village of Volozhba.
In the morning, Aizeman went into the forest and got lost. The latter circumstance did not frighten him, but it upset him a lot, since the engineer considered himself a good tracker and a good connoisseur of the Tikhvin forests. All day he wandered through completely unfamiliar places, and in the late afternoon he came out on a barely noticeable forest road. "It will lead somewhere," Eiseman decided, and set off down it.
The road led him to an abandoned farm on the edge of a large swamp. Apparently, the farm was abandoned quite a long time ago. Aizeman went up to the porch and pushed open the front door of the hut. It creaked open. There was nothing remarkable inside the house, except for the traces of someone's long-ago sleepover: several empty cans, a bottle of vodka and an armful of firewood thrown near the couch.
It was getting dark fast. A whitish mist was creeping in from the swamp, and there was a dank dampness. "I'll spend the night in the house, and in the morning I'll find out where the hell I've gone," Eiseman decided and began to settle down for the night.
In the middle of the night, he suddenly woke up, feeling through his dream that someone was shuffling next to him. For the first few moments, the engineer lay motionless, but then, startled, he sat up on his bed. Nothing could be seen in the pitch darkness, but Aizeman sensitively sensed someone's presence in the hut and realized with horror that the one hidden by the darkness was deadly. He hastily flicked the lighter. A wavering tongue of flame picked out the corner of the couch from the darkness and the stooping figure of an old woman standing a few steps away from it.
Aizeman screamed in surprise. The old woman slowly, as if blind, leaned towards him, spreading both arms. A sweet smell of decay flowed through the hut, and Aizeman clearly saw what was approaching him... A corpse!
In desperation, he threw a Neva lighter at the deceased, still Soviet-made, hefty and weighty, like a chair. She hit the old one hard in the rotten forehead and, bouncing off, instantly went out. There was a scream in the darkness. Eiseman rushed into the vestibule. Fear gave him strength, and with one jerk he tore the hook and the hole out of the closed front door and jumped onto the porch.
He spent the rest of the night running over some shaky hummocks, falling into the peat muck every now and then. At dawn, I felt solid ground under my feet and collapsed exhausted. After catching my breath, I looked around and realized that I was not far from Volozhba.
When Aizeman appeared in the village, he caused a stir among the locals — his appearance was so wild. However, everything he said did not surprise the villagers at all, since there had been a bad rumor about the farm in the swamp for a long time.
Before the war, a lonely old woman named Korenikha lived there. No one really knew how old she was or what she was doing. It was rumored, however, that the old woman was a witch and kept an ancient book on witchcraft in her house. Once, they even saw a Rootling wandering around the village churchyard, scraping moss from crosses on abandoned graves and collecting cemetery grass in a purse — wet convolvulus. They were afraid of the old woman and avoided her farm.
In 1941, during the fighting in the Tikhvin direction, a German infantry unit entered the area of the village of Volozhba. The Germans shelled the farm where our outposts were entrenched with artillery fire. A shell fragment struck Korenikha to death. "Damn fascists, they killed my grandmother," the soldiers sighed after the fire raid and buried the dead woman right there in one of the craters.
Since the 50s, hunters, berry pickers and mushroom pickers began to tell terrible things about the abandoned farm. Some heard footsteps and groans in the crumbling house, while others noticed a stooping, gray-haired old woman in its windows. Grisha Volobuyev, an atheist Komsomol member, was found in Volozhba, who decided to dispel all superstitious fears, for which he went to the farm. A couple of days later, in the Volozhbinsky swamp, they came across a Volobuev cap and a kirza boot — all that remained of the atheist. There was no doubt that Grisha had fallen into a quagmire and drowned. However, the reason that drove him into the swamp remained unclear.
Over time, the farm and the road to it became overgrown with forest and grass. The locals did not go there, and it was possible to find the old woman's house only with a guide or by chance, as happened with the engineer.
Aizeman left Volozhba for St. Petersburg, without even remembering about the backpack, bandolier and double-barreled shotgun left on the farm. Upon arrival in the city, he turned to Andron Friedman for clarification. The expert's opinion was as follows:
— In the northern regions of Russia, according to an ancient witchcraft rite, a sorcerer or witch had to find a successor in order to pass on to him all the secrets of his forbidden knowledge before his death, usually in the form of a handwritten codex. Otherwise, their black souls could not find peace and were doomed to eternal torment. Korenikha's sudden death may have disrupted this rite and caused the witch's ghost to appear.
