When my grandfather was younger, he worked for the Soviet police, the Militsiya.
He handled his share of unsettling cases, but the strangest one happened in a place called Krutchshow, a long forgotten factory town in Southern Russia. He referred to it as the Prizrak Case.
Grandpa’s face was full of unease, haunted by long forgotten demons, as he recounted what made the case so special.
In the early fifties, the Soviet Union went through a time of heavy industrialization. During these years, many towns similar to Krutchshow were built. The principle was simple. The authorities found a suitable location for factories or other production facilities. Once those were finished, they’d construct cheap living quarters for the workforce.
The case started when an older woman arrived at Grandpa’s station in Volgograd. Her brother lived in the small town of Krutchshow, but she hadn’t heard from him in months. The woman herself was too old to visit the distant town, so she pleaded with the Militsiya to find out if something had happened to him. Krutchshow was hours away from Volgograd, but still fell under their jurisdiction. Grandpa assured her he’d check on him and set out on the long trip.
He told me he’d heard his share of stories about these factory towns, but when he arrived, things were much worse than he’d imagined. The inhabitants of Krutchshow were a sad, malnourished lot, and mostly comprised people who had nowhere else left to go. They were either too old, or migrants from distant parts of the Soviet Union.
People were scared when he arrived. After he said this, Grandpa was quiet for a moment, and a dark expression showed on his face.
“Couldn’t blame them. We, the Militsiya, had a terrible reputation, and for good reasons. We did… a lot of bad things back then, a lot of bad,” he admitted. “But that’s just how things were.”
His voice trembled, and I saw a flicker of guilt on his face.
The inhabitants were worried about what he’d do. Maybe he’d foreclose their homes and drive them away. Maybe they’d be taken to the gulags, or worse… Grandpa shook his head.
“Bad times, nothing but bad times.”
While he didn’t find a hint of the old man, and no one told him anything about him, he learned more about the town of Krutchshow and how different it was from other, similar factory towns. The region it was built in had a history. During the times of the Russian Empire, it was the estate of a noble family. By the time Krutchshow was built, the former grand mansion still existed, now vacant and abandoned. Instead of demolishing it, however, the authorities converted it into makeshift living quarters. They unceremoniously divided up the vast, lavish rooms into small one-room apartments, and relocated the future workforce there.
After he toughened up on people a bit, though, he learned there was more going on at Krutchshow than merely a man going missing. Over the course of the past three years, more than a dozen inhabitants had vanished. A person going missing wasn’t strange, especially during these times. People were poor, rarely had enough to eat, and often ran off to find their luck elsewhere. Hell, sometimes they simply went missing. More than a dozen people vanishing without a trace, and informing no one, was a different story.
When he informed the local factory overseer, and the higher-ups in Volgograd, and investigation by the Militsiya was started. The authorities weren’t concerned about the people, of course.
“No,” Grandpa said with a grim expression, and anger on his face. “All they cared for was their damned production quota.”
Their initial questioning went nowhere. No one was willing to talk or seemed to know a thing. Yet there was one thing Grandpa heard from time to time. It was a word he only overheard in hushed whispers and quiet murmurs when they thought he wasn’t listening. It was the word prizrak, which is the Russian word for ghost or phantom.
When he finally confronted people about it, they all pretended they’d never heard about it. It was clear something was going on, and the Militsiya had already made plans for some stricter methods of interrogation, when someone talked.
One day, a factory worker in his late fifties, Dimar, showed up at the Militsiya’s makeshift investigation office. He was fidgety, nervous, and didn’t even look them in the eye, but he said he needed to talk to them. When they pulled him inside, he sat down, but they all saw how scared the man was, how he was trembling in his seat. At first he just sat there, silently, but finally, he opened his mouth, pleading with them to not do anything to him.
“Was afraid we’d sent him away, and said he had nowhere else to go. Krutchshow was the only home he had, he said, but someone had to talk, someone had to say something!”
After they’d handed him a stiff drink, the man finally opened up about the noises that haunted the building. He said they’d started years ago and continued on ever since. At first, everyone thought it was nothing but the old mansion itself, or maybe someone messing with the other inhabitants. God knows, he said, there’s no shortage of shady characters in the building. Yet the longer the noises continued, the more unsettling things became.
Those noises, he said, anxiously. They were all wrong. At times, they sounded like heavy footsteps, at others as if something was scratching or beating against the walls. Sometimes they echoed from far away, and sometimes they came from right beside you. Occasionally, they’d even originate from rooms long-vacant and empty. It didn’t matter what time of the day it was. You could hear them in the early morning, but also in the middle of the night.
It was some of the old woman who first began talking about the story of the prizrak. At this point, Grandpa interrupted the man’s ramblings and asked him what this prizrak was. Dimar was quiet again. He cast his eyes down while his feet shuffled over the floor. Grandpa said he had to repeat the question twice more, the third time yelling it at the man until he finally started. Dimar said he was never one to trust in ghost stories, and told himself it was all humbug, of course, but the longer the noises went on, the more he listened.
At first, it was only rumors about a ghost or a curse someone had put on the old mansion. Before long, however, the rumors developed into a life of their own. There was talk about a serf who’d been murdered by the noble family, while others talked about a disfigured family member who’d been imprisoned in the basement. Some even said it was something much older, a shadow who’d been stalking these old walls for centuries.
Grandpa asked him how all of this was related to the disappearances.
“Never seen anyone so terrified in my life. Said it was always during these noises, always when the prizrak was most active that someone was taken.”
After that, Dimar was almost mumbling to himself. Said it happened all the time now, daily ever since the Militsiya arrived. It was only a matter of time now before someone was taken away again, and now that he’d talked… Grandpa was quick to assure him that nothing would happen to him, and that they’d figure out what was going on.
After the man had left, Grandpa shook his head, and the other members of the Militsiya had a good laugh about the story. None of them were religious, and none of them believed in silly ghost stories, but it seemed the inhabitants thought it to be true. When I asked him how he could be so sure, Grandpa turned to me.
“We were all men of the Militsiya, and in all our years, we’d learned one thing above all else: the darkest and vilest things are always committed by men themselves, always.”
There was one specific part of Dimar’s story, however, that had caught his interest more than anything else. He’d said the noises had happened daily ever since the Militsiya had arrived, but none of them had ever heard anything. It seemed as if whatever, or better, whoever, was responsible, made sure the Militsiya didn’t notice a thing.
The plan they hatched that day was simple. They’d bug the place, storm in once the noises started, and catch the perpetrator. For this, they told the inhabitants, they needed to do a sweep of the building to find evidence. In reality, though, they planted a handful of simple listening devices; nothing sophisticated, but enough to do the trick. Once they were done, all they had to do was wait.
The Militsiya man divided into two groups. Grandpa and a few of the others would enter the building, while the rest kept a tight surveillance outside, in case the perpetrator tried to flee the scene.
Only a few hours after they’d installed the devices, late in the evening, the noises started again. When Grandpa and the rest entered the building, they found it in pure chaos. People huddled in the hallways. The women were crying and praying, while some men accused the Militsiya men of angering the prizrak. It took them almost an hour to restore order. Once everyone was accounted for, however, one person was missing: Dimar. Grandpa immediately rushed to the man’s room but found it empty.
A search was conducted right away. They evicted all the inhabitants and put them under tight surveillance at a nearby factory warehouse. Then they searched through all the rooms, and went through the entire place from top to bottom. Yet even after hours, they found no hint of the man. Some started voice concerns, and a few even wondered if there might be more to the story of the prizrak.
Then one of them noticed something. He’d been in Dimar’s room, rechecking it for what must’ve been the fifth time. He’d noticed that a part of the wallpaper locked strange. It was darker than the rest and hung loosely in front of the brickwork. He thought it was because of the building’s terrible conditions, but when he went closer, he noticed it wasn’t only the wallpaper, but also the brickwork. The moment he touched it, he noticed he could move it. That’s when he called for the rest of the Militsiya men.
They quickly removed the loose part of the wall and found a small entry way leading to the room next door. At least that’s what they thought at first. When one man squeezed through, he noticed that it instead led to a space between the walls. Grandpa left the room to compare the inner and outer dimensions of the room, and realized the wall had to be almost a meter wide. They were puzzled, but after consulting the mansion’s blueprints, they discovered this wall was part of the original mansion. Sure, a lot of new walls had been added, but the old ones were still there.
When they entered the space, they were even more surprised. It wasn’t a hole or a small hideout like they’d originally thought, but a sodden tunnel that led through the entire length of the wall. The air was musty, dirt and fallen plaster was everywhere, and all corners were infested by thick, heavy spider webs. Yet this tunnel was easily half a meter wide; enough space for a human being to pass through.
While they explored these narrow, tunnels, one at a time, squeezing past plaster and bricks, they soon discovered that it led into other, similar tunnels, in the original mansion’s other walls. All of them with hidden entryways of their own. It was clear what the source of the noises must’ve been: someone moving through these tunnels.
When checking out the rest of the tunnels, they found even more puzzling things. There was an old, half-rotten mattress stacked between the walls, a chair and a table, and even an improvised cooking area.
Before long, they stumbled upon Dimar’s corpse. He just lay there, in one of the corners, discarded, his blank eyes staring at nothing, and his mouth still wide open. The cause of death was strangulation, but the man also showed a wound caused by a blunt object. The perpetrator must’ve entered Dimar’s room in the middle of the night, beaten him unconscious before he dragged him into the walls and strangulated him.
A helpless, futile expression came over Grandpa’s face, and he began cursing.
“Things like that; they happened a lot. We, the Militsiya… always making promises, always saying we’d protect people and make sure no harm came to them, but in reality… we rarely did anything… rarely saved anyone!”
For a while, he sat there, panting and staring off at nothing, before he continued.
Investigating the tunnels, he said, took hours. The men of the Militsiya were hardened, stoic man, yet none of them wanted to venture in on their own, afraid of what they’d find in there. They also stumbled upon stacks of old, rotten clothes, and various other items: the belongings of all the other people who’d gone missing over the years. They all must’ve suffered a fate similar to Dimar. Yet one thing puzzled them all. Even after searching for hours, no other remains were found.
The interrogations went for an entire week, but even after harsher methods of… questioning, the perpetrator was never found. The only thing they knew was that it had to have been one of the building’s inhabitants. While there were secret entrances to the wall tunnels all over the building, none of them led outside. After killing Dimar, the perpetrator must’ve left the tunnels, and mixed in with the rest of the inhabitants. If they’d had more time, they might have eventually figured out who was responsible. The higher-ups, however, didn’t care. It didn’t matter to them that a dozen workers and immigrants had died.
In the end, the old mansion was demolished, people were relocated to a newer building, and Grandpa and the rest of the Militsiya men left Krutchshow behind.
I sat with Grandpa for a while longer, but he’d fallen quiet. I was about to get up, thinking the story was over, but when I did, Grandpa sighed heavily. When I looked at him, he had a dark, almost empty expression on his face. His hands were resting on his knees, but I saw him trembling. Finally, he turned to me, his voice nothing more than a whisper.
“This case it has haunted me for years, but it wasn’t because people died. Not because of the promise I’d made to Dimar. No, it was because of something else.”
I stared at him expectantly.
“There was a routine to these murders. A person was only killed every few months.”
At first, I didn’t know what he was trying to say, but then he reminded me what they’d found inside these walls, and also what they didn’t. I felt sick to my stomach instantly, and when Grandpa saw it, he only nodded. Yes, there was a reason they’d found no remains, and there was a reason for the cooking area.
“Terrible times,” Grandpa said, shaking his head. “The country was still in ruins, people were poor, people were starving… but Krutchshow? It was the most impoverished of them all.
