Real Ghost Busters

Police officers have to make up with mentally unbalanced people

Traditionally, spring and autumn bring natural cataclysms and seasonal aggravation of various mental diseases. Mentally unbalanced people cause a lot of problems to the people around them, including doctors, police officers, reporters and so on. Summer is supposed to be a period of infinite relief for the people of such specific professions. However, the summer sun this year is special: it is very good and warm for one person, but it is a total disaster for another one.

There is a building in the center of the city of Volgograd. The building has been full of various evil spirits and extraterrestrial beings for more than 50 years already. We have been to the building and visited an apartment where poltergeist and its comrades were residing. Young girl named Julia from the special department of the FSB accompanied us in the adventure.

An old lady welcomed us to her apartment:  "I have been living here for eight years like in hell. At first I sensed the presence of some strange waves rushing from one end of the room to another, they knock me down sometimes. Horrible things started happening here soon: lamps would break into pieces, nails and screws would come out of furniture, the furniture polishing would get spoiled. Look at this!" The lady took us to the cupboard and showed three holes in it that had been "drilled by the invisible power." There were actually two holes underneath every shelf to regulate their position in the cupboard. The lady took us to the bathroom: "Do you think it is just a water heater? No, this device transmits extraterrestrial signals. I have not been using bathroom lately after I was nearly killed here with an electric shock."

When we went to the kitchen and I found out that evil spirits had conspired with her neighbors, as well as with the Russian and the French governments. The lady said that her neighbors broke her "new" fridge, having scratched it all over. In fact, the fridge and the old lady were about the same age. She said that the rubbish chute in her kitchen was filled with bugs. To all appearance, the lady thought that cockroaches in her chute were not actually cockroaches, but French spies. The old lady went out to the balcony and pointed to the building's facing (the building was more than 50 years old): "Bricks used to be smooth and flat and now look at them! Every morning, when "they" work I have loads of garbage on my balcony," the lady said.

We did not have a chance to find out what the old lady was talking about in particular, but her neighbors upstairs were repairing their apartment (which explains the garbage on the balcony), and when we tried to talk to them about the lady, they just said the she was crazy.

We knew what the end of the story would be, before we entered the "mysterious apartment." The 80-year-old lady has recently lost her husband: neighbors said, he simply decided to run away from her eccentricity. Trying to find the "missing husband," police officers determined, the unlucky man took a bus and left for the city of Krasnodar. However, the building's residents also said that the man was as weird as the woman. The lady submitted a written complaint against her own apartment to the regional police department. When the lady was giving us a tour, we saw a book on her table - "The Secrets of the Psychological War." Moreover, the woman assured us that she was living together with her granddaughter, although she preferred to spend nights in the apartment to be on the safe side, so to speak.

People submit a lot of such complaints to the criminal department of the Volgograd region, and police officers are supposed to do something about each and everyone of them, no matter how insane they might seem. We spent about two hours in the old lady's apartment just to write a short explanatory note.

In addition to troubles, such clients give police officers an opportunity to laugh. A lot of such "stories from hell" become jokes and help people rest. Policemen of the Volgograd criminal department remember the story of a man, who said he knew the names of assassins, who had killed the son of an influential businessman in Volgograd. The man said that he knew everything, and when investigators were asking him questions, he said that he had learnt everything from the Pendulum. "When we asked him to clarify, he showed us a little rope with big screw nails on one end and said that it was the Pendulum. Well, what can we do? This is our job," investigators said laughing.

Julia Sycheva