If you walk a few hundred meters from the cemetery Church of the Resurrection and the abandoned clergy house (there’s a separate post about them HERE ), then leave the main road and turn into a half-forgotten little lane, two buildings come into view.
The first is a two-storey, barrack-style apartment block—once home to staff from a nearby children’s home. The second is a single-storey structure shaped like the letter “П”, a former village club.
It looked as if life had left this place for good—just like so many others we’ve had the chance to visit. The neglect was total, and on some of the old wooden poles the power lines hung severed, trailing toward the houses as if the village had simply been unplugged.
We circled the club building for a while, then headed to the dormitory. It turned out to be split into two wings, each with its own entrance. We ducked into the nearest one and found a communal kitchen, a shared toilet, and rooms choked with old furniture and forgotten junk. Empty—and wonderfully atmospheric.
But when we approached the second entrance, we got a small shock: the snow there was trampled down, and by the porch stood improvised sleds—an old metal trough repurposed as a runner, loaded with firewood. Someone was living in the other half of the house.
We caught the faintest movement behind the second-floor windows, and after that we couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. The occupant clearly saw us, but made no hurry to show themselves.
With the fates of horror-movie heroes in mind—The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wrong Turn—we decided not to step into the “lived-in” part of the building.
The rational part of the mind insisted there was no inbred maniac lurking in this backwoods corner of Kostroma Oblast—more likely an unwilling hermit, a homeless person with nowhere else to go. But the romantic part didn’t want the spell broken. Some stories are better left with their veil intact.
So we took a few more photographs of the house and its surroundings, and then walked away from these bleak ruins—letting the ending remain unfinished, with a trace of mystery still clinging to it.
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