The Apartment in Smolensk

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At the time I was sixteen or seventeen. I had just finished school and enrolled at one of Smolensk’s universities. Since I didn’t actually live in Smolensk itself but in the surrounding region, a classmate friend and I had to find an apartment to rent. As it turned out, that wasn’t so easy at the end of August, when students start frantically searching for housing. We looked at three options, but none of them suited us: the apartments were in terrible condition, and the prices were outrageous. Finally, for seven in the evening, we had an appointment with a real estate agent to see one last option.

We really liked the apartment. It had everything—old, of course, but we didn’t mind. Hot water, a fully equipped kitchen, furniture, carpets, dishes… And the price was symbolic—5,000 rubles. My friend and I were thrilled: such an apartment, so cheap, close to the university and the city center. We agreed right away. One thing was notable: the landlady lived on the first floor, and we were on the fifth. Why did she have two apartments in the same stairwell? It turned out that an old woman had lived in our apartment—bedridden for twelve years—and Auntie Olya had taken care of her all those years. In gratitude, the old woman rewrote the apartment in her name. The old woman died in April, and the apartment was rented out to us in September—less than half a year after her death.

When we moved in, we asked Auntie Olya to remove all of the old woman’s belongings, of which there were many: clothes, rags, even a cane. The landlady took most of it away but asked one thing in return: not to remove the icon that stood on the dressing table, because the deceased grandmother had asked for that specifically. We didn’t attach much importance to this request.

The very next day I noticed something strange. When I opened the door into the shared corridor (it was a dormitory-style building: two corridors per floor, each with a shared door—and our apartment was at the very end of a practically unlit corridor), I felt an inexplicable fear. The closer I got to our front door, the stronger the dread became. Inside the apartment, it stopped. You know how some apartments feel warm, bright, cozy, joyful—pleasant to be in… and others feel gloomy, “overcast,” heavy, as if the air itself presses down on you. Apartments you want to leave as soon as possible. Ours was exactly like that. Everyone who spent even a couple of minutes there told me the same thing.

A week later the first strange incident happened. My friend and I came home after classes, cooked some food together, and went to the room to do our homework. A couple of hours later I got thirsty and went to the kitchen to get some water. To my surprise, I found the refrigerator turned off—the plug had been pulled from the socket. Neither of us had done it, and both of us clearly remembered it humming just a few minutes earlier. Later we found out that pulling the plug out required considerable force. But we just laughed it off—decided we’d studied ourselves silly.

That night I couldn’t fall asleep; something was bothering me. And when the clock by my bed showed 00:04 (I’ll explain later why I remember the time so precisely), the doorbell rang. I was terrified—those buildings have wooden floors, and you can always clearly hear when someone walks down the corridor, but I hadn’t heard anything at all. I quietly called my friend—she, as it turned out, had woken up from the ringing too. We waited and calmed down. Could’ve been anything—maybe a drunk neighbor. There was an Uncle Sasha in the building who used to come asking for potatoes or pasta. We felt sorry for him and gave him food. Uncle Sasha, incidentally, turned out to be one of the unsolved mysteries of that house—but more on that later.

We fell asleep, but at 02:44 the doorbell rang again. Then again at 03:49. After that, the ringing repeated every other night, on a strict schedule, for almost a year, with only a two-month break—so that’s why I remember the times so well. We already knew: now it would ring.

My mother came a couple of weeks after the nightly ringing started and had the apartment blessed. According to her, she had never seen such horror: during the ritual, the candle went out twelve times. After that, every night before bed I sprinkled holy water on my bed. For a while everything calmed down; the nightly ringing stopped.

Then in December my sister moved in with me for a time—we had had a terrible falling-out with my friend and barely spoke to each other anymore (maybe that was another influence of the cursed apartment?). One late evening my friend said she wouldn’t be coming home for the night. My sister and I decided to go to the kitchen and cook something tasty. When we sat down at the table, the following happened: just as we lifted our forks, something crashed loudly in the room. We looked at each other and pretended we hadn’t heard anything (even though we both had). As soon as we raised our forks again, chaos broke out in the living room: something was crashing, falling, whistling, banging against the walls… I don’t know why, but I stood up and went into the room—where, as you might guess, everything was perfectly fine. While I was there, the doorbell rang, and my sister went into the hallway. I found her there shaking, sliding down the wall. All she managed to say was: “Zhen, don’t look through the peephole…”

Strangely, I wasn’t afraid at that moment. I don’t know why. I went up to the door and looked through the peephole. And I saw nothing. Only red light. No corridor, no apartments. Nothing—just a red glow. We spent the rest of the night under the blanket, praying for morning to come as soon as possible. After that, the doorbell ringing resumed; the water in the bathroom started turning on by itself, and dishes began breaking.

In ten months, I spent the night alone in that apartment only one and a half times. Why “one and a half”? I’ll explain. The first time was in February (my sister had already found a place and moved out). I don’t know how I survived that night. I lay under the blanket praying, while chairs in the room started moving by themselves, the water turned on in the kitchen, and the chandelier fell and shattered. Honestly, I thought I’d go gray from it all. The second time I was alone was on the eve of the anniversary of the old woman’s death—but my nerves didn’t survive the first ring at the front door. I got dressed and went outside. I sat on a bench by the building until five in the morning, watching a “disco” in the windows of my apartment: the lights turned on and off all night long. Notably, my friend also stayed there alone several times, but nothing like that happened to her—aside from shuffling sounds in the hallway and storage closet.

Another strange thing was that there were seven apartments in our corridor, but for an entire year I never once saw a single neighbor from that corridor. In other corridors there were people; in ours—no one. It felt as if we were the only ones living there.

In June we finally moved out, and I rented another apartment with my sister. By then my friend and I didn’t speak at all. Now we don’t even say hello (and we’d been friends for ten years).

And lastly, I want to mention our neighbor, the alcoholic. He always told us that if we had any problems with plumbing or electricity, we could always come to him—“Uncle Sasha from apartment 120,” as he put it. Naturally, we never did. But just before moving out, almost a year later, we accidentally noticed that our building had only 119 apartments. There was no apartment 120. So what was that? He had come to us for food more than once.

Now my sister and I have been renting an apartment in another district for three years. Everything is fine; nothing strange happens. But we remember that apartment in Medgorodok with horror. After all—someone else even bought it…

My story isn’t made up; there are two witnesses. Everyone who’s ever been to my place believes me without question. I can even name the address of that strange apartment: Smolensk, Promyshlenny District, M. Oktyabrskoy Street, building 12B, apartment 111.