Electricity

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This story is absolutely real. It’s unlikely to thrill lovers of spine-chilling tales, but there’s enough mystique in it. On the other hand, if you imagine yourself in the place of the “injured” party, it becomes rather unsettling.

In the early 2000s, I worked as an electrician at a telephone exchange and handled apartment service calls. One day we received a request that, in our slang, was called “checking for a bunny” — meaning we had to make sure no one had illegally connected to someone else’s telephone line. I went to an ordinary brick Khrushchyovka building, second floor, a one-room end apartment without a balcony. All the wiring in the stairwell was clearly visible, and of course there was no unauthorized connection. I rang the doorbell. A woman in her fifties opened the door. I asked what the problem was. She said her phone would periodically ring at night and not let her sleep. “All right,” I said, “show me the device.” Not long before that, there had been a case where a family was tormented by nightly calls, only to discover that while playing with their new phone they had accidentally set the alarm mode, which woke them up every morning at four.

The woman invited me inside, closed the door behind us… and locked it with a wooden crossbar. Like in movies about medieval castles, the board slid into special brackets on both sides of the doorframe. I had never seen anything like that in an apartment before, but I pretended it was normal. It was late autumn, getting dark early, and the hallway was dim. I asked her to turn on the light. She replied that there were problems with the electricity and the lights didn’t work anywhere in the apartment. Fine, we went into the room. She showed me an old rotary telephone with a mechanical ringer. Obviously, there was no built-in alarm clock in that thing. I told her that either hooligans were fooling around at night or the old exchange was malfunctioning, but to find the exact cause of the calls, we would need to put the line under special monitoring. For now, she should simply unplug the phone at night.

And then the landlady dropped a bombshell that instantly made everything look different to me. She said she did unplug the phone, but it rang even when disconnected, so she had to cover it with a pillow — that way it was almost inaudible.

A brief digression: it’s known that schizophrenics experience flare-ups in spring and autumn, and at telephone exchanges this is actually noticeable — during those periods, the number of exactly such “bunny” requests increases many times over. These subscribers harass the girls taking calls so much that special notes are made in the files to avoid wasting time on them in the future. So I thought: here I am, quietly locked inside by an unmarked schizophrenic. What if she turns violent? I began looking around, and my concerns only grew.

All the electrical outlets in the room were covered in a peculiar way: circles had been carefully cut out of linoleum and taped over the sockets in a cross shape. And a double outlet at the level of the sofa’s back, on the wall between the room and the kitchen, was additionally covered with… a brick wrapped in a plastic bag, resting on the sofa back. I pointed this out and asked why. She replied that something in the sockets would periodically click, even when all the fuses in the apartment were switched off. Once she had seen a glowing ball, like a soap bubble, flow out of that corner socket. And if she turned the electricity on, there were strong voltage surges — light bulbs lasted a day or two and burned out. The TV had burned out, the refrigerator had long been unplugged just in case. The electric meter had once run up a huge number overnight. She was tired of calling electricians, but they found nothing and just shrugged. Once, she said, a light bulb that had been unscrewed and left on a hallway cabinet lit up by itself.

Then the woman looked at me intently and said seriously: “You probably think I’m crazy too. I tell people at work — they laugh. But it’s not funny for me. At night someone walks around the apartment, coughing. Slippers often end up in a different place. I invited a friend who used to tease me to stay overnight — in the morning she said she would never set foot here again.” She pointed to the table, where there was literally a stack of complaints to every possible authority, from the housing office to various deputies. She said she had called a priest — it didn’t help; it had all been going on for over a year. I asked about the neighbors — any electrical problems? She said no, everything was fine with them. It only happened in her apartment.

I expressed my sympathy as best I could and hurried to retreat (fortunately she let me out without any problem), unsure how to interpret the situation, since I had previously dealt with schizophrenic subscribers who, with completely normal expressions and full confidence in their words, would talk utter nonsense. However, some time later, reading various articles about poltergeists, I found descriptions of similar cases. Researchers believe that a poltergeist is “attached” to one of the residents, and that this person involuntarily creates or attracts certain wandering electromagnetic fields, which then cause a reaction in electrical devices. And indeed, such interference could trigger a phone’s mechanical ringer, make a lamp glow spontaneously, cause the meter to spin, and so on.

No more service requests came from that apartment, and a year later other people were already living there — I made a point of asking.