The Barabashka poltergeist: knocking in a Likhobory workers' dormitory, Moscow, 1988

Moscow. Autumn 1988. Near Likhobory station, on Likhoborskaya naberezhnaya, stood a four-storey brick dormitory for construction workers. On the first floor lived three young women who painted Moscow building sites. Tanya, 20, from Krasnodar. Flyuza, 20, from Minyar in Chelyabinsk Oblast. Feruza, 18, from Kokand. The sources spell their names in different ways.

10 September 1988. Evening. Someone knocked at the door. The women opened it. Nobody was there.

The knocks came again and again. Then the door began to move. As Krushelnitsky and Vozchikov put it, "the door opened and closed, as if someone were riding on it." The electric kettle whistled, though nobody had switched it on. Stove burners lit. Slippers moved without outside help, and flew "somehow strangely", making "such banking turns!"

It was not cruel. The women said it switched off irons and kettles they had forgotten. Sandwiches were found made on the kitchen table. It rested by day and favoured Feruza. "We call him Barabashka," they said. "He's actually not harmful. He talks to us by knocking."

Feruza had some earlier experience of spiritualist séances. She proposed a code: "one knock will mean 'yes' and two 'no'." Through it, the entity described itself as an adolescent stuck between worlds. It reportedly guessed the number of letters in journalists' names and told the correct time.

The girls' brigade leader phoned the Ostankino TV centre. Central Television of the USSR came to record an episode of Ochevidnoe-Neveroyatnoe, hosted by Sergei Kapitsa, called "Who's There?". Its director, Alexei Gorovatsky, named the visitor. "Since it drums, let it be Barabashka."

Scientists sat in on the sessions. Among them were Valentin Fomenko, chair of a poltergeist research commission, Igor V. Vinokurov, and V.T. Isakov of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Instruments were set up to register knocks and moving objects. Later commentators claimed night-vision equipment caught the outline of a human-like being slightly over a metre tall. No image or primary record has been found. A volunteer researcher's bedding was reportedly found neatly cut lengthwise. The electron-microscope results were never disclosed.

The press followed. Stroitelnaya Gazeta reportedly asked "Who are you, Barabashka?" on 30 September. Trud ran its article on 5 October, and Moskovsky Komsomolets covered it too.

Then the crowds came. Onlookers besieged the dormitory. Young men refused entry at night smashed the windows, and the investigation was abandoned. The scientists could not reach a unanimous conclusion. Some turned to Slavic folklore about the domovoi, the household spirit. The girls agreed to leave only after Barabashka confirmed by knocking that it agreed. They were moved to specially equipped premises. On 21 October, Stroitelnaya Gazeta ran "Goodbye, Barabashka".

No formal hoax finding was ever made. Sceptics of poltergeist cases usually point to patterns present here: activity centred on one teenager with séance experience, quiet by day, speaking through a code she proposed. Those details come from sympathetic sources, not accusers. Copycat cases followed, including one in the Nevsky district of Leningrad. Barabashka became the everyday Russian word for a household poltergeist. And one account still ends on a question: "where the girls were taken, where Barabashka went with them… there is no answer to any of these questions today."