The Maraksa Poltergeist: Police and a Priest Report Flying Objects in a Siberian House (2018)

Maraksa is a village of 445 people in Kolpashevsky District, Tomsk Oblast, about 6 km from Kolpashevo. In one private house lived Natalya Vikentievna Zhukova, her husband Alexander Ivanovich Zhukov, a retired river-fleet sailor, and their ward Igor Yakovlev, a teenager. For about two weeks the lights flickered every evening between 7 and 9 pm. Electricians found nothing wrong.

About 11 pm on Sunday, 11 February 2018. Natalya phoned her daughter Ekaterina and said everything at home was collapsing. A small cabinet fell and large ones shook. Books flew from shelves, eggs flew at Igor's face as he entered the main room, and a pot flew onto the veranda as he dressed to leave. Relatives saw it everywhere Igor went.

Alexander put it simply. "There he stands, and suddenly a knife flies at him and sticks in… Then he goes into a room and a cabinet topples onto him." At night came quiet knocking, rustling in the corridor, footsteps in empty rooms.

12 February, 15:45. Natalya called the Kolpashevsky District police. Three patrols came. Major Yevgeny Artamonov wrote the report. A closet fell in the bedroom "in the immediate vicinity of the police officer." Books fell from a rack. A stick flew out of an unoccupied room. "There was no rational explanation to be found of the specified events." Artamonov later said, "I saw myself how things really fell… and none of our people will go there again."

Then came Fr. Alexei Postnikov, priest of the Church of Christ's Resurrection in Togur, and a chair fell behind Igor when the boy entered the kitchen. Postnikov said neatly stacked bathroom linen ended up on the floor with no one entering, and thick children's encyclopedias flew from a shelf "one after another" while Igor stood touching nothing. A bookshelf began falling on him, and he caught it and set it upright. Postnikov confirmed that, in his words, "genuine devilry was going on." On 15 February, Candlemas, Igor and Natalya were baptised under police guard, and everything stayed quiet.

Hieromonk Simeon Koynov of the Kolpashevo Diocese said the priest witnessed everything in the report. The diocese named the teenager "the main object" and blamed "spirits of malice." The regional police found "no signs of crimes or administrative offences." Artamonov stopped talking to the press.

Pavel Kanygin of Novaya Gazeta looked closer. The living-room cabinet stood against a thin plywood partition to the parents' bedroom, with holes "allowing manual contact." He asked who had been in that bedroom during the incidents. Natalya threw him out.

Villagers who spoke to Radio Svoboda did not believe in a poltergeist. Most thought the family staged it. An unnamed teacher suggested the guardians wanted to send Igor back to the orphanage without public blame. Kanygin noted this does not explain why the police went along. Igor had passed auditions for a TV singing show, but Natalya forbade the trip to Moscow. Ufologist Viktor Fefelov, who brought instruments to the outside of the house, spoke of an "energy fault" beneath it. Ekaterina said the media misrepresented her family and that fabricated videos were circulating online.

The story ran across the Russian press, reached The Moscow Times and was repeated on Coast to Coast AM. Later retellings added a burned-out phone and a confiscated film of a ball resembling ball lightning, details absent from the first reports. No photograph or film of the phenomenon itself has ever been verified.