Moscow
6 legends
Metro-2
A secret metro line that officially does not exist — Moscow's most durable urban legend. As the story goes, "D-6" links the Kremlin with bunkers, the ministry building on Smolenskaya and Stalin's Near Dacha, and an entrance sits in the basements of Moscow State University's main building, which is said to have as many floors below ground as above. Diggers have published maps for decades that do not agree with one another; the defence ministry has never confirmed anything and never clearly denied it either. The legend runs on that silence: the less that is said, the more detailed the map becomes.
The House on the Embankment
The grey housing block facing the Kremlin, built in 1931 for the Soviet elite. During the Great Terror people were taken from it at night: of roughly five hundred flats, more than a third were touched by the purges, and some changed occupants several times over. The legends follow from that — staircases with no numbers on the doors, rooms nobody moved into for years, footsteps along the corridors of empty floors. Residents said they heard furniture being moved in the flat next door at night, when nobody lived there. It is still considered the bleakest residential building in Moscow, and it is the case where the ghost story grew straight out of the documented history.
Ostankino and the Crone with the Staff
Ostankino was built on the ground of an old cemetery, and Moscow's most persistent legend attaches to that fact. In the sixteenth century, when the boyar Sotin set out to plough a field here, a hunched old woman with a staff appeared and told him not to disturb those lying in the earth — or misfortune would find whoever did. She has been "seen" before every disaster in the area since; staff at the television centre recalled her in the days before the tower fire of 2000. People mention her matter-of-factly, the way they mention an omen, and almost nobody can say where they first heard it.
The Site of the Sukharev Tower
The tower stood here from 1695 until it was demolished in 1934, but the legend outlived the building. It housed the School of Mathematics and Navigation, run by Jacob Bruce — Peter the Great's companion, astronomer and engineer, whom rumour turned into a sorcerer. He was said to keep an observatory at the top, to conduct experiments at night, and to have walled a "black book" into the masonry, one that granted power over everything. The book was looked for during the demolition and never found. Bruce's ghost is said to appear on Sukharevskaya Square since, waiting for the tower to be rebuilt.
The Bad Apartment on Bolshaya Sadovaya
Apartment 50 at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya — the "bad apartment" of The Master and Margarita, where Woland's retinue takes up residence. Bulgakov lived here in the early 1920s, and the stairwell had its reputation before the novel: residents said people went missing from that flat. After the book was published the entrance stood covered in quotations and drawings for decades — the walls were painted over, the writing came back. There is a museum there now, but the habit of leaving a note for Woland has not gone anywhere, and locals describe the black cat in the courtyard in a tone that is not entirely joking.
Golosov Ravine
A ravine in Kolomenskoye that Moscow tells stories about as a place where time comes loose. In the best-known version, a detachment of Tatar horsemen vanished into it during Devlet Giray's raid of 1571 — and in 1621 riders in antique armour appeared at the tsar's gates. Questioned, they insisted they had gone down into the ravine to escape pursuit, hidden in a greenish fog on its floor, and stepped out of it a few minutes later. Fifty years had passed. Two enormous boulders lie at the bottom, the Goose and the Maiden Stone; people still come to make wishes on them, and the fog really does linger there longer than on the slopes.