The ghost that said "shh"
Geolocating a haunted military cemetery to remember that life is for the living
Ukrainians are blasé about death and Ukrainian cemeteries tend to be somewhat prosaic, but there are a few of them that make me feel like Aragorn at the Argonath — as in, “long have I desired to look upon the kings of old. My kin.”
One of those places was part of a geolocation challenge I did recently. It’s also the site of the second ghost story I will tell today.
Here’s what I tweeted:
Good job, Alexey!
Good job again!
As you will note after clicking on Alexey’s links, this isn’t the standard Google Street View we are used to. These are user-uploaded images, and they are particularly helpful in places where Google Street View doesn’t have much penetration:
Other clues were in the topography. As Oleg pointed out, there are military graves here, but the width of the road gave away that this isn’t the famous Vii’skove cemetery:
The rest of my social media footprint may give you an idea of whose grave I was visiting the day I took the pictures, of course. Check it out and report what you can find!
Here’s the other thing about Lisove cemetery — people obviously grieve here a lot. And sometimes, that grief requires intervention.
If you read old Slavic fairy tales like I do, you’ll sometimes come across a particular cultural refrain: Death is natural. By failing to respond adequately to death, we endanger ourselves and our loved ones. We also sadden and disturb the dead when we are unable to let go.
This is why corpses in Slavic tales will reanimate to wreak havoc if not buried on time, and this is why people who cry too much about lost loved ones will fall prey to supernatural visitations.
My Ukrainian great-grandmother once told me about a woman who buried her handsome colonel husband in Lisove and just couldn’t let go. She grieved too much, to the point of neglecting their grown children, who needed her. Then, a couple of years into it, she showed up unannounced at her son’s door, rain in her hair, and hugged him tightly and said that she was sorry and that she would no longer visit the cemetery quite as often. Things began looking up. But why?
Here’s the tale the woman told to my great-grandmother, herself the widow of an officer by then:
The woman visited the colonel’s grave so frequently that she began to take notice that someone was leaving strange flowers there — very dark roses, of the sort her husband didn’t like.
She began to wonder if he had a mistress. And if that was the reason he acted like he hadn’t liked those flowers in life. Maybe they were the mistresses’ favorite flowers, and the sight of them made him nervous in his wife’s presence. This is quite the conspiracy theory!
So the colonel’s widow began throwing the flowers away with a vengeance, but they always seemed to come back, and there always seemed to be more of them. It began driving her a little crazy!
Finally, when faced with a giant bouquet of these things, she completely broke down. She ranted and raved and shook her fist at the dark clouds gathering above Lisove — and yelled all sorts of desperate, accusatory things.
And then, it was as if a pair of icy hands grabbed her shoulders, and a voice said sweetly and knowingly in her ear, “Shhhh!”
With some difficulty, the colonel’s widow broke away, and rant between the tombstones. She was so disoriented that she didn’t even notice the rain falling, or that she’d lost her hat. When she got to the gate, looking disheveled, one of the old security guards who was having a cigarette outside took one look at her and invited her to sit in his booth for a while.
When she told him what happened, the security guard said that there is the ghost of a woman who sometimes teases cemetery visitors who’ve overstayed their welcome. “Because life is for the living,” he said.
He was right.
And so as I continue to grieve for everyone I’ve lost, I find a lot of comfort in this story. I hope you will too.
Be safe. Life life to the fullest. Don’t overstay your welcome in sad places.
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