“Not the devil, but an evil spirit,” suggested others.
An old woman, who sold herrings on the Ochta, had herself seen the ghost at a spinning wheel, quite naked, lean, black, with a tiny head about the size of a thimble; you could not tell the body from a straw.
“Was it not the house-haunting spirit?” asked some one.
“House spirits don’t visit churches,” he was informed.
“Perhaps it was a stray one; they are liable to the same plague as cows and dogs. That’s why they play pranks.”
“It’s the spring. In spring the house spirits moult, they shed their old skin; that is the reason they rummage about.”
“Whether it be a house spirit, devil, or ghost, one thing is clear,” they all agreed, “the spirit was a bad one.”
In the muddy yellow mist illumined by the dull red flare of the torches, which cast monstrous shadows from the dwarfs, the procession itself seemed to be a manifestation of things evil.
More terrible tales yet went from mouth to mouth in the crowd as the dwarf’s funeral went by.
On the Finnish side of the river, a priest, for the performance of some mad act, had attired himself in a goat’s skin with horns, and this skin had at once stuck to him, and in this guise he was to be taken at night to execution. The son of a dragoon, Zwarikin, had sold his soul to the devil “who had appeared to him in the shape of a foreigner; the compact had been signed with blood.” In the Apothecary’s garden, the cemetery, thieves had opened a grave, broken the coffin and begun to drag out the body by his feet. They did not finish however, for they got frightened and ran away. In the morning, some one saw the feet sticking out of the grave; the news spread of the resurrection of the dead. In the Tartar Quarter, beyond the Crown works, an infant had been born with a cow-horn for a nose, and in the Mitny Dvor, a pig with a human face. “These are bad omens for the town where they happened.” In one place a cock with five legs had appeared. In Ládoga blood had rained from the sky. The earth had trembled and groaned; three suns had appeared.