FROM RUSSIAN SOCIAL MEDIA:
A 1947 expedition discovered Baba Yaga's hut in the Vasyugan Marshes.

The Vasyugan Marshes are one of the most mysterious places in Siberia. It was here in 1947 that an expedition discovered a strange structure, later codenamed "Object No. 7."
There are stories that seem like folklore.
A children's horror story.
A fairy tale invented to scare children in the evenings.

And then there are worse things.

Because sometimes a fairy tale turns out not to be fiction, but a weak, distorted echo of something real.
What we're about to discuss never officially existed.
Not in the archives. Not in the reports. Not in the country's history.
But if this entry is to be believed, in August 1947, a Soviet expedition in the Vasyugan swamps discovered something that formed the basis of the most ancient and terrifying Russian fairy tales.

And if this is true, then Baba Yaga was not a figure from folk tales.

She was real.

An archival recording by Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Rakitin became the starting point for this whole story.

A Recording They Shouldn't Hear
My name is Sergei Mikhailovich Rakitin. I am eighty-nine years old. A retired lieutenant colonel in state security. I was the curator of the Izba project from 1952 to 1978.
I am recording this on a tape recorder in my apartment on Bolshaya Polyanka Street in Moscow. Today is November 14th. It's dark outside. I know time is short.
Not because I'm old. I've been old for twenty years.
But because last night I received a call.
The voice on the phone belonged to a man who died in 1978. I recognized that voice. I buried that man myself.
That's why I'm speaking now, while I still can.
August 1947. Tomsk Region. Vasyugan Swamp
The Vasyugan Marshes are more than just a remote area. They're a vast, living labyrinth of black water, peat islands, bogs, and dead spots where even locals avoid lingering for long.
The Vasyugan Swamp is the largest wetland system in the Northern Hemisphere.
Officially, our group was going there for geological exploration.
We were looking for oil-bearing strata.
That's what it said on our travel documents.
That's what they told the driver who drove us from Bakchar station.
That's what they explained at the village council when they needed guides.
Only four people knew the truth.
Me: Major Konstantin Petrovich Zubov, the group's leader.
Captain Andrei Semyonovich Mirny, an operative in the special department.
And Professor Boris Arkadyevich Weisberg, an ethnographer and specialist in Siberian peoples.
The rest knew only one thing: we were going into the swamp, looking for something important for the state. No questions asked.
What the Khanty hunter said
A strange report arrived in Moscow.
A Khanty hunter from the Kazymov family, who was hunting fur in the Bolshoy Vasyugan region, came to the outpost in the village of Novy Vasyugan and told a story that the local police officer initially dismissed as nonsense.
It was a Khanty hunter who first reported a strange house in the depths of the swamp.

Deep in the swamp, on an island the locals called Crooked Mane, stands a house.
Old. Black. On pillars. And these pillars look like bird legs.
According to the hunter, this house had stood there for as long as people could remember. His father had seen it. His grandfather had seen it. His great-grandfather had seen it.

No one was allowed to approach it.
Anyone who tried either never returned or returned different.
The local police officer decided the hunter was drunk or insane. But the instructions required that anything unusual be passed on.
The paperwork went up.
And there were people at the top who knew: such stories couldn't simply be thrown out.
When a fairy tale is examined as a military object
By 1947, the state already had experience dealing with things that didn't fit into the conventional picture of the world.
There were closed departments.
There were institutions that didn't exist on paper.
There were phenomena that couldn't be spoken about out loud, but which were studied with the meticulousness of an atomic project.
A house on chicken legs could have turned out to be:
A delusion,
a local legend,
a trap,
an anomalous object.

We were sent to investigate.
I still remember the coordinates of the entry point to the swamp better than my own children's birthdates:
58°47' north latitude, 77°32' east longitude.
Some numbers are never forgotten.
The horses refused to go any further.
It took us three days to reach the entry point. The last forty kilometers were on horseback.
But at some point, the horses stopped.
They weren't just stubborn.
They weren't just nervous.
It was as if they'd hit an invisible wall.
They snorted. They stamped their hooves. They tried to back away. One nearly crippled Savelyev's vehicle when he pulled on its reins.
The animals had to be left with one soldier. We continued on foot.
We had to leave the horses and walk.
That's when I first felt like we were being watched.

Not people.
Not animals.
Something else.
The compasses started acting strangely.
The first truly inexplicable thing happened two hours into the march.

The compasses went crazy.
During the march, the instruments stopped working, as if they were being manipulated by an unknown force.
Three needles spun slowly, as if someone were turning them from the inside.
The fourth compass simply froze, pointing straight down.
Major Zubov ordered us to continue, navigating by the sun.
An order is an order.

We walked.
The swamp squelched beneath our feet.
Mosquitoes hung in the air like a thick gray layer.
The putrid smell of peat and water ate into our clothes and skin.
Everything looked like an ordinary West Siberian swamp.
But the feeling of someone else's gaze didn't go away.
It grew stronger.
Professor Weisberg noticed something we hadn't.
By evening, we set up camp in a relatively dry spot. We lit a fire and posted guards.

Professor Weisberg sat separately, writing something in a notebook.
I approached him and asked:
"Boris Arkadyevich, do you really believe we'll find a house on chicken legs?"
He looked at me over his glasses and answered calmly:

"Sergey Mikhailovich, I've been studying the folklore of Siberian peoples for thirty years. I long ago stopped believing, or not believing. I record facts."
"And what facts did you record today?"
He paused and said:

"Horses aren't afraid of swamps. They're afraid of what's in that swamp." Compasses don't break all at once from dampness. Something's blocking them. And also... don't you notice anything?
I listened.
Silence.

The usual nighttime silence, save for the water and the wind.
Then Weisberg uttered a phrase I still remember:

"I can't hear the frogs." A swamp this size in August should be deafening with croaking. But here—nothing. They're gone. Or driven out."
The guard disappeared during the night.
I didn't have time to respond.
A scream came from the north side of the camp.
Short.
One.
And then silence.

Private Semyonov was shouting. Twenty-two years old. A Ryazan guy, freckled, with a perpetual half-smile.

We rushed there with flashlights and weapons.
But Semyonov wasn't at his post.
His boots were neatly stacked on the ground.
A rifle lay nearby.
And nothing else.
After the guard's nighttime shout, only his boots and rifle were found.

No signs of a struggle.
No blood.
No fingerprints.
No man himself.
He vanished as if he had simply been removed from the world.
We combed the area until dawn.
Without result.

Retreat or continue?
Towards morning, Major Zubov called a meeting.
Captain Mirny insisted on returning.
Professor Weisberg was silent.
I was silent too.
Zubov made the decision.
Continue.

We lost one man. But returning without finding anything would have meant admitting failure.

And in 1947, such things weren't forgiven.
On the morning of August 16th, we headed to an island the locals called Crooked Mane.
Where, according to the hunter, stood a house on chicken legs.
We didn't yet know that three days later we would see something that would make life as before impossible.

We found it.
On August 18th, at 11:17 a.m., we reached the island.
It wasn't big. About one hundred and twenty meters long. The birches and aspens grew there strangely—leaning to one side, as if something were pressing on them from the center of the island.

And then we saw a house.

Or rather, a structure that resembled a house.
A blackened log house.
A collapsed roof.
Not a single normal window.
And piles.
Six thick pillars, carved so that each one ended in the shape of a huge, three-toed paw.
A bird's.
A chicken's.
This wasn't a metaphor from a fairy tale.
Before us really did stand a hut on chicken legs.

We found it.
And at that moment, for the first time, I truly understood: children's fairy tales might not be fiction.
The continuation of this story is even more terrifying.
Because when we entered the hut, we found something inside that shouldn't have existed.

But more on that in the next part.