St Michael's Castle — the ghost of Paul I

OVERVIEW

Saint Michael's Castle (Mikhailovsky Castle, or the Engineers' Castle) was built in 1797–1801 by Vincenzo Brenna and Vasily Bazhenov as a residence for Emperor Paul I, who feared assassination and disliked the Winter Palace. Surrounded by the Moika and Fontanka and two dug canals, it stood on an artificial island. In the early 1990s it became a branch of the Russian Museum, housing its portrait gallery.

HISTORY

Paul I was murdered only forty nights after moving in, on 12 March 1801, in his own bedroom, by dismissed officers led by General Bennigsen: forced to a table to sign his abdication, he resisted, was struck with a sword, then strangled and trampled. The imperial family returned to the Winter Palace; in 1823 the castle was given to the army's Main Engineering School, and was known from then on as the Engineers' Castle.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The best-known legend holds that the murdered emperor's ghost could not leave the place of his death and was seen by soldiers of the garrison, by the school's staff and by passers-by who saw a glowing figure in the windows. The Russian Wikipedia article notes that the rumours appear no earlier than the late 1840s, that the ghost was used — if not invented — by senior cadets of the Nikolaevsky Engineering School to frighten the younger ones, and that it was made famous by Nikolai Leskov's story 'The Ghost in the Engineers' Castle', which fully demystifies it and was written to expose the bullying in the school. In the 1980s members of a commission on anomalous phenomena of the Russian Geographical Society made a limited, unofficial study there: interviews with staff of the patent library then in the building, photographs, magnetic-field measurements and dowsing.

VISITING

The castle is a branch of the Russian Museum, in the centre of Saint Petersburg.