Spooked - The Domovoi

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Sure, you’ve heard of a gnome, a troll, a sprite, an orc, a Babadook, a centaur, a tomten... but have you ever heard of a Domovoi?  Thank you, Nikita, for sharing your story with us. We also want to thank Laura at the Paranormal Scholar for helping us find this amazing story. Produced by Eliza Smith, original score by Leon Moriomoto, artwork by Teo Ducot Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ghosts, demons, the vampire, the vang. You may think you know the creatures born of the veil. Some would rather, you didn't know them at all. We're listening to Spoot. Stay tuned as a child. At our family Bible study, my mother tells me that names hold power. She says that once you know the name of something, you can call upon its power.

That's why you need to know the book. She says, point to her testament. All you have to do is shout his name when in the dark time. For in facing the dark times, there are lots of names to call. So many names, and sometimes I forget which is which. My name is then Washington. You should know that in the dark valley, Some names work better than others.

Spook starts. Now, as you recognize that on the spooked, we spare no expense. If we sense a story that needs telling, but it takes place on the other side of the world, well, the other side of the world we go. So I ask you, put on your warmest mittens and your thickest coat, taking the slow train to Moscow. My name is Nikita.

My last name is Zuyenko. I grew up in Moscow. I was born and raised here. Nikita lived with his mother and his sister, who was about four years old at the time, in an apartment in central Moscow. This apartment was really the center of our family until my grandmother's death.

And we inherited it after she died. We decided to just shift furniture around. in my mother's room itself. She was in the same room with my sister. They were sleeping together. It was a very tight bond there. And I guess not enough space for both. Into the place where the bed was initially,

we placed our closet. And we moved the bed from one wall and to the other one that's opposite. to the entrance to the room. And we dragged in one of the bigger chairs. So that night, after he and his mom finished rearranging the master bedroom, Nikita was sitting in the living room. It was late, and his mom and sister had already gone to bed.

I was watching something on TV. And I hear a yelp. It's like this sharp but very short-lived scream. I get up and I hurry there. I look inside the their room and I see my mother just hugging my sister and I ask what happened. And my mother looks at me and she says, my sister told my mother, she saw a snake at the feet of her bed. I think that was the first time I saw my sister's really scared. I think that's the first time I really saw.

fear on her face. And that's kind of bad just overall. I feel like this was like this realization that there's this little kid very innocent and something bad happened to her. And I really struck something inside. After I just go back to bed. And the next day was like it always was.

Nothing special, nothing new. didn't seem like anything happened. Nikita put the incident out of his mind. His mom put his sister down to sleep, and he spent the evening on the couch, watching YouTube videos on his laptop. At some point, he drifted off. I was sleeping.

Wake up because of that yelp. I felt like this rush of adrenaline, and I run there, and I look into my sister's room once again. My sister screams that there is a snobes, that there is a snake at the feet of the bed. And she was terrified and she was really screaming this out. Nikita didn't see a snake in the room and neither did his mom.

But it didn't seem like his sister was dreaming. She was definitely fully awake. And she was certain she'd seen a big snake slithering across the floor. After that, we woke up every night during, around 12 or 1 o'clock at night because my sister was screaming. She was screaming every single time. It was not like a continuous scream. It was a yelp.

It was a sudden realization that there is a snake there. It was just, p. That was at the end of the first week that I started to actually wonder if there's something more to it. So, Nikita started reaching out and asking friends. and then friends of friends. Have you ever heard of this? A snake in your bedroom?

But like, not a real snake, but maybe a snake specter or a shapeshifter? I always got the same kind of an answer to my questions, to my frustrations and everything. Do you believe in Jesus? What about God? Did you try to buy holy water or call for the hell from the local church or, well, anything like this?

And in my head, no matter what I do with the church, it would not have any result unless I have faith in it. I did not have that faith. And people just gave their opinions. That was actually rather disturbing because for the most part, I was told that it was spirit of maybe my grandparents, the most loving people I ever knew that were coming back and trying to threaten the family, which was ridiculous, in my opinion. Nikita's sister was still waking up every night,

screaming about the snake in her room. So he took refuge in his work. He was a clerk doing inventory at a stationary shop. I was working in the basement in the storage unit. And it was the worst job of my life because I had to literally fight off rats with an iron rod. One day, Nikita was in the break room with his two closest co-workers eating lunch. And we were talking about basically everything, mostly about the rat. and I did not feel like talking about the rats anymore for once

and I decided to speak up about the situation at home and we were eating at that point and I was telling them the story and they just continued eating. It was just, okay, they shrugged it off. And then when I stopped talking, they would say, they look at me and they said, Yeah, that's Damavoie.

That's a usual thing. A Domavoy is a Russian house spirit. Nikita had read about Domavoie in fairy tales as a kid. But here was his co-worker, talking about the mythical creature like it was an invasive house guest who had to be dealt with and mollified. You just either feed him or you just clean the apartment or do something to just make it kind again.

that's fine. My grandmother once saw one and he was like this little old guy sitting in her chair and it was a normal thing for them. I at first thought that come on and then at the same time I thought I thought well there's clearly something going on there and this is the first time someone saying something apart from praise the Lord. maybe there is something to it I returned home and I started to conduct my investigation through the internet

the books and Wikipedia a lot of forums that was actually a very interesting discovery for me Russian forums are full of Domavovoi like questions how do you invite Domevoie to the house in order to make the house more livable.

How do you get rid of the Domevoie because that's a satanic creature and so you need to get rid of it? How do you make the Domevoie happy? How do you make the Domevoie go away? How do you make the Domevoie just appear so you can talk to it? There's so much about it. You can say that he is like this spiritual housekeeper, keeping the bad spirits at bay, bringing luck in. maybe helping the owners of the apartment,

sometimes cleaning up, sometimes wording off bad people. It's usually seen as a very helpful spirit. It was a very small gnome-like creature, usually described and seen as this old person. It was so small that, well, he could fit. on the palm of your hand. But what did a tiny gnome have to do with the giant snake who was terrifying Nikita's sister every single night?

When Dumavoy felt like the owners of the apartment were not living up to their unwritten agreement, he would try to change their mind by changing his own shape. in order to spook the people inside the apartment. But one of those that actually caught my attention was snake. That was a very prevalent one. Domovoi don't like change. They want their home to stay within the same family for generations.

They don't want you painting walls or knocking them down. And they don't want you moving furniture around. I did not really think on what exactly. exactly did he not like about us moving the furniture around. There is, it's an alien mind in my understanding of it. And to try to understand it is a fool's errand. Nikita learned through his research that there were two ways to get back on the Dumovo's good side. And one way is basically giving him something to eat and saying that you apologize.

which because I'm a stubborn person, I refuse to do because that asshole was messing with my family. And the other one, basically from what I could understand, that was moving the furniture back. But once again, I'm a stubborn person. And in my opinion, as the owners of that apartment, we were the ones who would determine where the stuff stands. and so I refused to do that either. It was, I think, on the third night after I really faced myself considering what was happening and thought that maybe that really is something supernatural. Two more nights, and each and every night the snake would slither across his sister's room

and she would wake up in terror. I actually try to make my own version of, I'd say, quote-unquote, exorcism. I was in the guest room. It's a big place with the TV and the couch, very comfortable. That was where we would have every New Year's celebration, which in Russia we do instead of Christmas. There was the gathering point. That was the heart of the family. And I specifically waited for everyone to leave the house because I didn't want to look like a loony.

I walked to the middle, the exact middle of the room. And I was done feeling stupid at that point. And I just wanted to just burst. And so I did. I walked to the middle of the room and I shout that I'm going to call for the priest. And that if this night something happens again, there is nothing that's going to stop me from just kicking this thing out of the house. If it doesn't like how things are, who we are, or anything else, I'm just going to get rid of it all the same. and I felt proud

and I felt like a man and I felt like oh this is this is gonna solve everything the same night we wake up at around 1 o'clock and there is once again a scream and this time I am rushing out not because I am scared for my sister but because specifically because I'm just so angry at this thing and I want to go there

and I want to deal with it right there and then, because this was it for me. And I try to walk out of my room when my door slams shut, and with enough force to actually crack the door frame. And so I opened the door just as forcefully, and I go through without even looking at the entire thing. I was not scared. I was just angry.

At some point, it just gets on your nerves. so much that you really don't feel fear, or at least the fear is just so far down your throat, that you feel anger over just so much clearly. And for me, the door slamming into my face, without anyone holding it or anything really signifying that it was wind or maybe something else, for me, that was just someone taking a jab at me, and I needed to take a jab back. and I go to my mother's room and I hug my sister

and I finally tell my mother that this is probably the Mawoi and that we need to deal with him somehow and I am not sure she really took me seriously. She nodded and she agreed visually but I have a sense.

serious doubt she really believed in this. It took her at least two nights more of the same thing to realize that maybe there is something to my diagnosis, I guess. And in about two days, she agreed to move stuff around again. Nikita and his mom moved the bedroom furniture back to the way it was when his grandmother was alive. And that night, his sister didn't wake up screaming. The snake was gone. Things were going as always. My sister, nowadays, doesn't even remember that she was having those nightmares. It magically went away. So, Nikita appeased the Domovoi. His sister never saw

the snake again. She went back to sleeping soundly and everything returned to normal. except for one thing. Every time Nikita left the apartment for work or an errand or even a trip. I would come back to some part of my technology being thoroughly destroyed. My motherboard on my badass computer explodes out of nowhere for no reason. Then suddenly my iPad stops charging out of nowhere. okay, I go and fix it, and the week after it stops charging again. Then my phone, the way I see it, after I messed with him, it became personal because I took a jab at him.

I threatened him. And then, yes, I also was the one who kind of initiated the moving of the stuff and the apartment once again. I guess I can understand that, but I would never apologize. Thank you, Nikita, for sharing your story with us. You wish you the best of luck with that pesky domovoie. I want to thank Laura, at the paranormal scholar, for helping us find this amazing story. Dear listeners, this is not a journey where one can simply step off the train, no, no, and if you appreciate, stories from real people, spoken in the bright light of day, out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment.

The storytelling was soul, cinema of sound. It's amazing. Spook was produced by the team that has never tasted a single day's remorse. Be afraid of Mark Ristich, of Anne Assessment.

Our chief spookster is Liza Smith. The original score was by Leon Morimoto, additional sound by Lauren Newson. You may never have heard of them because they don't want you to hear of them. But knowledge is power, understanding and strength. There are steps you can take to navigate this dark path.

Of course, the first. And the most important is simply this. Never. Ever. Never, never, ever, never, ever, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never.