In the late 1970s, amidst the streets of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, a thirteen-year-old Anatoly Moskvin was strolling homeward from school when he encountered a group of men donned in somber black suits.
Accompanying them was a casket, and they were en route to the funeral of an 11-year-old girl who had tragically passed away. This marked the commencement of a life that witnessed Moskvin desecrating approximately 150 graves, exhuming, mummifying, and adorning the bodies of 29 deceased girls as if they were lifeless dolls. Among them was a 12-year-old girl he unsuccessfully tried to adopt from an orphanage. This is the hitherto untold chronicle of Anatoly Moskvin, the Russian historian, aptly nicknamed "The Lord Of The Mummies" in one of the world's most perplexing and surreal cases.
Proficient in 13 languages, a well-traveled individual, and a self-proclaimed authority on cemeteries.
Spent a night resting in a coffin prior to the funeral of a departed individual.
Inserted buttons into the eye sockets of deceased bodies so they could "partake in watching cartoons" with him.
Anatoly Yuryevich Moskvin, 57, a Russian linguist, historian, and journalist who taught at the collegiate level in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
During his schooldays in Gorky, Soviet Russia, Moskvin harbored a fondness for meandering through cemeteries with friends, particularly the Krasnaya Etna Cemetery in Leninsky.
In 1979, at the age of 13, Moskvin, on his way home from school, inadvertently stumbled upon a group of men participating in the funeral procession of Natasha Petrova, an 11-year-old girl who had met an untimely demise.
Moskvin recounts the harrowing experience of being forcibly brought to Natasha's coffin, made to bow down, and compelled to kiss her lifeless form.
That pivotal moment would cast a shadow over Moskvin's life for the next 30 years, propelling him into an obsession with the macabre, culminating in his publication in 2011. Following the incident, Natasha's grief-stricken mother placed a wedding ring on Moskvin's finger and another on Natasha's, binding them in an eerie 'marriage'.
Subsequently, Moskvin matured, earning a degree in Philology from Moscow State University. However, this unusual 'marriage' led him into a reclusive adult life.
Throughout his college years, Moskvin abstained from intimate relationships, choosing to reside with his parents. He refrained from indulging in vices such as smoking and drinking, and he remained unmarried.
Esteemed as an academic, Moskvin amassed a personal library comprising over 60,000 books and documents on rituals and occultism. A colleague, captivated by his work on doll collections, hailed him as a "genius."
For inquiries related to necromancy, Anatoly Moskvin was the definitive authority. He emerged as the unparalleled expert on cemeteries and the deceased. His fixation with the enigmatic persisted, prompting him to pursue a further degree in Celtic Studies, a culture blurring the boundaries between life and death.
As his preoccupation with the macabre intensified, Moskvin delved into druid practices, discovering that druids slept on the graves of their departed to commune with them.
In one of his documentaries, "Great Walks Around Cemeteries and What The Dead Said," uploaded on YouTube and translated from Russian, the Celtic Studies scholar Anatoly Moskvin unearthed that native Siberian tribes also slept on the graves of their deceased.
From that moment onward, he commenced sleeping on the graves of children he found appealing, persisting in this morbid habit for approximately two decades.
Moskvin asserted that this unsettling practice aided him in gathering information to ascertain whether the deceased were "spirits" or "demons." An experiment that ultimately revealed them to be, in fact, spirits. According to Moskvin, these spirits only manifested in warm weather, and given the impracticality of sleeping on a cold grave, he devised a shrewd method to slowly dry them, leading to his extensive travels across Russia, where he acquired expertise in mummification techniques.
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