The purpose of this book is to find out whether the mystical legends of the Northern capital are true, whether the city prophecies are true, whether ghosts and apparitions have survived in St. Petersburg. However, the dear reader will not find here either fascinating interviews with witnesses of poltergeists, or chilling conversations with victims of vampires, nor the ominous predictions of the mummy in the State Hermitage, the same one with whom the famous hypnotist recently communicated in the Atlantean language. The fact is that neither psychics nor journalists have anything to do with this book. Its authors are quite ordinary historians who did quite ordinary historical work here: they posed a question and asked the dead to answer it. Yes, that's what we always do - talk to the dead. So the work of a historian is literally imbued with mysticism. True, not all of our colleagues like this, and in professional circles such conversations with the dead are usually called criticism of historical sources. The only difference between this book and an ordinary monograph is the somewhat unusually stated purpose of the research. Indeed, much more often historians write works about the peculiarities of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire in the 1830-1840s or about the characteristic features of the taxation system in the post-reform economy of the country. However, a boring topic is not at all a guarantee of high-quality historical research (as well as an ironic preface)...