“Rarely where can there be so many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the human soul as in St. Petersburg... Here and on the streets it’s like in rooms without windows.” F. M. Dostoevsky “Crime and Punishment” “... St. Petersburg, I don’t know why, always seemed like some kind of mystery to me. Ever since childhood, almost lost, abandoned in St. Petersburg, I was somehow always afraid of him.” F. M. Dostoevsky “Petersburg Dreams” The construction of the Northern capital began on the sites of numerous pagan temples and Swedish witchcraft places. This is precisely the reason why the city began to be considered cursed. Mikhailovsky Castle, where the conspirators killed Paul I, also enjoys a bad reputation. After visiting this place, Dostoevsky began to have his first seizures of epilepsy. The ghost of Peter I once appeared to Emperor Paul. The ghost said to him in parting: “Farewell, but you will see me here again.” After listening to her son, Catherine II actually decided to erect a monument to Peter the Great on this very spot. It was rumored that in the morning, not far from the monument, corpses with crushed heads were sometimes found. The sphinxes opposite the Academy of Arts were enchanted by Amenhotep himself. For inexplicable reasons, drowned people from all over the Neva unmistakably float to them. There are plenty of such places in the city on the Neva. The proposed book is a story about the darkest, mysterious and disastrous places of Northern Palmyra and its environs. All the ghosts, secrets and dark urban legends of the most tourist city in Russia.