GRANDFATHER KNEW HIM GRANDDIN IN A PIT FOR 3 MONTHS — He said he “cured the evil eye”…
Eleven years old. That’s how old Nastya was when her own grandfather buried her alive in a foul-smelling concrete pit. He didn’t kill her with an axe, nor did he strangle her. He took her life slowly and painfully, day after day, assuring her that he was driving the demons from her childlike soul. Today, in our studio, we’re trying to understand how gray-haired peasant wisdom transformed into monstrous, primitive cruelty, and why an entire village remained oblivious for three long months to the hell unfolding right before their eyes.
How could the cries of a tormented child be ignored, and why did rescue come too late? It happened in the summer of 1999, a turbulent and frightening time when the collapsed empire left a trail of destruction in people’s minds and souls. It was a time of abject poverty, gang wars in the cities, and silent, hopeless despair in the villages.
A time when every house was filled with the hum of old televisions and streams of murky water, with Kashpirovsky’s séances, “recharging” creams and hopes, and the sermons of newly formed sects promising salvation in exchange for the last cow. It was in this atmosphere of general madness, where ancient superstitions mingled with the magic of television, that our tragedy unfolded.
In the Sverdlovsk region, in the Irbit district, lies the tiny village of Zaikowo, lost among the forests and fields of the Urals. Here, life followed its own unwritten rules. Crooked log cabins, mud-covered roads, a perpetually drunk tractor driver, and women who carried the burden of household chores, children, and constant hardship on their shoulders. The air here was filled less with the scent of freshly cut grass than with a dull melancholy and rumors that spread from house to house faster than any virus.
In this godforsaken corner of the world, eleven-year-old Nastya Belousova was a quiet, almost invisible child. She had fair hair and large gray eyes, in which an expression of perpetual guilt and fear was deeply ingrained. She rarely played with other children, preferring instead to sit at home and draw princesses and fairytale castles in an old album—worlds so different from her own.
Nastya lived with her mother, Svetlana. The 32-year-old woman, exhausted from working on the farm from early morning until late at night, had long since given up. After her husband left her for another woman and abandoned her with their young daughter, her entire life revolved around one thing: survival. She was a typical victim of her time and circumstances: tired, dejected, and accustomed to obeying.
The central authority figure, the undisputed patriarch of her small family, was her father, Nastya’s grandfather, Afanasi Gromov. He was a 68-year-old widower and a former employee of a long-closed sawmill. In the village, he was considered a man of the old school: taciturn, strict, and exceedingly so. Unlike many others, he didn’t drink alcohol, kept his house and garden in exemplary order, and went to the dilapidated little church on the outskirts of town every Sunday. His neighbors both feared and respected him.
They said: “Afanasi is a strict man, but fair. You cannot deceive him.”
No one suspected that behind this facade of apparent righteousness lurked a domestic tyrant whose word was law and whose hand was heavy. His deceased wife, Grandmother Nastya, walked around until her death with dull eyes and old bruises, which she usually explained by saying she had tripped or hit her head on the doorframe.
For Svetlana, her father was both king and god. His opinion was not to be questioned. His commands had to be obeyed without argument. And when Afanasi decided that his granddaughter was possessed by evil spirits, Svetlana, despite her fear, did not dare to contradict him.
It all started with little things. Nastya, entering the difficult adolescence, became increasingly withdrawn. Sometimes she reacted irritably to her mother’s remarks. Sometimes she cried for no apparent reason. For a child her age, this was normal behavior, but not for her grandfather Afanasi. He saw it as the work of the devil.
“She’s cursed,” he declared categorically to his daughter, piercing her with the heavy gaze of his faded eyes. “The girl is bewitched. Do you see the way she’s looking sideways? That’s not her, that’s the devil inside her. We must cast him out before it’s too late.”
He began bringing “holy” water from a dubious source into the house, forced his granddaughter to wear homemade amulets of dried grass and garlic around her neck, and read her strange prayers at night that sounded more like magic spells. Nastya was afraid of him. A look from him made her flinch, but she had no one to complain to. Her mother just pursed her lips and said:
“Obey your grandfather, he will not advise you to do anything bad.”
The resolution came at the end of June on a sweltering day that smelled of thunderstorms. Svetlana, who was setting off for the farm as usual, told Nastya to go to her grandfather’s house to help him weed the garden. This was nothing unusual. The girl nodded obediently, put on her old calico dress with small flowers, and strolled along the dusty village road to her grandfather’s house, which stood on the edge of the village.
Her neighbor, Baba Klawa, who was watering the geraniums on her windowsill, saw Nastya slip through the gate into her grandfather’s yard. That was the last time anyone saw her free. That evening, Svetlana came home exhausted from work and discovered that her daughter was gone. She wasn’t worried. Nastya had stayed overnight at her grandfather’s house before when she had to work late.
It wasn’t until the next morning that she raised the alarm. Svetlana went to her father’s house. Afanasi was unfazed. He sat on the veranda, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and calmly watching his agitated daughter.
“She left yesterday,” he said languidly. “She helped with the cucumber harvest and then walked to the river with her friends. She said they might go to Wera’s place in the next village to spend the night. They’re young and inexperienced. What can you expect?”
It was the first carefully calculated lie that set a monstrous deception in motion. Svetlana rushed to Nastya’s friends, ran to every house where her daughter might be. No one knew anything. The girl had vanished without a trace. By evening, the whole village was in an uproar. The search began. Men with lanterns combed the forest and the riverbank, while women questioned everyone and everything.
Grandfather Afanasi actively participated in the search. He went with everyone, offered advice, shook his head in despair, and lamented louder than anyone else, cursing “the times we live in, when a child can no longer walk safely on the street.” No one could have imagined that, while they searched for Nastya in the windswept fields and reed beds, the girl was only a few meters away, in her own garden.
She was buried alive in a concrete hell from which there was no escape. A hell her own grandfather had created for her in the name of her “rescue.” The first days of the search were marked by desperate, feverish activity. A local police officer came from the district center. An older, weary police captain named Anissimov, who had seen everything in his service but could never get used to missing children.
He methodically questioned Svetlana, the neighbors, and Nastya’s few friends. The emerging picture was vague and bleak. The most important witness was, of course, Grandfather Afanasi, the last person to have seen the girl. He maintained a stern dignity and answered the questions thoroughly and without the slightest doubt. Yes, she came. Yes, she helped. Yes, she went to the river.
He mentioned casually that his granddaughter hadn’t been “herself” lately, staring at passing cars and dreaming of city life. Skillfully and subtly, he gave the investigator the “necessary” clues, steering suspicion down a false but convenient and logical path: escape.
The prevailing theory was that the accident happened on the water. The river was shallow in those areas, but with treacherous whirlpools and a strong current. Naturally, no one called in divers, not back then, not on that scale. For several days, local men combed the banks, searching the bottom with hooks in the most dangerous spots. All to no avail.
Nastya had vanished without a trace, dissolved in the stifling July air, and at that very moment, just 100 meters from the river where they were searching so intensively for her, she was alive, if one could call it life. Her prison was an old cesspool behind a rickety wooden latrine in her grandfather’s yard. The structure had been built before the war: a three-meter-deep concrete well that had long since fallen into disuse.
It was sealed with a heavy cover made of thick, tarred planks. It took considerable force to move it. Afanasi weighed it down, just in case, with an old tractor gearbox and a few concrete blocks. To the outside world, it was just a pile of scrap metal in the backyard. To Nastya, it was a coffin lid. The day she came to help with the chores, her grandfather was unusually affectionate. He gave her herbal tea that made her head spin and her eyelids feel heavy.
The last thing she remembered was his face leaning over her and a soft, suggestive whisper.
“Sleep, granddaughter, sleep. We will drive the demon out of you.”
She awoke at the bottom of that pit. At first, she was in shock, a sticky, all-consuming terror that took her breath away. She screamed until her voice gave out and pounded her small fists against the rough, damp walls covered in slimy moss and colonies of woodlice. But her screams were muffled by the thickness of the earth and concrete and never reached the surface.
Their world had shrunk to the size of this foul-smelling pit. The air here was stale, heavy, saturated with the smells of decay, damp, and excrement. By day, a thin ray of light penetrated a tiny crack between the boards, where dust motes danced, the only reminder of the sun, the sky, and the life above. At night, absolute, impenetrable darkness descended, alive, moving, filled with the rustling and squeaking of the rats, their only neighbors.
Grandfather Afanasi developed an entire ritual for his monstrous treatment. Once a day, always after midnight, when the village was sound asleep, he went out into the courtyard. He listened to every rustle, approached the pit, and, groaning, moved the heavy shield just far enough to allow a bucket to pass through. A bucket containing a piece of stale bread and an aluminum cup filled with lukewarm river water was lowered to the bottom of the well on a rope.
That was enough to save her from starvation and thirst, but it wasn’t enough to live on. Physical exhaustion was part of his plan. He believed that by weakening her flesh, he would also undermine the demon within her.
“Eat,” his voice boomed from above, distorted by the echo. “Eat, you wretch. Your demon wants to feed, but don’t give in. Pray, repent of your sins, and then you will emerge into the light of day.”
Then he began his exorcism ritual. He knelt at the edge of the pit and recited psalms aloud, mixed with some wild pagan incantations from a worn book he had bought from a gypsy woman in the market. He sprinkled the edges of the pit with “water he himself had consecrated” and scattered salt into it, supposedly to drive away evil spirits. He spoke to his granddaughter, but he wasn’t addressing her; he was addressing the devil.
“Come out, you impure spirit!” he shouted into the black hole. “Come out of the girl’s body. You will find no peace here. I will kill you with darkness, starve you, and burn you with prayers.”
Driven to madness by fear and hunger, Nastja first begged him, weeping and calling for her mother. But he perceived her pleas as tricks of the devil.
“It is not you who is speaking, but he, the accursed one, who weeps with your voice. You cunning serpent, but you will not deceive me.”
Gradually, the girl fell silent. She realized that begging for mercy was pointless. She simply lay on the cold, damp ground, curled up in a ball, staring at the narrow strip of light that was her entire universe. And above, life went on as usual.
The search gradually stalled. Inspector Anisimov closed the case with the notation “vanished without a trace,” leaving Svetlana with a faint glimmer of hope. The neighbors stopped discussing Nastya’s disappearance, and new topics of gossip emerged. Only her mother continued to believe and wait. Afanasi supported her belief but simultaneously fueled her guilt.
“Pray, my daughter,” he said to her, placing his heavy hand compassionately on her shoulder. “Only a mother’s prayer can bring her back. We have lost her. We have lost her. But the Lord is merciful. Perhaps she will come to her senses and return. The prodigal daughter.”
Svetlana, crushed by grief and her father’s authority, believed every word he said. She couldn’t imagine that the monster who had stolen her child sat at the same table with her every day, drinking tea and discussing God and justice. Time passed. July ended and August began.
The heat gave way to persistent, cold rain. Water seeped through the cracks in the lid, and the bottom of the pit was always covered in icy slush. Nastya no longer felt the cold. In fact, she felt almost nothing at all. Her skin was covered with unhealing wounds caused by constant contact with dirt and grime. Her body was transforming into a living skeleton, covered with gray, parchment-like skin. Her mind began to fade, sinking into a saving oblivion where there was no hunger, no fear, and no repugnant darkness.
Sometimes she thought she heard voices, the laughter of children playing in the street. Once, a neighbor boy, chasing a ball, ran right up to the pit. Nastya mustered her last bit of strength and let out a soft, squeaky groan. The boy froze and listened.
“Uncle Afanasi, is a kitten crying in your pit?” he called to the old man who had stepped onto the porch.
Nastya’s heart beat with desperate hope, but the older man only smiled ominously.
“Those aren’t kittens, those are squeaky rats,” he replied calmly. “They’ve spread here. Go play, there’s nothing to climb on.”
And hope died before it was even born. It was September. Three months had passed since Nastya Belousova had disappeared. Three long months in which summer ended and gave way to a damp, cool autumn. The village of Zaikowo had finally come to terms with the loss. The girl’s name was now only spoken in hushed tones, like a creepy bedtime story, like a warning to disobedient children.
“If you run far away, you will disappear, just like Nastya Belousova.”
His mother, Svetlana, had become a silent shadow, mechanically going about her work in the yard and just as mechanically returning to her empty, cold house. Hope had almost faded, leaving only a dull, aching ache. Afanasi Gromov, on the other hand, seemed to have recovered from his grief. He continued to attend church regularly, spoke at length with the priest about sins and repentance, and had even begun to gradually tidy up the neglected yard.
Outwardly, he seemed a model of stoic acceptance of the inevitable, but that was merely a facade. Inwardly, panic grew and spread, cold and sticky like the mud at the bottom of his monstrous dungeon, for his plan was beginning to unravel. The reason was the smell. At first, it was barely perceptible, mingling with the usual village odors of rotting leaves and manure, but with each passing day, it grew stronger and more intrusive.
It was a heavy, sweetish stench of decay, human excrement, and rotting flesh. The smell of death was impossible to hide or mask. Afanasi tried to combat it. He poured bleach into the pit, dumped buckets of vinegar in it, and covered the lid with freshly cut grass and weeds. But all was in vain. The stench seeped through the ground and spread throughout the neighborhood, especially on calm, windless evenings.
The first to raise the alarm was the neighbor Baba Klawa, whose house was closest to Gromov’s property.
“I can’t stand it anymore, girls,” she complained to her friends by the well. “The stench from Afanasiy’s garden is so bad you can’t open the windows. It’s as if an animal died there and has been rotting for a month. I tell him, ‘Afanasi, get rid of the carcass.’ And he stares at me and says, ‘Get lost, old woman, mind your own business.’ The old man has completely lost his mind with grief.”
Rumors spread throughout the village. People noticed other strange behaviors of the old man. He began guarding his backyard with painful and fierce determination. If one of the neighbor children accidentally threw a ball there, he would run out with a stick, shouting curses. More and more often, he was seen wandering aimlessly around the old outhouse at night, muttering to himself.
The mask of a respectable, grieving grandfather began to crumble, revealing the ugly face of a cornered madman. The point of no return came with the young Kuznetsov family, who had settled in Zaikowo only a year earlier. They were outsiders, city dwellers, unbound by decades of rural traditions and fears.
The head of the family, Viktor, a former paratrooper who had served in Afghanistan, was a man of action, not words. He didn’t believe in evil spirits or the “evil eye,” but he was intimately familiar with the smell of death. And the smell wafting from Gromov’s yard evoked particular, unsettling associations in him.
“That’s not a dead dog,” he said to his wife one evening, closing the window tightly. “A dog smells different. This smells like a human.”
His wife Olga initially paid no attention, but when their five-year-old son fell ill with a bowel infection, she lost patience. The doctor suspected it might have been caused by a fly-borne infection. Flies swarmed over Gromov’s property, attracted by the terrible stench.
Olga gave her husband an ultimatum.
“Either you take care of it or we’re moving away. I’m not going to let my child live next to a plague-ridden hut.”
The next day, Viktor, with the support of two other strong men, tractor driver Sergei and his colleague Ivan, decided to take action. It was pointless to approach the local policeman, Anisimov. He would dismiss it and attribute it all to senile whims. They decided to take matters into their own hands.
Late in the afternoon, they approached Gromow’s house. The elderly man was in the yard chopping wood. When he saw the uninvited guests resolutely approaching him, he instantly transformed.
“What do you want?” he shouted, clutching an axe in his hand. “Private property, get out of here or I’ll chop you all to pieces.”
His eyes gleamed wildly and saliva dripped from his chin. It was an inappropriate, animalistic reaction that only reinforced Viktor’s suspicions.
“Grandpa, calm down,” he said calmly, taking a step forward. “Put down the axe, we have a question for you. What’s that stench coming from your shed? People are complaining. Children are getting sick.”
“Rats!” Afanasi shouted. “I laid out poison to kill them. What’s it to you? Get out of here.”
But the men were no longer listening to him. They circled the older man and went directly toward the source of the smell: a pile of garbage heaped on top of an old hatch. When Gromov saw this, he let out a desperate, animalistic cry and lunged at Viktor with his axe raised. A short, ugly fight ensued. Ivan and Sergei forced the older man to the ground and wrested the axe from his hands.
Afanasi struggled like a trapped animal, shouting unintelligible curses and prayers. Viktor ignored him and began clearing away the rubble. He tossed aside concrete blocks and pushed a rusty gear to one side. Beneath it lay the wooden shield, its cracks thickly smeared with clay. Together with Sergei, they gripped the edges and, with incredible effort, moved the heavy covering.
A stench so concentrated assaulted their nostrils that the men recoiled and covered their mouths. It was the smell of hell. When the initial wave of nausea subsided, Viktor held his breath and peered inside. At first, he saw nothing but black, viscous mud on the floor. But then, as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he noticed movement in the far corner.
There crouched something that only vaguely resembled a human. It was completely naked, covered with a crust of dirt and dried blood. Beneath the matted, filthy hair on a skull covered with gray skin, two enormous eyes stared back, filled with inhuman horror. The creature stirred and let out a low, hoarse groan that sounded more like the creaking of an unlubricated door.
There was nothing human about this groaning, but Viktor suddenly understood. He turned to his friends, who were frozen in horror, to the older man who was struggling and howling in their hands. His face contorted into a grimace of understanding and disgust.
“It’s her,” he whispered in a shaky voice. “Guys, it’s Nastya.”
The creature in the pit emitted another eerie, plaintive cry. It was still alive. The world exploded in a cacophony of screams. The screams of the women, the curses of the men, the terrified cries of the children. The entire village seemed to have gathered in Afanasi Gromov’s backyard to witness the “resurrection from the dead.” The sight that greeted them was not for the faint of heart.
Two men, pale, their faces contorted with horror and disgust, pulled something from a black hole in the ground, wrapped in an old, foul-smelling tarpaulin. A third man held down the writhing and cursing older man, Gromov. As the tarpaulin was spread out on the grass, the crowd gasped and shrank back. Nastya, what was left of her, a living skeleton covered in scabs, wounds, and dirt.
Her limbs were twisted at unnatural angles, and her eyes, huge and bottomless like those of a hunted animal, darted wildly back and forth, unable to focus on human faces or the sunlight she hadn’t seen in three months. She didn’t cry or scream. She only emitted a low, vibrating sound from her throat that made the blood run cold in the veins of everyone present.
At that moment, Svetlana pushed her way through the crowd, shoving her neighbors aside. She had run from her house, drawn by the noise, without knowing what awaited her. When she saw the creature lying on the ground and recognized who it was, she froze. Her face went completely pale for a moment, like stone. Then a scream burst from her chest.
An inhuman, drawn-out howl, like that of a wounded wolf, full of grief, horror, and despair, silenced even the birds. She sank to her knees beside her daughter, but dared not touch her, for fear of breaking that fragile, mangled little body. Her world collapsed in an instant. The father she had adored had turned out to be a monster, and her daughter, whom she had believed to be dead, had died a painful death just steps from home all along.
The ambulance and police from Irbit arrived surprisingly quickly. When the local policeman, Anisimov, saw Nastya and the distraught Gromov, he realized the terrible mistake he had made. He personally handcuffed the older man. Afanasi offered no further resistance. He seemed exhausted, and there was a strange, eerie calm in his mad eyes. As he was placed in the car, he turned to the crowd and spoke softly but clearly, with chilling conviction, of his righteousness.
“You fools,” he said, looking at the weeping Svetlana. “You ungrateful people. I saved her soul, freed her from the devil. He was almost gone. I had worn him down with hunger and darkness. And you, you all interfered. You ruined her, not me. Now the demon will return and devour her soul, and you will be responsible.”
These words sent a shiver down people’s spines. It wasn’t the remorse of a criminal, it was the sermon of a fanatic. He believed until the very end that he was doing good. Meanwhile, Nastya was carefully placed on a stretcher and taken to the district hospital. The doctors examined her and were horrified.
They had never seen anything like it, not even in the most modern forensic medicine textbooks. She was in a state of extreme exhaustion, cachexia. At 11 years old, the girl weighed less than 20 kg. Dehydration, vitamin deficiencies, and muscle atrophy were so severe that she couldn’t even move her fingers.
Her entire body was one infected wound, teeming with parasites. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the psychiatrist’s diagnosis: profound depersonalization and catatonic stupor. Unable to bear the monstrous torment, Nastya’s mind shut down and hid in its furthest, darkest corner to feel no more pain or fear.
The story of the girl found in a cesspool immediately caused a sensation. Journalists from across the region, and later from Moscow, flocked to Zaikowo. The village, whose existence was unknown to many, was the focus of attention for several weeks. Reports from the “accident site” were broadcast on major television channels.
Viktor Kuznetsov, who had found Nastya, became a hero. Neighbors who hadn’t noticed anything for three months gave interviews, looking shyly to the side. The monstrous grandfather, Afanasi Gromov, became a symbol of everything dark and wild that rose from the depths in the turbulent 1990s. His house was searched. They found the very same greasy book of spells, bundles of dried herbs, and homemade amulets.
He openly recounted the entire chronology of his treatment to investigators, all the details of his monstrous ritual, without showing a shred of remorse. The investigation revealed that he was sane but suffered from a delusional disorder stemming from religious beliefs. Simply put, he was insane, but in a way that allowed him to be fully aware of his actions.
Meanwhile, Nastya lay dying. Despite the doctors’ best efforts, her body, poisoned by decomposition and a widespread infection, refused to fight. The sepsis, the blood poisoning, could no longer be stopped. Her small heart, exhausted by months of starvation and stress, was working at its limit. She lay on IV drips in a sterile hospital room, but she remained there, at the bottom of her dark grave.
She didn’t react to anything, didn’t even recognize her mother, who sat by her bed for days, whispering words of love and remorse. Sometimes she would begin to moan softly in her sleep at night. Then Svetlana would run out into the hallway, howling softly as she dug her fingernails into the wall. She understood that the rescue had come too late. Her little daughter had been found and brought to light, but they couldn’t bring her back to life.
Anastasia Belousova died a month after giving birth to her second child, without ever regaining consciousness. Doctors attributed her death to organ failure caused by septic shock. Her short life of eleven, cut short by the hand of a loved one in the name of a deranged idea, ended in a hospital bed.
The demon her grandfather had so stubbornly tried to exorcise from her had finally won. Only it wasn’t a mythical demon, but a very real demon of human cruelty, ignorance, and indifference.
