We have often searched for a connection with the dead. Our unwillingness to accept death, the end of all things, is a defensive measure of our minds to prevent our conscious selves from thinking too hard about the inevitable end.
This leads to stress and worry, and some people alleviate that through seances, communicating with spirits to prove that there is a world after and there is life after death.
Some people go too far. The practices of communing with the dead are as ancient as our perception of death.
There are many ways that people choose to do it, and some are flat out wrong on every level. Not just criminal or moral, but wrong in a spiritual sense.
Anatoly Moskvin believed that what he was doing was part of this process, to communicate with the dead’s spirits and give them help from the world of the living.
10 /10 Bright Youth
Anatoly Moskvin was reportedly an avid learner in school. After college at Moscow State University, he led a prodigious career as a researcher with a particular focus.
His focus was on Celtic practices of burial rites and their language, which he helped push forward as a field of study.
He had a massive quantity of books on the subject and helped create academic journal entries regarding his findings. On the surface, some suspected that he was a reclusive genius, choosing to study rather than pursue a social life.
9 /10 Dark Future
When Anatoly was just a child, a schoolboy, he and his friends would hang out in the local cemetery.
It was there that he confessed his fascination with death, and the dead began as he was ushered into a funeral procession for a recently dead 11-year-old girl.
He was dared by his friends and then forced by an adult out of posterity to kiss the dead girl.
He said he was held down and had to kiss her, noted the wax-like quality of her skin from the makeup, and never forgot or recovered from the incident. From then on, his obsession led to strange actions.