Mikhailovsky Castle

Mikhailovsky Castle stands at the meeting of the Moika and Fontanka rivers in central Saint Petersburg, south of the Summer Garden. It was built in 1797–1801 for Emperor Paul I by the architects Vincenzo Brenna and Vasily Bazhenov. Paul, who distrusted the court and lived in fear of a coup, wanted a fortress rather than a palace: the building was ringed by rivers and specially dug canals, reached only by drawbridges, and named for the Archangel Michael after a legend – which Paul may have encouraged – that the archangel had appeared to a sentry on the spot.

The castle was consecrated on St Michael’s Day in November 1800, and the emperor moved in early in 1801. About forty days later, on the night of 11–12 March 1801 (23–24 March in the modern calendar), a group of dismissed officers led by General Levin von Bennigsen broke into his bedroom, demanded his abdication and killed him. His son, who became Alexander I, was in the building at the time. The imperial family promptly abandoned the castle, which was stripped of many of its treasures and around 1820 handed to the army’s Main Engineering School – hence its other name, the Engineers’ Castle. Fyodor Dostoevsky was among its cadets in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

A legend soon claimed that Paul’s death had been foretold. A holy fool, sometimes identified as Saint Xenia of Petersburg, was said to have warned that he would live as many years as there were letters in the biblical inscription above the castle gate – 47 – and Paul was in his 47th year when he died. Historians note that no record of the prophecy exists before the fact; the coincidence was almost certainly noticed afterwards.

The ghost story is younger than the murder. Rumours of the emperor’s spirit in the castle appear only from the late 1840s, and the senior cadets of the engineering school used it – perhaps even invented it – to terrify newcomers at night. The writer Nikolai Leskov, a sharp observer of the school’s bullying culture, turned the tradition into a story, The Ghost in the Engineers’ Castle, which ends by revealing the ‘ghost’ as human. Since the 1990s the castle has been a branch of the State Russian Museum, and after a long restoration it again shows its original reddish-ochre walls.

The legend describes a pale or glowing figure of the emperor seen at the windows by passers-by and soldiers, and footsteps and other noises in the corridors at night. In the 1980s a group from the Russian Geographical Society’s commission on anomalous phenomena carried out an informal survey of staff in the building, with photographs, magnetic measurements and dowsing.

The former imperial bedroom on the upper floor, later converted into a church of Saints Peter and Paul, and the corridors and windows of that wing. Cadets told the stories in the dormitories at night.

Paul I’s ghost is a staple of Saint Petersburg ghost walks and boat tours. Leskov’s story keeps the cadet legend alive in Russian literature, and the castle’s strange history appears in countless guides to the city’s mysteries.