Anatoly Moskvin was reportedly well liked by his neighbors in Nizhny Novgorod, a Russian town about 200 miles from Moscow. Then this shocking discovery was made by his parents when they went to visit him. What his neighbors didn’t know was that Moskvin had populated his home with mummified corpses dressed in women’s clothing for years. Yes, you read that right. Police said Moskvin also compiled up-to-date information about the lives of each girl he had dug up and printed off instructions on a computer for how to produce dolls out of human remains. He said that when he was 12, he came across a funeral procession whose participants forced him to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl. He said he later grew interested in the occult. I get creeped out just looking at his face.
Anatoly Moskvin was a journalist, a historian, and was known as a “genius” in his neighborhood because he could fluently speak 13 different languages.
After his parents came to visit one day, they discovered that Moskvin had been living with 29 mummified corpses dresses up like dolls in his apartment. One was even dressed as a teddy bear. Each one of the corpses was dressed up in women’s clothing. He apparently would dress them up and have parties.
Each girl was between 15 and 26 years old when they died. Their remains dried up before Moskvin could wrap them up in a plastic bag and carry them to his apartment. I wonder how no one ever noticed what he was doing.
Moskvin is said to have visited more than 750 cemeteries when choosing his many wives. He often slept on the graveyard benches when he wasn’t sleeping at home in the coffin he used as a bed.
He even said he spent one night sleeping in a coffin ahead of a deceased person’s funeral. His observations were more than just observations, however.
After police discovered the mummified bodies, they attempted to move one of the bodies and it played music, as if on cue. Inside the chests of many of the dolls, Moskvin had embedded music boxes.
Investigators later found music boxes or toys inside the bodies of the dead girls so that they could produce sounds when Moskvin touched them. There were also personal belongings and clothing inside some of the mummies. One mummy had a piece of her own gravestone with her name scrawled on it inside her body. Another one contained a hospital tag with the date and the cause of the girl’s death. A dried human heart was found inside a third body.
He said he dug up graves of girls because he was lonely. He said he was single and his biggest dream was to have children. Russian adoption agencies wouldn’t let Moskvin adopt a child because he didn’t make enough money. Perhaps that was for the best, judging by the condition of his pack-rat apartment and psychotic obsessions with dead people.
His parents said, “We saw these dolls but we did not suspect there were dead bodies inside. We thought it was his hobby to make such big dolls and did not see anything wrong with it.”
Police originally suspected that the culprits were shady, pseudo-religious cults and were relieved to find an answer to the mystery of disturbed graves over the past few years. I hope all the families were able to lay their loved ones to down rest (again).
In court, Moskvin confessed to 44 counts of abusing graves and dead bodies. He said to the victims’ parents, “You abandoned your girls, I brought them home and warmed them up.”
Check out this creepy video below of police discovering the bodies:
He allegedly told authorities to not bother reburying the girls too deeply, as he will simply unbury them when he is released. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.