Macabre video ritual interrupted by the police in Leningrad forests. Living people, taken out of potholes
Illustrative photography – view of the Museum of People's Architecture Vitoslavlitsy, in Veliky Novgorod, Russia, on June 2, 2025. Photo: SOPA Images / Shutterstock Editorial / Profimedia
The law enforcement authorities in the North-Western Region Leningrad in Russia interrupted a symbolic funeral ritual in the forest, forcing the organizers to dig up participants who had been buried alive on Thursday the Russian press, according to The Moscow Times
“The officers found two people wrapped in sheets and buried in graves during an inspection,” a source for the TASS State News Agency said. “The police officers asked the organizers to dig up the living people and to make sure they are in good health,” this source said.
A video recording published by Tass shows the police arriving in the area of a campsite and ordering a person dressed in blue clothes to dig at least two people, who seemed to be fully wrapped in canvas and located in a superficial pit.
According to the Tass agency, 15 people participated in the ritual, in which a person is symbolically buried, as part of a practice of spiritual or psychological transformation. Participants are usually covered with soil after they have been stretched into a superficial pit to simulate the funeral.
The organizers of the symbolic funeral, a man and a woman, were later arrested, wrote Tass, adding that the two could be accused of leading an organization that violates the rights of citizens. This accusation is punished by up to seven years in prison in Russia.
