Russian Graveyard “Explorer” Kept Corpses as Dolls in his Home

You never know where you’re going to find the weirdos. Generally speaking, those with Ed Gein-ish tastes for digging up corpses and decorating their home with them don’t hold PHDs in Celtic Studies and are thought of as well-respected authors and academics. However, such is the case with Russia’s Anatoly Moskvin, who was discovered with the bodies and pieces of bodies from perhaps as many as 29 corpses in his house.

Police found inside his home, among stacks of books and other brick-a-brac, a gruesome and distressingly adorable collection of graveyard remains. Anatoly had many of the all-female corpses mummified, dressed in cutesy, frilly doll dresses, and some even had implanted recording devices. “When we were transferring one of the mummies, it startled us by starting to play the song, ‘Bear enjoys his honey.’ It took us some time to figure out that the mechanism inside reacts to touching,” said one policeman. All the corpses had their faces covered or painted and one even had the head of a stuffed animal.

In an interview with a journalist years back, Anatoly had said he became fascinated with cemeteries as a teenager. “When I was a pioneer in 1979, by pure accident, I took part in an occult ceremony that took place in a cemetery. I have been strongly drawn to these places ever since,” he said, adding that he had visited 752 cemeteries.

Thankfully, he doesn’t appear to have stole bodies from all of them, but according to police, for the past 15 years at least, he had been making late night raids to claim both the bodies, pieces of bodies, and clothing from the bodies of women aged 12 to 30. Along with the ‘dolls’ police found piles of gravestone plaques, bones, skulls and a foot dressed in a lacy stocking.

It hasn’t been made clear yet how the police identified Anatoly; one story has it that his visiting parents found him decorating a doll and turned him in, but apparently the evidence is pretty overwhelming. I mean, even if you were to go with the ‘someone broke into my apartment and put all these here’ defense, police still found his fingerprints and footprints all over the desecrated graves. Anatoly stands to serve from a fine to 3 years in prison for each of the more than a dozen charges currently leveled against him. At least we can be glad he never graduated, the way our own infamous Ed Gein did, to killing to get fresher bodies. That we know of…