The Peter and Paul Fortress sits on Hare Island in the Neva River, a stone structure that Peter the Great commissioned in 1703 as a defense against Swedish attack. Within fifteen years it had found its real purpose: Tsarevich Alexei, the tsar’s own son, was tortured to death inside the Trubetskoy Bastion in 1718, and the fortress never fully returned from that. For the next two centuries it held dissidents, revolutionaries, and political prisoners in cells designed for complete isolation—thick walls, high narrow windows, architectural erasure. In 1775 it received its most famous prisoner: the woman history calls Princess Tarakanova, who had been traveling in Europe claiming to be the legitimate heir to the Russian throne. She had no verified name, no confirmed origin, and the most powerful court in Europe could not establish either after months of interrogation.
She arrived because Catherine the Great sent Admiral Alexei Orlov to Italy to find her, and Orlov used seduction as his method—calling her “my empress,” staging a fake marriage ceremony with a servant dressed as a priest, getting her onto a Russian ship in the port of Livorno under the pretext of showing her the fleet. She was arrested on board. She continued to sign her prison letters “Elizabeth” through every interrogation. She died in her cell in December 1775; the cause remains uncertain. Orlov retired from public life shortly afterward and, by contemporary accounts, was never entirely himself again.
The ghost reported near the Trubetskoy Bastion is a woman in period dress standing close to the fortress wall on rainy evenings. One witness described his young son running ahead and returning to say a woman was crying near the wall. When the father walked toward her, she disappeared into the stone. She was a person who spent her final months insisting on being heard by a court that had decided she did not exist. The wall has not changed. Whatever pressure she exerted against it is still there.
Story Source: www.saint-petersburg.com
Address: Petropavlovskaya Krepost, 3, St. Petersburg, Russia 197046
Accessibility Rating: Open to All — Freely accessible to the public with no advance requirement. Includes hotels, restaurants, bars, and public historic sites where visitors may walk in without prior booking.
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What Others Have Experienced
A visitor named Maxim K. said that while walking around the fortress with his sons late one autumn evening, his youngest ran back saying a woman was crying nearby, and when Maxim approached he saw a figure in old-fashioned dress sobbing by the wall before it simply vanished into the stone as he got close.
— from Ghosts of the Peter and Paul Fortress, LiveJournal (Maxim K.)
In the early Soviet years, members of a local ‘League of the Godless’ tried to catch what they assumed were superstitious troublemakers after reports spread of five pale figures in white robes walking the fortress grounds at night, said to be the five Decembrist rebels hanged there in 1826, but the investigators only ever heard footsteps and sighs and never found anyone there.
— from Ghosts of the Peter and Paul Fortress, LiveJournal
A visitor named GIPARioDeJaneiro said something was telling her not to go inside the fortress that day and she couldn’t explain why, but she went in anyway to pay her respects at the Romanov tombs after reading other travelers’ comments about the place.
— from TripAdvisor
