Knocking at the Sauna Door and a Locked Outhouse at a Dacha near Konakovo

I guess I'll tell my story too… Unlike most of the local fucking amazing ones, it didn't happen in some distant childhood, when a child's imagination turns any fart in the dark into an invasion of demons from hell, but 4 years ago and it still hasn't ended, everyone involved is quite grown-up and level-headed people.

It happened (and is still happening) at our dacha, in one of the gardening associations on the Volga, not far from Konakovo. That summer we built a sauna on our plot (a solid one — with a recreation room, a shower, and a utility block with a separate entrance).

I should mention that we put it at the far end of the plot, right on the border with the neighbor's, and that border is pretty conditional — there's no fence between us, we're separated only by a small drainage ditch, the neighbor's shed, their little bathhouse, and some taller greenery so we don't get in each other's faces. By the way, a husband and wife live there — the guy is totally uninteresting and unsociable, and I've never heard anything from him except "hello", and as for the wife — she sometimes chats with our mom about dacha stuff, but nothing more (and there's something pleasant to look at while having a smoke, right from the sauna porch, when she walks around her plot in a swimsuit in the heat, but that's beside the point)

Now to the story itself. That evening we were at the dacha as a family — me, my brother, and our parents. I can't say the exact time, but it was a bit past midnight and it was completely dark outside. We were all watching something on TV, chatting, and mom decided to take a shower before bed, took a towel, pajamas, and went to the sauna. But she didn't get to wash in peace. About 10 minutes later she came back home and started interrogating us about which of us was Mr. Joker who decided it would be very funny to knock on the door from outside while she was about to wash. I should note that the whole time mom was gone, the three of us were in one room and didn't go anywhere. By the laws of the genre I should say we all shit bricks from the mysterious knock, but nothing like that — everyone except mom didn't take it seriously and preferred to explain it with dad's banal "you imagined it", a few suggestions that it was a branch knocking, a knock from the neighbor's shed, or my sparkling improvisation that "well it's obvious — it was the bannik who decided to scare you, because you shouldn't go into his domain after midnight, the bathhouse is the time of unclean spirits — you should know that". Mom, however, wasn't satisfied with any of these options, because according to her it was a clear and measured knock of knuckles on metal (the entrance door from outside is metal) — not the touch of plants swaying in the wind, not noise from the neighbors, but a distinct knock on the door, which was literally a meter away from her at that moment. After listening to my horror story about the bannik, which dad and brother were already happily amplifying, mom said we were idiots and, suddenly, decided it was the neighbor who decided to play such a stupid joke. Our arguments that this was a crazy assumption, what the hell neighbor, if we're not on those terms for it to be an appropriate joke, that the neighbors' lights were already off, meaning they were asleep, that, basically, it's simply impossible to silently approach the sauna, silently climb the porch, knock, and then disappear just as silently like Splinter Cell — mom didn't take any of that into account. She had no doubts that the knock on the door happened (and still doesn't), and if it wasn't us, then only the neighbor remains. Mom is a doctor and the need for a rational explanation is mandatory for her. Later she even told this story to the neighbor woman and carefully asked if her husband could have joked like that, and got the answer that definitely not, it couldn't even have crossed his mind. In the end it turned out that my version with the prankster bannik became our local dacha meme and, suddenly, the most logical explanation of what happened.

But that wasn't the end, the communication with the bannik had a continuation. Again the story happened to mom. At the dacha she almost always gets up very early (at five or six in the morning) and one such morning, Mom, having woken up, went to the toilet (which at that time was still outside, right next to the newly built sauna). And everything, according to mom's story, was as usual, but right up to the moment when she was about to leave the outhouse — it turned out she was locked in, and the door was closed from outside with a hook. No knocks or any sounds this time, except chirping birds and bugs flying in the background, not even the sound of the hook closing… Mom got seriously scared then and got out far from immediately, she had no phone with her, shouting was inconvenient and stupid, in the end she found some little chip and used it to pick the hook through the crack between the door and the frame. I have a quite logical explanation for this episode, but I'll leave you, anons, room for imagination. And it's simply impossible not to tease mom, so my brother and I again blamed it all on the bannik.