Alyoshenka

Tamara Prosvirina found it during a storm, buried under shale near a grave. It was small and it was alive. She brought it home and looked after it as she would a baby, and she gave it a child's name, Alyoshenka. Four other people say they saw the creature while she had it. When Prosvirina was taken to hospital there was nobody to feed it. It starved and the body dried out. What was left was mummified, and it is the mummified body rather than the living creature that anyone examined.

What is on the record

This case rests on one telling from one channel and one video. The archive resolves five claimants: Prosvirina, Tamara Nikolayevna, Slavik, Nina Glazarina and El Galitskova. The record is candid about a weakness at its centre. The four people who saw the creature gave descriptions that contradict one another, which is what you would expect either from an unfamiliar object glimpsed briefly or from a story growing in the retelling. The archive cannot separate those.

A forensic pathologist is reported to have examined the remains and concluded they were not human. That is a claim in the telling. The archive holds no report, no photographs it can vouch for, no laboratory record. There is no document of any class in this file. And the remains themselves are gone. They were handed to an occult group and lost, which closes off the one route by which any of this could have been settled.

The archive should not go further than that. It has no independent examination and no counter-analysis on file, so nothing here establishes what the body was, and nothing here rules out an ordinary and sad explanation.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 on the number of people the account names, though every one of them reaches the archive through a single source. There is no paperwork, so it cannot climb. What the record holds is a woman who cared for something she found in the ground, and a body that no longer exists. What Alyoshenka was is not resolved here.