The Daily Dispatch: April 21, 1864., [Electronic resource]

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A human sacrifice.

--A strange affair is related in the Russian journals: "At Moscow, the occupiers of a vast house at the corner of Great West street, were awakened by the glare and crackling of a fire, and on getting up found that a large pile of fuel, consisting of logs of fir trees, which had been collected in the courtyard, was in flames. The conflagration was extinguished as quickly as possible. On examining the remains of the fire the calcined bones of a woman were found, and it turned out that a widow, named Theresa T--,about forty years of age, who had lived in the house had disappeared. Nothing could be beard of this woman, and as she had repeatedly declared that in these times the sacrifice of human victims was necessary to appease the wrath of God against sinners, the conclusion was come to that she had lighted up the fire and placed herself in the midst of it to be consumed. In the Russian empire, the Moscow journals state, self crimination from motives of religious fanaticism, is not rare. In the provinces of Clanetz, for example, in the course of one year, no fewer than fifteen, men and women, burnt themselves to death in the belief that they were performing an act pleasing to God."