According to the documents, Richard's Castle appeared on
Andreevsky Spusk in 1902–1904, and the land, together with the house, belonged to the Kiev contractor Dmitry Orlov. It was on his order that the construction technician A. Krauss erected a building in the English neo-Gothic style. For a family noble nest, a castle with pointed spiers and battlements, a covered gallery-staircase leading to an internal, surprisingly romantic courtyard, was the best fit, but it is curious that the house was originally built as a profitable one (at the beginning of the 20th century, Kyiv experienced a period of rapid urban development : wooden, mostly one-story buildings were demolished, and in their place they built high-rise by those standards and spacious apartments, which the owner then rented out). So Orlov decided to invest in this very profitable business, but fate decreed otherwise. The contractor Orlov, engaged in construction in the Far East, was shot dead in 1911, and after his unexpected death, the house was soon sold.
Immediately after the new owner of the apartment building rented out apartments, chilling rumors spread throughout Kiev that evil spirits had settled in the castle on Andreevsky Descent. The rumors were caused by frightening noises in the chimneys and ventilation pipes, which occurred every time the wind picked up. The inhabitants of Kiev were literally paralyzed with fear. The most resolute threatened to smash the accursed house brick by brick, thus destroying both the ghosts and their terrible voices. Only thanks to the intervention of one outstanding personality, as the Kiev legend says, in this story there was a salvific turning point for everyone. One of the tenants of the house number 15 was a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, the famous historian Stepan Timofeevich Golubev. It is to him that the legend ascribes the role of a daredevil-savior. Rumor has it that one day, utterly tired of the mournful howl in the pipes, Golubev put his hand into the chimney ... and there was an eggshell! It was she who was the cause of sounds unpleasant for hearing: air passed through small holes in the shell, and the shell itself played the role of a resonator. How she got into the pipe, one can only guess. Most likely, workers planted it there, who were pissed off by the contractor ...
With the establishment of Soviet power, the house was nationalized, and its comfortable apartments were rebuilt into crowded communal apartments. When the writer Viktor Nekrasov was in Kyiv (somewhere in the late 60s), Richard's Castle, like the House of Turbins, attracted Kiev bohemia like a magnet. After all, among other things, behind the house there was an exit to one of the steep hills framing Andreevsky Descent - Zamkovaya, and from there an amazing view of Podil opened, and further, with a panorama of the entire Left Bank.
