The house of zombie dolls: Inside house where bodysnatcher who dug up dead girls lived with their corpses after turning them into horrifying playthings wearing lipstick and knee-length boots.
Once a respected figure in his field, horrific truths began surfacing in 2011 about Anatoly Moskvin, 57, that revealed he was digging up dead females and turning them into dolls.
It was believed that by the end of his two-decade-long span of graverobbing, he had desecrated around 150 in total.
Dumped among the mounds of clutter within the home of Moskvin, from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, were 26 mummified bodies of girls and women aged between three and 29.
The scholar-turned-bodysnatcher had unearthed the dead girls and lived with their corpses in his house of horrors after turning them into ghoulish playthings and adorning them with lipstick, makeup, and knee-length boots.
He dug up the bodies of the girls before dragging them back to his home, where he would turn them into showpieces that resembled antique dolls with red lips, blushed cheeks, and brightly coloured, frilly dresses.
Chilling images of his sickening collection show bodies and skeletons in stockings and costumes, with one even dressed to resemble a child’s teddy bear.
Footage later released by cops showed the dead children placed around his house in bizarre outfits, poking out from behind curtains and shoved into gaps in his walls.
Some were found with their faces wrapped in fabric which Moskvin had applied makeup over, and others had their hands concealed in sheets of fabric.
A terrifying image of one of Moskvin’s victims showed a skull covered in a thick layer of wax as the teeth protruded from the dead girls mouth.
He admitted he would stuff the decayed corpses with rags before wrapping their faces with nylon tights, or attach fashion doll’s faces on top of the human ones.
Moskvin would also insert buttons or toy eyes into the girls’ eye sockets so that they could ‘watch cartoons’ with him.
The self-proclaimed ‘necropolyst’ – an expert on cemeteries- had collected photographs and plaques taken off the gravestones, doll-making manuals, and maps of local cemeteries, as well as the original clothes worn by the dead girls from when they were buried.
When police eventually caught Moskvin, they found music boxes and toys wedged into the bodies, so that the dolls could produce sounds for the perverted man when he touched them.
There were also personal belongings and clothing buried inside some of the mummies, and one even had part of her tombstone with her name scrawled on it stuffed inside her body.
