The Valletta building ‘haunted’ by an English knight

Irina Pereverzeva sat on the floor in her office, talking to a man who had been dead for more than 400 years.

“What do you want,” she asked aloud, both in Russian and in desperation. “What is it that you want me to do?”

Pereverzeva was not the first, nor the last, person working in the Russian Centre for Science and Culture who claims to have been pushed over by the ghost of Sir Oliver Starkey. 

The centre is in a building in Merchant Street, Valletta that was once owned by Sir Oliver.

He was an English Knight of St John who took part in the Great Siege of 1565 and was Latin secretary to Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Order of St John and founder of the Maltese capital city.

We don’t know exactly where Sir Oliver died, sometime in the 1580s, but we do know this was his house and, according to Pereverzeva and her staff, he’s still there now.

“I arrived in March 2021 and strange things happened soon after,” says Pereverzeva, who is the centre’s director.

Irina Pereverzeva says strange things began to happen to her after she started working at the Russian Cultural Centre in 2021. Photo: Mario Cacciottolo

“A big piece of plaster suddenly dropped from the ceiling in front of me. Printers and PCs wouldn’t work. Lots of small things went wrong. I believe these were signs but I didn’t realise it then.”

A few months later, Pereverzeva was in her split-level office, which she believes was once part of Sir Oliver’s bedroom.

She stood up from her desk and walked toward the steps. She paused at the bottom, hesitating as she thought about her next task.

Suddenly, she felt a sharp shove and fell onto the steps.

“I knew who had pushed me because, before I came to Malta, the previous director of the centre told me not to be afraid of the building and not to be surprised by anything that might happen there.”

Pereverzeva knew that, even back in the 1990s, there were stories about the building being haunted, which began with testimony from the then-centre director, Elizaveta Zolina.

The museum room opened at the centre.

In an interview with the Times of Malta in 1996, Zolina gave details of the disturbances she and her family experienced when they lived in the building, in two small flats still found on the top floor today.

Zolina said her family had heard strange sounds in the middle of the night of men at a party, with raucous voices speaking in a language they couldn’t understand, and cutlery clinking together.

Valletta at that time was far quieter than today, and the family could never tell where the sound, heard inside their flats as well as outside, was coming from.

They also experienced a presence throughout the building that made them uncomfortable. Doors and windows would slam when there was no wind, and their pets would behave strangely, acting as though someone was present when the family could see no one in the room.

Olga Agafonova says one of her pupils saw an old man, who wasn’t there. Photo: Mario Cacciottolo

Back in Pereverzeva’s office, while still sitting on the steps, she began saying aloud all the things she thought might placate Sir Oliver’s restless spirit.

“I asked him: Do you want me to go back to Russia? But others will come. Do you want me to stop working here? Do you want me to rebuild the centre and restore its history?

“Just when I asked about rebuilding the centre, there was a thump from near my desk.”

Pereverzeva got up from the steps where she’d fallen and found a book that had been sitting in the middle of her desk had somehow slid off and was now lying on the floor.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not – the book had been written by Zolina.

Pereverzeva says she took that as a sign of Sir Oliver’s wishes, so she has subsequently overseen a programme of restoration of the building.

Artist Irina Kuznetsova also claims to have experienced spooky goings on at the building. Photo: Mario Cacciottolo

This includes creating a small museum in one room, which contains artefacts and paintings that tell the story of Russia’s long-standing links with Malta.

Elsewhere in the building, other strange episodes have occurred. Many of the staff say they too have felt a push and fallen over, either when walking up or down one of the centre’s staircases.

Deputy director Olga Agafonova is an opera singer and teacher who experienced an incident during a singing lesson in the main hall about two years ago.

“I was sitting at the piano when the young girl I was teaching suddenly stopped singing.

“I asked what was wrong, and she said she could see an old man in the room, dressed in medieval costume, who was very pale and was staring at her.”

Agafonova said that she did not want to turn around, but when she eventually did, there was nothing there.

“The child said that, as soon as I turned, the man vanished.”

On the day of these interviews, Russian artist Irina Kuznetsova was busy preparing to hold a workshop in the centre.

She explained how, a couple of days before, she had been in the building late in the day.

“All the lights in the building were off apart from the ones on my floor. I began to hear the noise of people downstairs, so I thought it was some of the staff who had come back for some reason.

“After a while, I wondered what was going on with all the noise, so I went downstairs. The ground-floor light had been switched on, but the place was empty. All the staff say no one came back that day.”

Back in the 1990s, Zolina paid for a church mass to be said every three months for the soul of Sir Oliver, who was a Catholic. She said in her interview that things improved immediately thereafter, with “manifestations” still taking place but in a calmer atmosphere.

Pereverzeva does the same thing now, as she sometimes pays for a Russian Orthodox priest to say mass for Sir Oliver’s soul, occasionally in the centre itself.

“We will do it again this year,” says Pereverzeva, making reference to the latest incident of the noise heard downstairs.

“It seems like it’s necessary.”

Mario Cacciottolo is a journalist, researcher and tourist guide who runs Dark Malta Tours