Urban legends.
...In the morning, of course, I told the men everything. Well, someone laughed, and someone believed. We went to an old man's hut (he must have been about a hundred years old). And he's lying on the Russian stove, not climbing down. When they told him about the night incident, the old man then said: they say, I was still a boy, so I saw this old man with a beard to the waist between the convicts...