Daughters of the Mad Monk. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

You probably already know the name Gregory Rasputin. You know his face. He has a long beard,

he's kind of tall, that famous photo of him in black and white has a very intense stare. He looks

very creepy. There's a hand held high in the air. He's got a long, bushy beard. Or maybe you know him

as the culty advisor to the crumbling Romanov Empire with Anastasia and the mysteries around that

family. Or maybe you know him from his strange reputation of being unable or on willing to die.

These are all bound up in the legacy of Gregory Rasputin and are both untrue and very true.

While Rasputin's reputation lives between truth and fiction, larger than life spiritual magnetism

and sinister compulsive villainery, his family legacy is just as strange and infamous in its own

dark way. Today we're talking about Rasputin's two mysterious, somewhat tragic, yet amazing

daughters, Maria and Varvara Rasputin. As a refresher, let's go over a bit about Rasputin's

fucking insane life. Of course, we could do many podcasts just about Rasputin himself,

but I think a lot of it is hard because it's hard to know the difference between fact and fiction,

and a lot of it is bound up in the Romanovs, whom we've talked about extensively in the past.

The House of Special Purpose is one such episode that I'm very proud of and really takes you

to this specific moment in history where Rasputin is very powerful and has a lot of political

and religious reach. Gregory Yaphimovich Rasputin was likely born around January 21st, 1869,

to peasant farmers living in the small Russian village of Pachirov Skoyi, hopefully I'm saying

that correctly. In 1886 Rasputin traveled to Abelak, Russia about 1,700 miles from Moscow,

where he met and married a peasant named Peskovia Dubrovina. Peskovia stayed in Pachirov Skoyi

throughout Rasputin's rise and was massively devoted to her husband until his death.

The two had seven children, the only three survived to adulthood, Dmitri, born in 1895, Maria,

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