Chasidic lore tells that the spirits of the Maggid of Mezeritch and the Baal Shem Tov came to visit Rabbi Shneur Zalman in prison. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn is reputed to have once visited the cell (when he was in Saint Petersburg in the summer of 1911), and when he returned, his father, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth Chabad Rebbe, asked him if the cell had enough room for three people, which implies that Rabbi Sholom Dovber believed that they had appeared as souls in bodies.