Home · Legends & Customs · Stafii – meaning: the Romanian word for the ghosts of the Carpathians
What does “Stafii” mean? The word is Romanian, ancient, and the namesake of the second volume of the Carpathian Chronicles.
“Stafii” is not an invented title. In Romanian it is an everyday and deeply unsettling word: the singular is stafie, the plural stafii — ghosts, specters, the dead who do not stay where they were laid.
In Romanian dictionaries stafie sits beside fantomă (phantom) and moroi. It means the apparition of a dead person — less the blood-soaked undead of films than the thing that returns and stays: a voice, a shadow at the window, a knock with no one behind it.
At the foot of the Carpathians such names are never spoken aloud — to name a ghost is to call it. That comes with a rule: if a voice calls you by night, do not answer. The stafii are kin to the strigoi and moroi, the dead who do not rest. This is exactly what the Carpathian Chronicles are about.
Romanian ghost belief was recorded early by ethnographers: as early as 1888, the Scottish author Emily Gerard devoted an entire chapter to Transylvania's beliefs about the dead and ghosts in her book The Land Beyond the Forest. The folklorist Heinrich von Wlislocki gathered further accounts in 1896, in his essay "Quälgeister im Volksglauben der Rumänen" (published in the journal Am Ur-Quell), of restless dead said to appear to the living at night. These early records show: the stafii are no invention of the book – they belong to a belief system documented for over 130 years.
Stafii is the plural of stafie and means ghosts, spirits — the dead who don't stay where they were laid. It's an everyday and, at the same time, unsettling Romanian word.
The stafii are less the bloodthirsty undead of film and more what returns and stays — a voice, a shadow at the window, a knock with no one behind it.
Because it's believed that naming a ghost calls it — which is also behind the rule: if a voice calls you at night, don't answer.
They're kin — all three are the dead who don't rest. That's exactly what the Carpathian Chronicles are about.
The undead of the Carpathians — the root of the vampire myth.
The superstition of never answering a voice at night.
Three knocks after midnight — and why you don't open.
Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles tell exactly these kinds of stories — based on true events. The Village of the Hanged and Stafii are out in seven languages.
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