Home · Legends & Customs · Whoever answers is lost – the superstition of the voices at night
A superstition from the Carpathians — and the rule that decides life and loss in Stafii.
In the Carpathians there is a rule children learn early and adults never forget: if a voice calls your name at night, do not turn around and do not answer.
Whoever hears their name at night with no one behind it is hearing — so the belief goes — not people but the voices of the dead. To turn or to answer is to accept their visit. And a visit once accepted cannot be undone.
In folk belief a name is not a label but a handle: to speak it is to hold power over the one called. That is why the stafii call by name — and why the word for the undead, strigoi, is kin to a striga: to call, to cry out. In Stafii, Florica waits forty years for a voice she once answered. Read more in the Carpathian Chronicles.
The rule not to answer a calling voice at night does not stand alone. It is closely related to belief in the Iele – female spirit-beings of Romanian folklore, still described today by informants from Romania in academic folklore archives (among them the University of Southern California's Digital Folklore Archive): whoever follows their call or song is said to lose their mind or fall ill. The same basic rule – do not react, do not answer, do not look – recurs throughout the earliest ethnographic collections of Romanian folk belief, usually in the same breath as the strigoi, who are likewise said to call their victims by name.
If a voice calls your name at night, you're not supposed to turn around or answer — whoever reacts, folk belief holds, accepts a visit from the dead, and an accepted visit can't be taken back.
In folk belief, a name isn't seen as a label but as a hold — whoever speaks it has power over the one being called.
Yes — strigoi is related to a striga (to call, to scream), because the stafii call their victims by name.
In “Stafii,” the character Florica waits forty years for a voice she once answered.
Three knocks after midnight — and why you don't open.
Why you had better stay in bed at 3 a.m.
The undead of the Carpathians — the root of the vampire myth.
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.
Subscribing to the newsletter comes with the free PDF “Thirteen True Customs of the Carpathians”.