The Devil Rides at Night

Collected in January 2025

In the shadowed hills of Banat, sometime in the 1950s, my grandfather set off toward the fair in Sânnicolau Mare with nothing but his horse-drawn cart and the quiet confidence of a man who'd done this many times before.

He never came back.

That night, my grandmother waited. The hours passed. The wind picked up. She asked every neighbor who’d gone to the fair-yes, they had seen him. But then? Nothing. Silence.

Just before dawn, he appeared. On foot. Pale. Shaken. Speechless.

He didn’t say a word; he couldn’t. Instead, he scribbled a note telling my great-uncle to go retrieve the cart and horses from a place nearly three kilometers away. And then, slowly, piece by piece, the truth began to emerge.

He had stopped by another village after the fair to look at livestock. On his way home, darkness fell thick around him. Then the horses stopped-dead in their tracks. He stepped down to see what was wrong.

That’s when it happened.

Something climbed onto his back.

Not someone. Something.

An unseen force gripped his shoulders, heavy and cold. And then, a voice-low and unearthly-breathed into his ear:
"Carry me."

He tried to shake it off. He fought. He prayed. But it clung to him like a shadow from the grave.

For over two kilometers, he walked with that burden. Step after step, through dirt roads and whispering fields, until he reached the outskirts of the village cemetery.

And just like that-it vanished.

There was no one there. Just the night.

He searched the darkness. Nothing. No footprints. No face. No sound.

This story isn’t one of drunken tales or exaggerated folklore. My grandparents never drank. At the time, my grandfather was strong, sharp, and just over 30 years old. He died in 1956 at age 36, a body broken by war-but some say… maybe not only by that.

My grandmother told me this story with a voice that never forgot. Her brother confirmed what he could. And now, I pass it on to you.

Because in Transylvania,
some burdens are not just physical.
Some travelers don’t come back the same.

🦇 Tales like this are part of why Transylvania Forever exists—to honor the unseen, the mysterious, and the stories that still walk among us.

📖 This story is part of the "Transylvanian Shadows" series — true encounters from local folklore that will be published in upcoming volumes this summer