Shadows Before Winter: Halloween’s Forgotten Twin in Romania

When autumn arrives in Transylvania, the air grows sharp and metallic, and the forests shed their color until only the stone of the mountains seems alive. Smoke rises from the first hearth fires, curling above tiled roofs and lingering with its sweet scent in the cold. In the West, this is the season of Halloween I am familiar with - a celebration of ghosts, costumes, and death. In Romania, the same chill carries something older. There are no pumpkin lanterns or suburban trick-or-treaters, but there is the same sense that the world has turned. Long before the word “Halloween” existed, these valleys were already keeping vigil for the end of the light and the beginning of the long seasonal night.

A Season When Worlds Overlap

Every ancient culture marked a moment when the year itself seemed to die. For the Celts, that moment was Samhain, when fires were lit to guide spirits home and keep the darkness at bay. In Romania, the same intuition lived on in Noaptea Sfântului Andrei (the Night of Saint Andrew), observed on November 29. Although now wrapped in Christian symbolism, the night preserves unmistakable traces of a pagan past. Villagers once believed that on this night, wolves could speak in human voices, and the dead wandered among the living. Families stayed indoors after sunset, sealing windows and doors with garlic and marking them with the sign of the cross. Fires burned through the night, not to terrify the spirits but to welcome them, to assure them that the household still remembered its own.

The resemblance to Samhain is striking. Both traditions fall at the edge of winter, a liminal season when harvest is done and the earth is laid bare. Both perceive the veil between worlds to grow thin. In each, the dead return not as horror but as kin. The living honor them with food, warmth, and the quiet acknowledgement that all life eventually circles back to the same mystery.

Pagan Memory Beneath Christian Skin

Romania’s older belief systems were never truly erased by the arrival of Christianity; they were absorbed, reinterpreted, and hidden in plain sight. Ethnographers such as Romulus Vulcănescu and Mircea Eliade describe how pre-Christian Dacians saw the year as a living being whose “death” at harvest time demanded ritual farewell. Offerings of bread, honey, and wine were left on the hearth for ancestral spirits, while household fires were kept alive so the visiting souls would not enter a cold home. When Christianity took hold, these gestures quietly survived beneath new names. The bread became blessed loaves for saints’ days, the hearth became the altar, and prayers replaced incantations. But the purpose remained — gratitude, remembrance, and the restoration of balance between the seen and unseen worlds.

Wolves, Spirits, and the Vigil of Protection

Throughout Transylvania, autumn folklore centers on two figures: the wolf and the strigoi, the restless dead. Saint Andrew was said to command the wolves, and his feast day marked the beginning of their wandering season. On this night, every creak of the forest carried an omen. People avoided speaking a wolf’s name aloud or venturing far from home. At the same time, it was believed that the strigoi roamed freely, seeking warmth or reconciliation. Villagers responded not with panic but with ritual order. Garlic and basil were rubbed into woodwork; iron nails were placed discreetly in doorframes; wheat and salt were sprinkled in corners so that spirits would pause to count the grains until daylight returned. These small actions expressed the same truth as the bonfires of Samhain: that the living must take care to maintain peace when the world grows porous.

Echoes Beneath the Modern Mask

Today, Halloween in Romania is a cheerful blending of traditions, with school parades, carved pumpkins, and themed parties in Brașov and Cluj. Yet beneath the modern decorations runs an older current of reverence. The fascination with ghosts, the urge to light candles, and the comfort of sharing fears around the table, are all familiar notes in the country’s older symphony. Even now, many families in rural areas place candles on windowsills or in cemeteries at the end of October, believing that the flames help the souls find their way. These gestures may not be labeled “Halloween,” but they spring from the same instinct: to mark the threshold between worlds with light, warmth, and care.

The Shared Hearth Between Worlds

What Western culture calls Halloween and Romania calls Saint Andrew’s Night are, at their heart, twin reflections of the same ancient idea — that life and death coexist at the same fire. Halloween dresses that truth in masks and laughter; Romanian tradition clothes it in prayer and garlic and soft candlelight. Both remind us that fear and reverence are siblings, and that the hearth, whether literal or symbolic, remains our oldest place of unity.

So when October darkens and the wolves begin to howl beyond the mountains, Romania remembers the old rhythm of farewell and return, the pulse of the earth slowing for winter, and the quiet understanding that the living and the dead still keep company at the same flame.

Sources

Vulcănescu, Romulus. Mitologie Română. București: Editura Academiei, 1987.

Eliade, Mircea. De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han. Humanitas, 1995.

Marian, Simion Florea. Sărbătorile la români. Iași, 1898.

Oișteanu, Andrei. Myth and Magic in Romanian Traditional Culture. Polirom, 2004.

“Ziua Sfântului Andrei în folclorul românesc.” Hotel Ambient Blog.

“Romania’s Saint Andrew: The Real Halloween.” Romania Private Tours.