The time? About a hundred and fifty years ago.
The place? A tiny village in a remote corner of Romania.
The sleepwalker? A wood cutter and carpenter named Andrei Cazacu.
Andrei built his small house a short distance from the village on the edge of the forest. He built it entirely of wood: warm in winter and cool in summer. He also built a small shed for his carpentry work. Andrei supplied the villagers with logs for their wood-burning stoves and simple wooden furniture for their homes. In return, they supplied him with bread and milk and butter and other necessities.
Andrei also owned a sturdy little horse called Anton who helped drag the trees that Andrei felled out of the forest. Each December, he would ride Anton twenty odd miles through the snow to a nearby town where there was a Christmas market. There he would sell the wooden nativity figures that he had carved during the long winter evenings. And it was there that he met Alina. Andrei had reached the age when he felt the need for a wife and Alina had reached the age when she felt the need for a husband so their two needs coincided and resulted in an April wedding in the little village church.
Alina was no beauty but she was pleasant-looking and sensible. She not only kept house for Andrei, she also tended a good-sized vegetable garden and cared for their chickens and ducks. There were only two small flies in the ointment of this contented marriage. One was that, as yet, no children had arrived although they lived in hope. The other was Andrei’s sleepwalking.
Now and then, often when the full moon filled their small bedroom with its icy light, Alina would wake to find herself alone in the bed. Then she would lie awake anxiously until Andrei, still sound asleep, climbed back under the covers. Sometimes, she didn’t wake up and only knew that Andrei had been sleepwalking when she made the bed in the morning and found dirt and bits of grass on the mattress. She worried, of course, what might happen to her husband on these midnight walks but so far he had come to no harm.
Then, one midnight, Andrei heard a spine-chilling howl and woke to find himself in a forest clearing wearing only his long johns and flannel vest. For a moment he felt confused. That howl …. surely it had sounded like a wolf? But, of course, there were no longer any wolves in the forest. The last one had been killed when his granddad was a youngster. When he was a little boy, his grandpa had often tried to frighten him with the story of that last wolf hunt. No …. he must have dreamt that howl.
At that moment a cloud that had been covering the moon shifted and the clearing was flooded with cold, eerie light. It slid down the trees, crept across the clearing and fingered a dark mound in the shadows. On closer inspection, the mound turned out to be a dead deer, its throat torn out by some large animal probably a dog. There were plenty of those in the village. Most of the villagers kept at least one dog to protect their homes and their livestock. His beloved trees suddenly didn’t seem so friendly and Andrei shivered. Well, nothing to be done about it now and the early Spring air was chilling his bones so he hurried back to the cottage, his warm bed and warm wife.
The following evening, with Anton’s help, Andrei dragged the dead deer to the village inn where most of the men gathered at the end of the working day.
‘Somebody’s dog has done this,’ said Andrei, ‘so will you all please keep your dogs chained up at night?’
All eyes turned to where Florin the farrier sat alone in his usual dark corner. Florin was a surly character, ill-tempered and friendless and his huge mastiff dog was the same.
‘That means you, too, Florin,’ said Andrei but Florin only grunted.
Vasile, the butcher, skinned the deer and dismembered it and Andrei divided the joints up between himself, Vasile and his closest friends.
And that was the end of it.
Until … young Petar disappeared.
Unbeknownst to his parents, sixteen-year-old Petar had been slipping away to the forest at night to meet pretty young Liliana for a kiss and a cuddle. Then, one morning, his bed was empty. Village gossips were quick to tell his anxious parents what had been going on and they hurried round to Liliana’s home.
Eventually, the girl admitted that, yes, she and Petar had met in the forest the night before. After a final kiss, she had taken the homeward path a little before him to allay suspicion. She had assumed that he would be following a few minutes later.
A search party was quickly assembled and, as dusk was falling , they found the boy – or what was left of him. It was a sight that none of them would ever forget. Not only had Petar’s throat had been torn out but his stomach had also been ripped open. His entrails were spread out on the forest floor. Except for his liver: that was missing.
One member of the search party fainted. Two others threw up. And Petar’s parents would never recover. From then on, they moved around the village like zombies, unsmiling and unspeaking.
The following morning, Florin’s mastiff was discovered with its throat cut.
Of course, Life goes on. It has to. And even the most traumatic occurrence eventually fades into legend.
Or would do, if that were the last of it. However, only two months later something else happened.
Just after midnight on a night of full moon, the church bell rang out loudly, violently. It woke the whole village and the villagers all dragged on clothes and hurried to the church to see who was ringing the bell so frantically. It turned out to be crazy Constantin. No surprise there. Constantin had been dropped on his head as a toddler and his wits had never recovered. He was always imagining things but this time there seemed to be some truth behind his panic. The back of his shirt was ripped and, beneath it, his flesh was scored with four bleeding wounds. As usual, Constantin’s speech was a meaningless mishmash. However, two words kept being repeated: ‘wolf’ and ‘monster’.
That was when the rumours started and the frightened whispers centred round a single word: ‘werewolf’. The whole village seemed to be in a state of paranoia.
‘There’s no such thing as werewolves!’ laughed Andrei. ‘Just old wives’ tales.’
But Alina wasn’t so sure. With another full moon approaching, she was terrified of what Andrei might meet if he should sleepwalk.
Andrei had grown to love Alina deeply and he formed a plan to set her mind at rest. He had a spare dog-chain in his shed and a padlock. He would chain one ankle to the bedpost on the night of full moon and give the key to Alina. There’d be no sleepwalking then for sure.
Alina was delighted with the plan and on the night of the full moon, when the villagers were all bolting their doors and sleeping with their guard dogs inside the house instead of outside, she and Andrei shut the bedroom shutters, something they never normally did. Then she chained Andrei’s right ankle to the bedpost, locked the padlock and hid the key between her generous bosoms. Side by side, they fell into contented sleep.
Until midnight.
That was when Andrei woke with a start. The sliver of moonlight creeping in between the shutters was not enough to dispel the thick darkness of the room. He realised that he needed to empty his bladder and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Except that he couldn’t, because one leg was firmly chained to the bedpost.
Drat! He would have to wake Alina and get the padlock key. He stretched across the bed to wake her gently but instead of his wife’s familiar, warm hand, all he felt was rough fur and claws. Instead of gentle snoring, he heard blood-curdling snarls. He tore desperately and hopelessly at the chain around his ankle.
And so ends the sleepwalking of Andrei Cazacu. Of course, you might want to know whether the village managed to prevail against the werewolf but if you want that story, you’ll have to write it yourself.
Dinah Kennedy
September 2025