Above the Top Floor

John Bogle (0:02)

Astonishing Legends Network The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Deadletter Office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests.

Forrest Burgess (0:18)

Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends Astonishing Legends When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone, but trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends, and now it's time for our fellow Legenders to hear them too.

Join us weekly in Blanket Forteana as we dig through your intriguing messages to the Astonishing Legends Dead Letter Office.

John Bogle (1:11)

Tonight's episode, Above the Top Floor.

Forrest Burgess (1:16)

Tonight we're headed to Transylvania in the 1990s to a big university town in the northwest of Romania a few years after the Revolution.

Scott Philbrook (1:24)

That's Cluj-Napoca, the biggest city in Transylvania. Now, for most of its history, it's answered to three names, believe it or not. It's Cluj in Romanian, Colosvar in Hungarian, and Klausenborg in German. The Napoca half only went on in 1974 when the Communist government added the old Roman name for the place.

Forrest Burgess (1:43)

Ah, there you go. And how appropriate for October that we're talking about Transylvania.

Scott Philbrook (1:49)

Indeed.

Forrest Burgess (1:49)

But also, 1974 is about the time when Ceaușescu's building program got going.

Scott Philbrook (1:56)

Yeah, they called it systematization. It ran from 1974 until he fell in 89

The plan was to knock down old towns and old neighborhoods and move people into big concrete apartment blocks. Now, in Bucharest, they cleared more than 40,000 people out for his palace, a lot of them with little or no warning. Cluj got its share of those blocks too, and by the 90s, they were full of families, and that's when tonight's story takes place.

Forrest Burgess (2:24)

Yeah, the Height of Brutalist Architecture Movement.

Scott Philbrook (2:27)

Yes.

Forrest Burgess (2:28)

How lovely. Well, our listener grew up in one of them when she was about six. She's been hanging out in our Facebook group for a while now, so she told us we could use her first name.

Scott Philbrook (2:37)

That's right. So Nadina sent this one in to the Dead Letter Office just a few months ago. Forrest, take it away.

Forrest Burgess (2:48)

Hi, Scott and Forrest. My story takes place when I was about six years old, living still in my native country of Romania. Ironically enough, I lived in Transylvania, and overlooking our city is the infamous Hoia Baciu Forest. So lots of lore with those two things alone. This happened with my sister, who would have been around 10 at the time, and our shared best friend who would have been eight. The three of us were inseparable, and we had the kind of childhood that's known to be driven by free-range parenting, meaning that we were able to run around and traverse our block or neighborhood. A little aside, folks, that's B-L-O-C for those of you unfamiliar. But we were allowed to play freely, all in the block, all day long, as long as we stayed within some loose parameters our parents gave us, and also if we came in as soon as we heard our mom yell for us from our apartment's kitchen window. Basically, a typical 90s childhood in Eastern Europe. The block was comprised of classic Soviet style buildings arranged in a four square pattern that overlooked a joint park, parking lot and trash disposal area. In the afternoons after school, when our parents were still working, we would be watched by an elderly neighbor who our parents hired as a nanny. She was probably in her 70s and was Hungarian, and overall a nice enough lady who took us for walks in our block's piazza area, which was essentially just an area of outdoor shopping stalls where people grab their groceries and other little goods. Our nanny's friend lived in a tall building overlooking the piazza, so she often forced us to visit the friend during our walks and shops when we were there. We hated doing this because the two women would just sit in the woman's living room talking endlessly while us kids had nothing to do, but peruse the woman's glass cabinets that had her collectible tiny figurines that she never let us touch.

On this day, we brought our best friend with us to the piazza. When we went for the usual visit to our nanny's friend's apartment, my sister asked if we could please go play around the building so we didn't just have to sit in the living room with them. Our nanny was less free-range than our parents, and so she didn't let us go outside in the piazza, but she agreed to let us run around the inside of the building. For context, these old Soviet buildings rarely, if ever, had elevators, and the stairwells were open to the middle of the building, like foyer style, rather than hidden stairwells like we have in today's buildings. This meant that if you were standing in the lobby, you could look up the stairs and see all the way up to the top. This also made you able to hear and see every tenant coming and going from their apartment as well when you were using the stairs or sitting in the lobby. This was fun for children because we could run up and down and scream to the bottom, hearing our echoes, or just generally bother people by knocking on their doors and running to a different floor. Anyway, we began running around the stairs. We were really rambunctious kids, so we always wanted to explore every inch of a new place. My sister immediately decided we go all the way to the top of the building to see what's up there. Maybe a door to a roof, she said. We go up, and we reach a floor where the residential units stop, and a smaller, more hidden stairwell went up to just one large, unopened door. It was a small staircase closed now on both sides, but it still had no door to it, meaning that it was open to the top residential floor, and still open like the main stairwell, if this makes sense.