Three friends spend the night in Bartniki’s abandoned railway station, where old rumours have long outlived the trains. By midnight, the silence starts answering back.
It was after eleven-thirty when Lena, Jakub, and Ola slipped through the rusted gate into the grounds of Bartniki’s old railway station. The place had been dead for years, or so people said. The village elders liked to warn children away with stories of a woman in white, vanishing footsteps, and trains no one else could see. The friends had come for the opposite reason: to laugh at the legend, to spend a night in the dark, and to prove they were not as easily frightened as everyone claimed.
Their headlamps cut narrow, shaking paths through the weeds. Broken glass crunched under their shoes. The platform still stood, though the roof sagged over the ornate pillars like a tired hand. Beyond it, the tracks disappeared into blackness, swallowed by nettles and the dim outline of trees. They climbed into the former waiting room, where peeling paint curled from the walls and old posters clung in ragged strips, and dropped their backpacks beside a row of warped benches.
For a few minutes, they tried to make the night feel ordinary. Snack packets rustled. A water bottle rolled against the floorboards. Jakub grinned and said there was probably more danger from mildew than from ghosts. Lena sat by the window, staring out at the platform, while Ola kept glancing at the doorway as if she expected someone to walk through it.
Then, from somewhere deep along the tracks, came a metallic scrape.
All three froze.
The sound came again, slower this time, as though a chain were being dragged over stone. The air in the waiting room seemed to thin. One of the headlamps flickered, then steadied. Ola swallowed hard. Lena did not take her eyes off the doorway.
The door to the main hall moved with a long, deliberate creak.
It opened by itself, just enough to reveal a strip of darkness inside, and from that darkness something stepped forward without a sound.