Vaimu, the Ghost Street

The short lane between Pikk and Lai streets appears in seventeenth-century records as Spukstrasse, the Ghost Street, and in Estonian it is still Vaimu. Its reputation was taken seriously by the people who lived there: when a town governor proposed renaming it something more respectable, residents protested. Soviet officials later swapped the name for the bland Vana, but the old one came back with independence. What first haunted the lane is no longer known, and that silence has only fed fresh stories of footsteps and shapes in the dark. The narrow street is lit at night now, yet it still feels like a place to hurry through.