As the sun begins to set over Dubrovnik and the heat of the day slowly starts to dissipate, the mysterious and the ghostly are coming out to play.

Marija Milovac leads her guests through the city, down narrow staircases to hidden courtyards.

She is taking this group on an unusual walking tour of Croatia’s famed medieval city.

A native of Dubrovnik, Milovac is proud of its stunning architecture and rich history, including as a key trade port in the Adriatic Sea in medieval times.

But the history graduate-turned-tour guide offers her guests a different perspective of the city, one rooted in local folklore and full of ghosts, tragic love, crimes, and cruel punishments.

Dressed in black and carrying a lantern, Milovac takes her guests beyond the city’s ancient walled Old Town to cemeteries and crumbling residences of local nobility of yore.

“There is also this other side (of Dubrovnik) that is hidden, that you cannot find easily in the guide books that you buy at our souvenir stores, there is more to tell and that is what I like to focus on, on the dark history and the folklore,” Milovac says, explaining what motivated her to launch her Haunted Dubrovnik tours.

She shares the stories of people tortured for refusing to quarantine as the Black Death ravaged the city in the 14th century, of historic witch trials, forbidden loves that ended in suicide, prison escapes, torture and various folk tales of ghosts haunting the city that have been shared across generations of its residents.

Then there are the traditional tales of the undead.

"In the 18th century, the peasants would gather during the night, they would visit graveyards and open graves of suspected corpses and they would impale them with blackthorn or blackthorn stakes. They would cut below the knee it was believed that when they cut the veins that they couldn't be raised from the dead. The vampires in the folklore here are not beautiful and elegant like the vampires from the movies, but are more ugly to the sight. Here it's believed that the vampires are bloated skin, bloated by the devil himself," she says.

She believes that these stories are “very important” even though they sometimes “do not speak about real events”.

"I believe that they tell about our ancestors and about their life, their state of mind, how they spent their evenings around a cozy fire. They would gather after long, hardworking days and they would share stories and sometimes the stories were the same that I am trying to tell to my guests,” she explains.

Since she launched her tours nearly a decade ago, they have proven to be extremely popular, especially in the summer when Dubrovnik attracts huge crowds of tourists.

They appeal to visitors who believe in ghosts, but also others, such as Liz Midget from Canada.

“I was looking for something a little bit unusual, a little bit different and when I saw this, I thought this is what I need to do here in Dubrovnik. So it was perfect,” she says.

Sanjana Singh from the United Kingdom agrees: “It was incredible. She had an interesting array of very unique stories….very insightful and very interesting.”

For those brave enough, after dark is the best time to hear about this ancient city's spooky history.

AP video shot by: Eldar Enric