Mist hangs over a forest-lined lake near Eggedal, Norway, in autumn 2025.
Photo: Barnabas Davoti.
In a Norwegian story recorded in 1909, Sterke Nils watched a man struggle up through the waters of Svartetjørn in Telemark. The stranger carried a boundary stone. Each time he raised it toward the surface, he sank again, crying out as he disappeared.
Rikard Berge recorded the account from Gunnar Godlid in Kviteseid, and it survives in the Norwegian Folklore Collection at the University of Oslo.
A boundary crossed
In Norwegian folk belief, a deildegast was the revenant of someone who had unlawfully moved or removed a stone marking the boundary between properties. According to University of Oslo folklorist Ane Ohrvik, such an offender might be condemned after death to restore the stone. The name derives from an Old Norse word for division or boundary marker. The work could continue until another person helped put the stone back where it belonged; in some variants, the punishment otherwise lasted until Judgment Day. These legends were especially common in parts of western and southern Norway, including Telemark, where traditions of individual farm ownership gave boundaries considerable importance.
Altering a boundary could mean claiming ground that belonged to a neighbour. In accounts of the wider deildegast tradition, people sometimes heard laughter as the ghost struggled with a stone and screams when it slipped. Godlid's version contains the repeated effort and terrible cry, but names no injured neighbour, says nothing of how the stone came to be in Svartetjørn, and offers no successful restitution.
The child beneath the stairs
In 1934, Gunda Carlsson collected a story in Södra Åsarp, Västergötland, about a shoemaker working late after the household had gone to bed. A small figure covered in white appeared and danced around his light, singing that the tub confining it was cramped and its legs were too long. The shoemaker protested that the movement threatened the flame he needed for his work.
The apparition was a myling, the revenant of a child killed and concealed in Swedish folklore. In Carlsson's version, a servant woman had placed her baby in a butter tub beneath a neighbour's kitchen stairs. The child told the shoemaker where to find the body and demanded that its mother be punished. It also gave him an elaborate way to identify her: fry pork, splash out a little of the fat, and watch for a woman in a checked headscarf with red marks on her face. The following afternoon a woman arrived with those identifying details. The shoemaker questioned her and brought her to watch as the tub containing the child's body was recovered. In the account, she confessed and was punished.
The child returns as a witness to a crime that the living have concealed. The story also belongs to a body of folklore shaped by the social penalties attached to unmarried motherhood. In a 2024 essay for Sweden's Institute for Language and Folklore, Edvina Lindberg drew on collected material to describe how women who gave birth outside marriage could face severe shame and exclusion. Her examination used responses to folklorist Åke Campbell's 1931 questionnaire about revenants and mylings, collected from various parts of Sweden.
Other myling variants link a dead child's unrest to the absence of baptism or burial in consecrated ground. Some end with the child receiving a name; others describe revenge. Carlsson's shoemaker account ends with the discovery of the body and the woman's punishment; it supplies no account of the child's burial or subsequent peace.
The Swedish folk-memory archives also preserve other kinds of gengångare, or returning dead. Some were associated with violent death or improper burial; in others, missing possessions or unfinished obligations explained why the dead could not rest. These collections record what people told collectors rather than independently verified hauntings.
Two children and a missing silver box
In 1946, Ingrid Norin, born in 1868 in Borgsjö parish in Medelpad, recounted a story about two children in a priest's household. When alive, they had played with their mother's wedding gifts, a silver box and a flowered handkerchief. After their deaths the objects could not be found, and suspicion fell on Kerstin, a servant who denied taking them. The archive gives no date for the events in the legend.
The children appeared on a road in broad daylight to a passerby. They told him that they had hidden the gifts in the cellar wall. He relayed their message to the priest, who accompanied him to the wall. Together they found the objects where the children said they would be, and the accusation against Kerstin lost its basis. In Norin's telling, the children could finally rest in their graves.
In an early-eleventh-century poem, an Icelandic traveller describes being turned away from a farmhouse on a journey towards Sweden.