I wake up and remember that yesterday, on the way back from the straw museum, we were supposed to have gone to Banffy Castle. But, in a very Eastern European turn of events, it was closed, and instead of updating their website to reflect that, they had parked a Transylvanian grandpa outside in a golf cart to inform visitors of the situation.

Why was it closed? They had used it for a festival, and cleaning up afterwards was taking longer than expected. He said they thought they would be done by the end of the week if we wanted to come back then. We didn’t.

Banffy is known as the Versailles of Transylvania. It was in the possession of a noble family for almost a thousand years, and then it was taken from them during the communist era. In the 2000s, like many other prominent Transylvanians, they managed to petition the Romanian government to hand the property back to them.

It had more or less been abandoned for hundreds of years and had been in disrepair since long before Communism, so that can’t be blamed for all of the family’s troubles with the place.

I was disappointed, but during the car ride home Peti read the history of the place to me, and my disappointment faded. The place seems to have a reputation for being haunted more because of how dilapidated it looks than because of the stories associated with it. They’re all very standard stuff. Visitors have seen the ghosts of soldiers marching through the halls. A noble girl used to sneak out to the stables to kiss a boy who was not of noble birth, and when a stablehand caught them, she stabbed him to death. His ghost now haunts the grounds. Finally, a servant had an affair with one of the noblewomen who lived in the castle, and when her husband found out, he killed the servant in a fit of rage. Like the stablehand and the soldiers, he too is said to haunt the grounds.

I finish the thought and look at the time. It’s late. I’ve been sleeping in again. I roll out of bed, get dressed, and get in the car. We head to the ethnographic museum downtown.

It’s a good exhibit. History tends to focus on the rulers of a place and the big-picture events, and it usually forgets the farmers, but not this place. It’s more interesting to experience than it is to write about, to be honest with you. When you’re there, learning about the different tools they made, seeing the weapons they used for hunting, and discovering how each village had a different cross-stitch pattern in its traditional dress, it’s the most interesting thing in the world. But when you’re trying to tell other people about it, you find yourself saying, “Oh yeah, they wear traditional dresses, and the dresses are different in each village, and they use tools for hunting.”

After visiting the museum, we went to a café owned by members of the Banffy family of Banffy Castle fame, where we ate traditional Hungarian spreads on bruschetta. I knew from an earlier conversation about pig butchering that this is the part of the pig they eat around lunchtime. It’s grilled fat chunks ground into a paste, and it’s a unique flavour. I’m glad I tried it. I could happily go the rest of my life without eating it again. I wouldn’t say no if I were offered it in the future, but I wouldn’t order it myself.

The ethnographic museum we had visited was only one part of the experience, and we drove out to the outskirts of town to see the other part. It’s a reconstructed traditional Székely village, and it has not one, not two, but three churches, along with countless reconstructed farmsteads.

Aside from some fantastic artwork we saw inside one of the wooden churches, it was like the museum, an experience best experienced for yourself, not one that makes for particularly exciting storytelling.

Well, maybe except for one mural inside the church. I recognised him instantly, but the others had no idea who he was, and for good reason. To the untrained eye, the mural that caught my gaze didn’t look out of the ordinary. Just a depiction of a man stuffing his hand into a vase. But I know what that vase used to be.

Each character in a church mural originally represented a virtue. Today we only know what a handful of them mean, and while we have some idea of what this guy represented back in the day, the act he’s performing has very different connotations today.

He’s known as The Onanist, and he wasn’t originally shoving his hand into a vase. He was stroking his big fat dick. Back in the Middle Ages he was in every church, usually tucked away in a corner, preferably partially obscured by a pillar so he wasn’t completely within sight of the congregation. But as attitudes towards depictions of penises changed, so did the meaning behind his stroking, and throughout the Renaissance, when many church murals were restored, most restorers either changed how The Onanist was depicted, as they did here, or painted over him entirely. Today, Denmark has only two surviving Onanists, and they might be the only ones left in the world still depicting their original phallic glory.

As we finished our tour of the traditional Transylvanian village, I couldn’t help but notice the tree-covered hill looming in the distance, the reason for my visit to Cluj: Hoia Baciu Forest, the most haunted forest in all of Europe.

Even though I’m an unbeliever, I happily postponed our trip to the forest by a day when we found out about the straw museum, partly because, well, it’s the most haunted forest in Europe, right? Regardless of the authenticity of the claims, the sheer volume of them has to mean there’s something to it.

We began driving towards the mountain pass leading up to the forest, and while en route we learned why there seems to be a second, smaller city right next to Cluj. It’s a Roma settlement. By “settlement,” I mean the government has built some fairly nice apartment buildings, but... Roma have a reputation for being wasteful and not taking very good care of their homes, and driving around the region I could understand where the stereotype comes from. You never have to point out which house in a village belongs to a Roma family. The grass will be overgrown, the roof will have holes in it, the pavement outside the house will be missing, there’ll be a big pile of rubbish in the yard, and every fence will have old laundry hanging from it.

I do have empathy, and I understand why they live like this. For a long time they never knew how long it would be before they had to move because they were never safe wherever they settled. They were often chased out of a town whenever there was a problem they could be blamed for, so it makes sense that they adapted a lifestyle where possessions are disposable and places are temporary.

But why that attitude persists today, after a hundred years of settled living in a country with a functioning trash collecting system, remains a mystery. I’d like to know, but Roma are understandably still suspicious of outsiders.

The first road we took to get up to Hoia Baciu was a no-go. The further up we got, the more potholes we encountered, until eventually the road disappeared altogether. We turned around, drove back down the mountain, and found another route. We parked near the top but still had an almost vertical 800-metre trek up to the forest itself. It was worth it for the view alone. I found the kind of view I’d been looking for yesterday, a perfect panorama of the city of Cluj.

I admired the view while my friends caught up to me, and then we went inside.

Our destination was The Devil’s Heart, a mysterious spot in the forest where no trees grow, an almost perfectly symmetrical circle that science can’t quite explain.

Hoia Baciu is named after a shepherd who disappeared in the forest with his flock of more than 200 sheep. No trace of them was ever found, and theirs became the first of many unexplained disappearances.

According to legend, locals refuse to set foot in the forest, which I can almost believe, judging by the fact that one of the roads up here washed away at least a decade ago and still hasn’t been rebuilt.

Allegedly, lights can be seen at night and strange noises can be heard. They’re supposedly the spirits of farmers murdered in the forest by a local lord.

I neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary. The strangest thing about the forest was how quiet it was, and I didn’t see a single turd anywhere, human or animal.

You’re also supposed to get a migraine that grows more intense the longer you’re inside the forest. It supposedly comes from the memories of past lives you’ll remember while you’re there, and it stops once you leave the forest and forget them again.

The scariest thing in the forest was apparently me. As we approached The Devil’s Heart, we saw some teenagers hanging around the clearing, and they looked quite spooked as I walked towards them. They seemed to relax when Peti and Szofia appeared behind me, but still on alert. They did that thing where it’s obvious people were doing something before they noticed you, and then suddenly stopped when they realised they’d been seen.

We walked around the clearing for a while while the teenagers lingered, not comfortable enough to continue whatever they had been doing, but not frightened enough to leave. We didn’t sense anything unusual about the forest itself, so I suggested we walk further in to see the crooked trees the forest is supposed to be famous for. We did see a few, but they weren’t nearly as twisted as they always appear in photographs, so, to be honest, the whole thing was a little disappointing. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I can usually understand why a place earns a reputation for being haunted. There’s usually something unusual that unsettles people. Here, there was nothing.

We were talking about this as we walked back to the car. Then we rounded a corner and entered the clearing again, and the teenagers were gone. Not just gone, it was as though they’d never been there in the first place. No rubbish. No cigarette butts. Nothing. The only thing left was perhaps the faint impression in the grass where one of them had been sitting, but I couldn’t be sure.

For a moment I was genuinely on edge because we hadn’t gone far, and we’d only been away for a minute or two. I felt like they’d been within earshot while we were looking at the crooked trees, yet I couldn’t remember hearing them leave. Standing in the clearing, I couldn’t hear them walking away in the distance either.

We walked through the forest and exited where we’d entered. Afterwards, I examined the photos and videos.

If we remembered our past lives at any point while we were in there, we certainly hadn’t talked about it on camera, and none of us had a migraine.

The people we encountered in the clearing appeared in both our photos and videos, so if they were ghosts, they were the kind that can be captured on camera.

The only thing that can possibly explain this forest’s reputation is its lack of sounds and wildlife, because that’s the only thing that truly feels out of the ordinary. Maybe that affects people somehow. Or at least that was my guess until I came across a website about a group dedicated to creating hoaxes about the forest, with the express purpose of making it famous as the most haunted forest in Europe and using that reputation to attract tourism to the city, something it desperately needs.

This is the first time, while investigating haunted locations, that I’ve come across an actual hoax, at least one that was so easily debunked.

We made our way back down the mountain and headed into town.

In the novel Dracula, as Jonathan Harker makes his way through Europe to meet Count Dracula about a real estate transaction, he stops in the city of Klausenburg, where he spends the night at the Hotel Royale and eats chicken with red peppers for dinner. He remarks that the dish is delicious but makes him thirsty.

Klausenburg is the German name for the city I’m in, Cluj-Napoca. The Hotel Royale is today’s Hotel Transilvania, and the chicken with red peppers is chicken paprikash, a well-known dish that every Hungarian and Romanian knows how to make.

So we figured that, since we were here looking for vampires, we had to eat at the hotel where the protagonist of the most famous vampire novel in history had dinner. We hadn’t booked a table. We had no idea whether they were open or whether they even served chicken paprikash, so we simply showed up.

They were open, and we got a table. Chicken paprikash was on the menu, so we all ordered it. The waiter’s eyes lit up when we did, and he said, “Come with me.”

He led us into a room filled with photographs of the hotel and the city over the past 150 years, and he told us the story of Transylvania, the hotel, and many behind-the-scenes details about the novel. The restaurant inside the hotel is now called Mina’s Heritage, a name with a double meaning. It’s named after Jonathan’s love interest, Mina, but also after one of the hotel’s former owners, Hermina, whose name may itself have been a reference to the novel.

Dacre Stoker, one of Bram Stoker’s descendants, had even visited the hotel not long ago. It was for some anniversary, I can’t remember whether it was celebrating the novel or the hotel, but either way it’s fantastic that the family still considers the hotel an important part of their legacy.

The chicken paprikash was delicious. Peti said it was the best he’d ever had, which has to be high praise.

After dinner we headed back to the apartment, watched some more Erdély TV, and then went to bed.

I woke up like I did yesterday, groggy from having slept a full night with no stops, something that has become more of a novel experience than I care to admit over the years. Something happens to me on vacation, but I guess everyone feels that way to some extent. Your body can sense the temporary release from the rat race, and it begins to heal. In my case, it’s going to take a lot longer because I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for years, and I can feel that it has left marks on my soul. Nothing that can’t be healed, but something I’ll need to do something about before it’s too late. Please don’t worry about me. I’m fine; I’m just always aware of my limitations.

Peti and Zsofia had been up for hours, and I chuckled a bit when I woke up because I remembered that they grew up on farms. That concept is foreign to me, even though I grew up in a rural community myself and went to school with kids whose parents were farmers. The difference is that a farmer in modern Denmark grows one crop or raises one type of livestock. Farming is a job, and it’s less of a lifestyle than it is in Eastern Europe. These two Hungarians grew up on a farm. They still go back to the village where they grew up to help their parents on the farm and take part in thousand-year-old traditions like communal pig butchering. They start at six in the morning by taking a shot of pálinka, then they kill the pig and begin processing it. The first thing they cut off is the fat, and by lunchtime they’re already eating it. It’s cut into chunks and turned into a kind of grilled bacon fat that’s smeared onto toast. A few more shots of pálinka and many hours later, nothing is left but the bones.

That kind of farming hasn’t existed where I’m from since the 1960s, and my grandparents were the last generation to grow up on farms where a bit of everything was raised and where the whole family took part in life on the homestead.

I think it’s quaint that this way of life still exists to some degree in Eastern Europe, and I think we in the West could definitely benefit from spending more time with our families. But I’m not sure anything has really been lost by progress, because rural Hungarians don’t farm like this because they enjoy it; they do it because they have to if they want to go to bed with full bellies. They do everything they can to push their children out of the villages and into the cities so they can have a better life than that of a farmer. Thankfully, most of them succeed, like my friends here, while also managing to take the good parts of having lived a hard life with them.

This is not a random aside. This is prologue.

We were supposed to go to the spooky forest today and then visit the ethnographic museum, but when we got to the apartment yesterday, we discovered that the TV not only had all the Hungarian channels they can watch back home, but it also had its own Hungarian-language station: Erdély TV, which roughly translates to TV from Beyond the Forest.

On Erdély TV, we saw a feature about a tiny straw hat museum in a real rural Transylvanian village, where they still make straw hats the traditional way. We thought it sounded amusing, so we decided to postpone our walk through the haunted forest until the next day. Instead, we jumped into the car and drove out into the countryside, way out into the countryside.

I keep finding ways to go on adventures that take me farther into the countryside than I’ve ever been before. Within two hours, we’d managed to drive 200 years into the past, and by the time we arrived, we’d seen more horse-drawn carriages than cars in the previous thirty minutes.

The straw hat museum in Körispatak was surprising. The name is cute, by the way, it means “Ash River,” and the village sits beside a river with plenty of ash trees growing nearby.

I expected to spend maybe ten minutes there because I assumed it would just be a single room with a few posters and some hats. Then we’d sneak around the village and observe some local Transylvanians in their natural habitat. Instead, the museum turned out to be far more interesting than I could have imagined, and we ended up spending about an hour there. There was a courtyard with a collection of rocks, which is apparently of great interest to the Székely, and there was an installation dedicated to visitors from different countries. Judging by the towns and regions listed, most people came here to reconnect with their Transylvanian roots. Most visitors were from Hungary and Romania, as well as parts of Germany and the Netherlands where the Transylvanian Saxons migrated during the communist era. There were also a few entries from the United States and Canada, presumably from areas with large Hungarian diasporas.

The gift shop was fantastic, selling only straw hats, other culturally appropriate items, and Székely-branded merchandise. To an outsider, that might not seem unusual, but we’re in Eastern Europe, so it’s actually remarkable that they weren’t also selling Cars 2 baseball caps and Darth Vader coffee mugs. I bought a straw hat and a Székely crest fridge magnet for my mother. I usually bring her a fridge magnet from my travels, and she always wears a straw hat during the summer, so I know she’ll appreciate one handcrafted by the Székely.

There was a booth selling lángos, a Hungarian version of a common, inexpensive fast food found throughout much of the Balkans. It’s basically fried bread topped with sour cream and cheese. It’s delicious, though I’m not sure whether it’s actually that special or if I’m simply not used to indulging in treats like that anymore. I’m a man in my mid-thirties trying to maintain a set of abs and a vaguely superhero-esque physique, so I’ve made certain culinary sacrifices in my everyday life. I don’t starve myself, and my diet isn’t especially strict, but I’ve found that ever since making this lifestyle change, I’ve come to appreciate good food and treats much more whenever I do indulge. Which makes sense. A piece of cake once a week is a celebration. A piece of cake every day isn’t.

While we were eating, we noticed a massive straw hat hanging on the wall, and one of the museum volunteers told us in Hungarian that it was the world’s largest straw hat. He took it down and helped me put it on, and I immediately understood why people wear these—not necessarily the world’s biggest straw hat, but straw hats in general, if you know what I mean. The temperature beneath the hat felt ten degrees cooler. The light color of the straw reflects the sunlight, and its thickness prevents much of the heat from getting through. If I hadn’t already planned to buy a traditional Transylvanian hat later in the trip, I would have bought a straw hat for myself right then and there.

We followed the man inside, where he explained the process of making straw hats by hand and the symbolism behind each part of the design. Very little of this information was available in English, and the man spoke only Hungarian, so I was incredibly grateful to have my friends there to translate.

The style of the hat depends on which village you’re from, and the width of the brim depends on how many hectares of land you own. One straw width is added for every half-hectare, so whoever owns the world’s largest straw hat must also be the richest man in Transylvania.

The women’s hats have emblems on the side, and whether the emblem is placed on the right or the left depends on whether the wearer is Romanian or Hungarian.

The village exports quite a few of these hats, and one of the walls displayed a poster of a Japanese scout troop. They had heard about the Körispatak hats and commissioned the village to make hats for the entire troop.

When we first drove into Cluj, I was confused by the region’s identity. Romanian flags were everywhere, yet everyone on the streets spoke Hungarian. As soon as we left the city, the Romanian flags gave way to Hungarian ones. But something clicked while standing in this village, looking out the window and seeing Székely flags instead of either Hungarian or Romanian ones.

The region suddenly made sense.

Transylvania is like any other border region. You have Hungarians to the west and Romanians to the east, and here in the middle you have the Székely—people who historically lived far enough away from the region’s endless conflicts to develop a distinct identity of their own. They may speak Hungarian, but they’re different from both Hungarians in Hungary and the Hungarian Transylvanians living farther west. Cluj might be geographically located in the Hungarian part of Transylvania, but as the de facto capital, it has become a melting pot of all three cultures.

I came to the straw hat museum expecting a laugh, but I think I learned more about the people of this region there than I probably will at tomorrow’s ethnographic museum. Not that the ethnographic museum won’t be great.

We drove back to Cluj and visited the large statue of King Matthias, the greatest king of Hungary. He became known as Matthias the Just because he would travel through Hungarian villages disguised as a beggar to see whether his officials were treating the people fairly.

Matthias was also a brilliant military strategist who conquered parts of Austria using his Black Army, a professional mercenary force far more capable than the peasant armies raised by earlier Hungarian kings.

When Matthias died, so did the Black Army, and with it Hungary’s military advantage.

His life story is legendary among Hungarians, and perhaps one day I’ll write a more in-depth biography of him.

His father was Prince of Transylvania and became famous for resisting the Ottomans and driving them out of Transylvania, making Matthias an important historical figure to both Hungarians and Transylvanians alike.

His statue stands outside St. Michael’s Cathedral, which we visited afterward, before having lunch at a café on the same square.

As I sat in the square looking toward the hills, I had an idea.

Cities built in valleys almost always have a viewpoint somewhere, and I wanted to find Cluj’s and photograph the city as the sun set. I found the highest point overlooking the valley, and we drove up to the trailhead. It was only a 700-meter hike, and along the way we came across a pile of sticks.

To the untrained eye, it looked like nothing more than an ordinary pile of branches. But if you spend enough time digging into local history, you’ll find that these often mark the site of an ancient death ritual.

It’s a tradition that has existed across Europe for thousands of years. The story usually goes something like this: A cruel and powerful man terrorizes the local people until, one night, they finally have enough and kill him in the forest. Because evil men don’t stay dead, they throw sticks onto his body to weigh him down so he can’t rise again. From that day forward, every villager who passes the spot adds another stick to make sure he stays buried.

Eventually, the story disappears, but the custom remains because it’s simply human nature to see a pile of sticks and want to add one more.

One such pile back home contains sticks that are at least a thousand years old, and I’m sure that if you examined the oldest ones here in the forests around Cluj, they’d be about that age too, if not older.

We reached the summit only to discover that the viewpoint had become completely overgrown. There was no spectacular panorama of the city. Judging by the signs and the old fire pit, it had once been a beautiful lookout, but it hadn’t been maintained for at least a decade.

Then I remembered another hill on the opposite side of the road from where we’d parked. It was smaller, but perhaps it still offered a better view. Having come this far, we hiked back down and climbed the second hill.

Although it wasn’t as high, the view was much better, and we finally got a good look over the city. While we were admiring it, a photographer was conducting a wedding photoshoot nearby. When he walked over to us, we assumed he was about to ask us to move. Instead, he politely asked if we could help him. Peti held one of the photographer’s lights while he captured a beautiful shot of the couple standing beneath an umbrella.

We went home, watched a bit more Erdély TV, but unfortunately didn’t come across any more broadcasts worth rearranging our plans for.

I woke up at 9, having slept like a rock in my little alley apartment. I made plans to pick up Peti and his wife at 10, so I packed my things and charged the car at a service station. A MOL service station, of course—one where they serve hot dogs. I’m going to have to try one on the way home so I can compare it to a Danish Fransk Hotdog.

I had a coffee there, and it would be the first of many coffees that weren’t really coffees at all, but just multiple espressos in a cup. I’m not opposed to espresso, but sometimes I want a regular cup full of regular bean juice to sip slowly while it gradually wakes me up, and espresso just doesn’t work for that.

I looked in my rearview mirror and saw an elderly Hungarian man walk by a dumpster. He pretended something in the dumpster hadn’t caught his eye and walked past it. Then he stopped and acted as though he’d forgotten something. He turned around, looked to see if anyone was watching, and then walked back to the dumpster and attempted to pull something out of it. Whatever it was didn’t come loose, and he looked around again to see if anyone had noticed the sound. He did this a few more times before looking around one last time and walking away. There has always been a debate over whether Hungary is part of the Balkans, but I’ve seen enough situations like this to confirm that they absolutely are.

The charger clicked done, so I unplugged it and began driving toward Peti’s house. I should probably introduce him and his wife, and explain what we’re doing.

We’re heading to Transylvania. Today it’s part of Romania, but it isn’t exactly Romanian. It maintains its own cultural identity, and the most populated parts of the region are primarily Hungarian-speaking. The region might technically be majority Romanian-speaking, but most of the culturally important areas are Szekely, the Hungarian minority that have lived here for thousands of years.

The Romanians are very sensitive about the region because they derive a great deal of national pride because they descend from the Dacians and were once subjects of the Roman Empire, hence the name Romania. The problem with that is that many Romanians today don’t descend from the Dacians, but most Szekely do, and they’ve identified as Hungarian for the past 900 years, not Romanian. Transylvania was part of Hungary until the Second World War, after which it was given to Romania because Hungary chose the wrong side of the war.

So the most economically prosperous and historically rich region of Romania is also the least ethnically and culturally Romanian. If Romania heavily promotes the region, it becomes more apparent just how distinct—and how un-Romanian—it is. If they do nothing, then eventually the people there may decide to secede and take a large chunk of the nation’s economy and identity with them. The compromise Romania has come up with is to make the region bilingual. Put all the signs in both Romanian and Hungarian, promote the pockets of Romanian settlement in the region, and advertise a shared European identity over a national one. It works to a certain degree. But the travel advertising budget for the region is still practically nonexistent, and the newest travel guides I could find in my native language were already twelve years old.

So, no one comes here, and hardly anyone speaks English, which means I’m going to need help. That’s where Peti and his wife, Zsofia, come in. They both speak Hungarian, and Zsofia is knowledgeable about the border region between Hungary and Transylvania, so their help will be invaluable. They’ll also get a cheap vacation out of helping me, because I always pay for accommodations and travel costs when people assist me.

I’ve known Peti for years, but we’ve never met in person before. We play video games together, and even though we don’t spend more than a couple of hours together each week, we’ve gotten to know each other well over the years.

I picked them up, and we drove toward the Romanian border. Romania still wasn’t in the Schengen zone, which, for the Americans reading this, means it wasn’t part of the EU’s passport-free travel area despite being a member of the EU. So it has border control and you’re supposed to show your passport, except you don’t.

As we approached the border, it looked like a proper border. There were signs warning that we could be searched, and I could see booths in the distance. But as we got closer, I realized they were all empty, and while the border technically exists, you just drive straight through it, which I found very disappointing.

I’m old enough to remember when a large part of Europe wasn’t in Schengen, and crossing into another country felt like entering an entirely different world. The borders were guarded by men in strange uniforms I didn’t recognize, and my parents would hand over documents to stern-looking officials and converse with them in languages I didn’t understand. They’d be asked questions, answer them, and then there would always be an awkward silence before another follow-up question. The final silence was always longer than the previous ones, and then I’d hear the click that meant the documents had been stamped, and that meant I was about to see a place I’d never seen before. I can’t hear the sound of a stamp without thinking of a border crossing—not that I hear many stamps these days.

In many countries today, driving across the border doesn’t feel like entering another country at all. With open borders, people from both sides live and work across the frontier, and the cultures have blended together. Up north, for example, when you enter Germany from Denmark, you don’t really enter Germany. You drive from a region that’s majority Danish into another region that’s still largely Danish for the next twenty kilometers, and it’s not until you begin seeing signs for Hamburg that things start to feel properly German.

The Hungarian-Romanian border is different. You go from Eastern Europe to what feels like a Third World slum the moment you cross it. The area around the Romanian border is primarily occupied by the Kalderash people, whom most locals simply call Gypsies or Zigeuner, terms many Western Europeans find offensive, so they instead use Romani, which is often considered inaccurate or even offensive by people in this region because it refers to a specific group living in Britain and the Americas.

No one knows who the Kalderash are, but I’ll use that name for this article. When I’m traveling, though, I use Romani with Western Europeans and Gypsy with Eastern Europeans.

The Romanian government is in the process of undoing five hundred years of unfair treatment of the Kalderash, and they’re making positive changes in the region, but these things take time. The areas where the Kalderash live are, to put it politely, absolutely fucked. I’ve been to war-torn parts of the Balkans that were less depressing than the Kalderash village we drove through on our way to Transylvania.

But then something appears in the landscape that doesn’t fit the scenery at all: their palaces.

The Kalderash mostly work in construction, often abroad. They send money back home so the heads of their households can build and maintain houses that are nicer than their neighbors’. Around here they’re called Gypsy palaces, and back in Hungary they’re beginning to become tourist attractions. I’d seen the carefully curated photographs of these palaces before, so it was interesting to see what they really looked like up close. They’re hidden behind gates, battered cars are parked in the driveways, the streets outside look like a bomb has gone off, and everything around them—unless it’s another palace—is practically in ruins.

That’s what fascinates me about the Kalderash. They don’t care what outsiders think, which is why the streets look the way they do. They only care what other Kalderash think, and they want them to feel bad that they don’t have as nice a palace as they do. There’s nothing more European than only giving a shit about what your next-door neighbor thinks of you, and wanting him to envy you.

We left Kalderash country behind, and the landscape began to slope upward. Before long we were in the mountains. The Romanian government is expanding the motorway from the border to Cluj, so we had to drive through winding mountain roads, climbing ridges and descending into valleys. What stood out to me was the absence of water. I’m used to seeing a mountain lake in every valley in places like the Alps, but here, unless there’s a dam, there isn’t much standing water at all. It feels strange in a way I can’t quite describe. Maybe it’s because running water is supposedly one of the most effective ways to stop a vampire, and in this region, where they’re said to be common, there are very few streams for them to be stopped by.

The city of Cluj appeared in the distance as we drove up the side of a mountain, then disappeared as we drove back down again. Then it appeared, and disappeared again, but each time it came back into view, it was closer. We arrived in the afternoon, and I’d booked a nice place on a hill within walking distance of the city center, but far enough away that you couldn’t hear the sounds of the city.

Cluj is the de facto capital of Transylvania. It sits in the middle of the Cluj River valley, and the Someș River passes through it. The city’s geography forms the basis of the flag of Transylvania. The blue represents the mountains on either side of the valley, and the yellow represents the river. The star and crescent moon symbolize the conflict between the Hungarians and the Ottomans, and how the Transylvanians found themselves caught in the middle.

The city is ancient. It was the largest city in the region when it was conquered by the Romans in the second century. After that it belonged to the Goths, then the Huns, and then various Hungarian states for roughly a thousand years before being traded back and forth between Hungary and Romania during the World Wars.

We ate at a restaurant and then headed back to our accommodation to relax. We had a long day planned tomorrow, when we’d head back into the countryside to visit some real Transylvanian farmers.

JOURNEY BEGIN: GROSS TRUCK STOP, CZECHIA

I woke up in my car bed setup, feeling very well rested. The truck stop was unusually quiet. Usually, I wake up in the middle of the night because some loud person parks next to me and starts making noise, but the Czech teens who were stranded there were fairly well behaved. They kept the noise and laughter at a tolerable level, and I heard them go to sleep not too long after I did.

The truck stop itself was extremely disgusting, but I made an observation.

At the first truck stop where I stopped to charge, I had made certain internal comments about how I was definitely in Eastern Europe proper now because the people were loud and they were throwing trash everywhere. But this second truck stop recontextualized that observation and changed my perspective. The people at the first truck stop weren’t Czech, they were German, and German car travelers have no respect for nature. The Czechs here were clearly doing their best not to litter. Whoever was in charge of emptying the bins was just doing a bad job. Most of the trash I saw was in or around the bins, not dropped by the side of the road or hidden in bushes. People had been trying; the system just wasn’t letting them be proper people.

My original plan was to take a detour somewhere in Czechia, like I had done the day before in Germany, but I had no friend here that I’d made plans with, and there was a weather warning, and I’ve come to respect those. So I booked a place to stay for the night in eastern Hungary so I could get a proper shower and a proper night’s sleep. If I had known how comfortable the car bed was, I probably wouldn’t have booked a place to sleep and would have just showered at a truck stop.

I brushed my teeth and had a coffee at a MOL service station, a chain that would become my favorite in the region over the next few hours. They’re great. Unlike German service stations, they’re clean and don’t smell like piss, and the people working there don’t give you the impression that they hate the concept of being alive. They just give you that bearable, “I just work here, dude,” energy, which is a big step up. You can get a coffee that tastes like the machine was cleaned recently, and there’s usually a seating area with a view of the road and outlets where you can charge your devices. MOL is my new friend, and I’ll be sticking to them whenever I’m in Central Europe or the Balkans.

As I was leaving the station with a fully charged laptop, something strange caught my eye: an ad for a hot dog. You can get hot dogs at most service stations, but this kind of hot dog is not one I’ve ever seen outside Denmark. It’s called a Fransk Hotdog, and in the West it’s one of our country’s famous unique dishes. But here it was. I was looking at an ad for a Fransk Hotdog somewhere in Czechia, and figuring out what it was doing here when it supposedly shouldn’t exist became one of my new favorite unsolved mysteries.

There are many conflicting origin stories for the Fransk Hotdog, and many people claim to be its inventor, but the basic story goes like this: a man on holiday in France sees someone cut open a baguette, hollow it out, and fill it with either meat or duck pâté. Fascinated by the idea, he returns from his vacation and begins to invent a Danish spin on it, which, of course, means putting a sausage inside. He dubs it the Fransk Hotdog to honor the French, and it becomes a hit among people who enjoy eating hot dogs but don’t want to make a mess. Today, it can be bought at most places that serve food on the go, and McDonald’s originally had trouble making a dent in the Danish fast-food market because they refused to serve hot dogs of any kind.

In other versions of the story, the hot dog already exists in France, and the man who brings it to Denmark also eats it in Norway, where it’s known as a Monte Frank, which eventually becomes Fransk Hotdog in Danish.

Regardless of which version you go with, there’s one problem: none of them are true. The guy from the 1800s who supposedly saw Parisian street children scoop the insides out of a baguette and fill it with duck pâté never existed. No one in France or Germany, where the dish supposedly originated, according to some stories, has ever heard of a sausage stuffed into a baguette, and some are even offended that the Danes disgrace their bread like that. And no hot dog cart in Oslo has ever served anything called a Monte Frank.

As I was thinking about all of this while driving, I made my way from one end of Czechia to the other, and as I passed a sign for a town called Brno, I snapped out of my trance.

Funny word. No idea how to pronounce it. Czech is an odd language.

I passed Brno and entered Slovakia, and then I saw something up on a hill: a giant statue of a bird. It couldn’t just be some random bird statue, so I asked a Hungarian friend about it, knowing I was about to enter, if I hadn’t already, the historically Hungarian part of Slovakia.

Peti was helpful and told me the bird had to be the Turul, a legendary eagle-like creature that guided the Hungarian people safely through a mountain pass to what is now Budapest, where they eventually settled.

That was it. The hot dog. The service station. Hungary.

MOL is Hungarian, and in the 1800s most, if not all, of Hungary’s musicians were Jews. According to an apocryphal story, these Jewish musicians would only take Jewish children under their wing and train them to fill positions in Budapest’s orchestras as they became available. This eventually angered the city’s aristocracy, who drove the Jews out, forcing them to flee.

The story is probably not entirely untrue. People have always favored their own families. These people just happened to be Europe’s most hated minority while also occupying highly coveted and highly visible positions.

Many of these Jews fled to Denmark, where they became known as the music Jews, and many prominent musicians today descend from them. They brought more with them than music, they brought food. Many spices and new types of bread became part of the Danish diet, and today, if you visit a Danish grandmother at Christmas, you’ll usually find Jew cakes in the cookie tin.

I wonder if they were also the ones who brought the Fransk Hotdog.

It seems like a stretch at first glance, until you examine the dressing that goes into a Fransk Hotdog. It’s not just any dressing; it’s Fransk Hotdog dressing, unique to the dish. It contains mustard, curry, béarnaise essence, and other spices. Many of these ingredients became common in Danish kitchens after the music Jews arrived, and if you order a hot dog from MOL, two of the sauces you can put on it are mustard and curry.

I don’t know if I’m onto something, but thinking about it kept me occupied for hours, and before I knew it I had driven through Budapest and made my way into the Hungarian Plain. From there to my destination of Debrecen, the landscape became an endless procession of hay bales and an ever-fading view of the mountains to the northwest.

I arrived in the city and checked into my accommodation, which was a nice little apartment in a back alley next to a town square. I texted my friend to ask if he wanted to grab a few drinks, as I wanted to try some local brews while I was there. He showed up an hour later, and we drank Hungarian beer while I tried pálinka, which I hadn’t had in decades. It’s a fruit brandy that burns in all the right ways on the way down, and it’s made in practically every village across Hungary and beyond.

After two shots of pálinka and three beers, Peti and I realized we were both over thirty and had a long day ahead of us. So we said our goodbyes, and I went to bed and slept like a rock.

JOURNEY END: DEBRECEN, HUNGARY

JOURNEY START: SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE BERLIN, GERMANY

I woke up to the noise of people. The rest stop I had “camped” at for the “night” was deserted when I arrived, but in the meantime about 30 cars had shown up for their morning coffee.

I put my shoes on and got out of the car and was surprised to see that I was in a British-style service station with a Macca’s in one side and an oddly English named establishment in the other. I looked down at my Coffee Fellows cup, and I got a weird sensation. I’m in East Germany, a place that was a surveillance state in my lifetime. The two women working the front desks at the Coffee Fellows and the Macca’s are identical, and I’m drinking a cup of coffee from a place in Germany that’s named something in English, and just ever so slightly oddly named that it raises an eyebrow. The whole thing made me feel like the Stasi was about to show up and grab me, like the East had never fallen and they had set up these Coffee Fellows trap to lure in tourists so they could kidnap them and take them back to the Soviet Union and make them work for them. I grabbed my phone and started texting my friends about my observation, and then a notification from my friend David popped up. It was a trans X-Files meme, fitting.

I’m taking a break from driving today to go meet my friend Nick in Berlin. We originally planned to go to an island in Berlin that used to be the home of an alchemist named Johan Kunckel, during the days of the Prussian Empire. His work was very secret, so people living on the island were not allowed to leave, and no one was allowed to come visit. The locals suspected him to be engaging in witchcraft and would occasionally smell a foul odor coming from his laboratory.

His research was financed by a noble, and when that noble passed away, Kunckel’s lab caught fire and he had to flee to Sweden. People suspected arson and his defection to another kingdom seemed to confirm it.

The German imperial family built a home there afterwards and for centuries they imported and kept exotic animals of all kinds on the island. The family was known to be cursed and according to rumors, many of its female members end up becoming white ladies, haunting the castles they once called home.

After the empire was dissolved following the First World War, the animals were moved to Berlin Zoo and the island became abandoned.

It would have been a cool place to visit, but unfortunately the ferry was out of operation due to a mechanical error on the day I was passing through, so we had hastily cobbled together another plan the day before I arrived.

I picked up Nick and we drove out into the countryside of what used to be East Germany.

There is this trashy cowboy themepark called El Dorado and it was built on the ruins of an abandoned East German summer camp. But they didn’t build over the entire thing, just part of it, so all of the housing where the kids and counselors used to stay is still there.

Germany has been reunified for over 30 years now, but you’re never unsure what bits of it used to be the DDR, there is a visible change in the architecture and the budget for maintaining the infrastructure. It feels like the German government is still punishing the east for being occupied by the soviet union….

We got on the motorway in Berlin and we drove out of the city, and as soon as we got onto a country road, my tires could tell that I was in the DDR. 90 minutes later of country driving and we arrived at the trashy themepark.

Since it was day and the park was being visited by people from all over Germany, I decided that it would be best if we scouted the perimeter first and then found an entry point that was secluded. We walked alongside the fence and Nick took a tumble and realized that nettles don’t sting as much as they did when he was a child, which is a revelation I myself had not too many years ago. We found a big hole in the fence that was suitable to enter through, and we climbed over. It was right behind a big building so if someone was inside the camp ground they wouldn’t be able to see us, not that anyone would be because why would they, it’s abandoned DDR summer camp and it’s 2026.

The camp was equal parts fascinating and boring. All of the bunkhouses were identical, and their furniture had been removed decades ago, so there weren’t any little messages or markings left behind by the kids that stayed there during the 30 years that it was in operation, but it was also interesting seeing that places like these that existed on the opposite side of an impenetrable fence look exactly like places did on my side.

I might not have washed my ass in this exact bath house, but I’ve washed it in one exactly like it a thousand kilometers away in Sweden. The iron curtain made the east mysterious to the west, but up here in the north we could see both sides of it, and we interacted a lot with the communists during that time, and we bought stuff from them, like the plans to make very utilitarian buildings that were cheap on materials.

And we weren’t the only ones. On a Facebook page dedicated to the camp, we found messages from people all over Europe who used to stay here, France, Holland, South American countries, and even West Germany. The east was never as cut off from the west as the history books claim it was. I think both sides wanted to achieve the same goal, they were just in disagreement about how to achieve it, but I think a thing they remembered back then that we have forgotten today, is that children shouldn’t be involved in politics, so the west sent their children here to spend time with their eastern neighbors, and the east allowed just a little bit of capitalist exposure, because they knew that seeing the west as enemies they had no relation to, was far more dangerous than exposure to coca cola.

We took some pictures and then we started to hear weird sounds and could have been coming from human sources. The camp area belongs to the theme park, and while they don’t use it for anything, we were technically trespassing, and we decided to not push our luck and got out of there as quietly as we got in.

It’s a shame that the area isn’t open to the public. While we were investigating we were talking about our own summer memories, and how people in the 60’s and 70’s coming here would have had those exact memories. No matter what point in time you lived in and no matter what regime you lived under, you were at some point a kid experiencing your firsts and a lot of kids experienced them here, and it’s a shame that they can’t return as adults to a place they still think about enough to seek out a Facebook page dedicated to it.

After the summer camp we stopped by a Döner place because I was getting a bit hungry. We thought El Dorado was a western themed restaurant and had planned to eat lunch there, and it was exactly that, but it was inside a trashy theme park and I didn’t want to pay admission fee to then go eat expensive theme park food afterwards, so I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and I was getting a bit hangry.

The döner was good, and while waiting in line a group of German-born Danish residents showed up and we chatted a bit in the döner queue. They live down south from me, and they are apparently involved in the Danish bitcoin business and gave me some promotional materials that I could look at if I was interested. I’m not but I will still check out their link out of some odd social obligation. Nick didn’t get anything because he bought a pretzel at a gas station earlier which he refused to eat in my car because “what if he got butter in my car”. I tried to argue but decided to just let him eat his pretzel outside. It’s the least I could do, he did pay the euro for the bathroom so I could piss like a civilized person instead of pissing near a bush like I usually do at german rest stops.

After lunch we headed to our second destination, a place we had heard mentioned as “The secret Stasi hotel”. The description didn’t tell us if it was a hotel that was secretly staffed by members of the East German government, or if it was a secret hotel exclusively for members of the East German government, but when we arrived it became clear it was the second one.

We entered through what was once the servant quarters and vehicle depot, it even had a bus terminal where members of the Stasi could be dropped off and enter the hotel through, without having to step outside.

The hotel had been abandoned mid construction, and we saw on some building materials that they had been delivered about 6 months before the wall fell, so the construction project was probably halted and then postponed and then quietly killed after the two Germanys reunited. There was just no longer a need for a hotel to cater to the East German elite, which was exclusively government workers, and there was no way a luxury hotel like this could survive in what was going to be the poorest region of Germany in the new unified country. Why go to a luxury hotel in a forest outside Berlin when you can go to a nicer one in Bavaria or Austria?

We walked around the place and talked for a long while, and then we got back in the car and drove towards our final stop.

That one turned out to be nothing. Back in the day it was a secret Soviet military base where the USSR hid some of its nuclear arsenal, but by 2026 much of it has been demolished, and since it was about an hour’s hike from the nearest road, and because it was getting late, we decided to skip it and head back to Berlin where I dropped Nick off and continued south.

It was great seeing him. We have known each other for almost a decade, ever since a common online mutual introduced us. It’s funny, neither of us really talk to those people we used to hang out from that group anymore, but we’ve kept in touch with each other. We don’t talk every day or every week, sometimes months pass by between chats, but when we talk it’s never awkward, we always just fall right back in sync and can talk about everything and nothing for hours.

He’s exactly like he is online. He once called himself a “warmduscher” which is German slang for someone who likes comfort, and that’s very on brand. He doesn’t like to go out of his comfort zone and he likes his life simple. It’s very different from how I live but I have nothing but respect for it. I’ve come to really like people that can just enjoy life and who are content living the life they live and who don’t need to constantly be striving towards bigger and better things. It’s a refreshing contrast to how I live, and it gives me perspective.

We said our goodbyes. Nick tried to bribe me into sleeping on his couch with ice cream and other things because he worried I would be too tired to drive and that I would crash, but he knows when he can’t change my mind so he relented and let me go. I wanted to hang out more but I had places to be, and I drove about 5 more hours and crossed into Czechia where I pulled over at a rest stop and tried out the car bed setup I had come up with 20 minutes before leaving for the ferry the day before.

JOURNEY END: GROSS TRUCKSTOP, CZECHIA

I apologise for how rough these coming posts are. They’re all going to be written after midnight and probably in a rush.

I wake up on the couch and think to myself, Fuck, why did I tell people I was going to X place? If I’d just kept my mouth shut, I could have stayed at home.

The reason I woke up on the couch is that I either stayed up way too late packing, or I failed to fall asleep in my bed, crawled downstairs to watch a movie, and at some point fell asleep. I probably slept for less than two hours.

There is some sort of sorcery at work when you don’t sleep in your own bed. Sleeping three hours in your bed is a shitty night’s sleep, but sleeping three hours on the couch is an amazing nap.

I went to work, got off work, packed my things, prepped the car, and then had an existential crisis for an hour or two while waiting for the ferry. I think that, regardless of how seasoned an adventurer I become, I will never be cool when it comes to actually leaving. I will always panic just before going on a trip, and I will always regret planning it until I’m on the ferry and there’s no turning back.

This trip is a bit of a special case, though, because I’ve enlisted the help of some friends, and they only had time to help me during the summer holidays, which is not my preferred time to travel. I like having the entire world to myself during the off-season, when regular people are stuck at work and I’m not.

But I need Hungarian translators because I’m going to Transylvania to investigate a weird old supernatural case, so I don’t really have a choice. It’s probably healthy to be forced to do something different every once in a while. Maybe it’ll change my perspective on something. Or some bullshit.

I hug my mum goodbye and try to talk to my dog, but he’s not interested. Then I get in my car and drive to the ferry.

I’m already regretting this whole travelling during the summer shit. The ferry is packed, and I have to hide out in the business section where the tourists can’t bother me.

We dock, and I go through my usual ritual of getting my car washed before the trip. Then I head south.

I don’t make it very far before I have to make a pit stop—not because I forgot to charge my car this time, but because I forgot I’d planned to watch a movie with some friends. I pull over, get the laptop out, and watch Cube with the gang.

It’s an amazing horror film from 1997 in which a group of strangers wake up inside a square room. They discover that doors lead to other identical rooms, some of which are trapped while others are safe, and they have to work together if they want to make it out of the cube alive.

I hadn’t watched it in over a decade, and I was delighted to discover that it was much better than I remembered. There was also a layer of social commentary that had completely gone over my head during my first couple of viewings as a teenager.

After the movie, I drove some more and then made my final Danish pit stop at a place I’ve dubbed The Last McDonald’s.

If you’re well travelled in Europe, you know that not all McDonald’s are created equal, and Danish McDonald’s is probably the best, so I tend to get my fix at the Maccas right before I head down into mainland Europe.

But there’s also something liminal about The Last McDonald’s. It feels like the edge of the country. Beyond the Maccas there’s just a cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff is a giant pile of rubbish. That’s not a metaphor for how we view the rest of Europe, but the rubbish pile does remind me of German rest stops whenever I see it.

The rest of the trip is hazy, and I’m not really sure when the day ended. It wasn’t at midnight because I was still wide awake and in transit. It was probably around six in the morning when I pulled over at a rest stop, crawled into the back seat, and took a nap.

Whenever I reach what I think of as the point of no return—which, in my mind, is crossing the border—I get lost in my own thoughts. I think about my friends, my job, my family. I think about all of my relationships over the past year, and I examine them to figure out where I went wrong in the ones that didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped.

Normally this yearly audit is just that: something I do once a year while heading towards somewhere.

But this year things are different.

There is a situation that hasn’t left my mind since last year, and, combined with an ever-increasing yearning to pack up my house and travel full-time, it’s put me on edge.

I told my mum that I was considering living on the island only part-time, and she didn’t panic at the prospect. I think she’s known for longer than I have that I either need a break or a fresh start—and that neither is going to happen if I stay.

JOURNEY END: ON THE ROAD TO BERLIN, GERMANY

He was called that not because he was some kind of were-marten or a giant marten monster. No, he was called the Marten because he wore a pointed hat made of marten fur.

It was said that if you cheated, either on your taxes or on your spouse, the Marten would appear at the edge of your property, where he would hide behind a stone dike and stare at you. You would begin to feel that sensation of someone watching you, and should you meet his gaze, you were doomed. You wouldn’t die from locking eyes with him, but the moment you looked away, you would realize that your house was completely engulfed in flames, and then you would perish in the fire.

From my recollection, this was a common urban legend in Denmark that originated from the island of Bornholm, and the phrase “The Marten will come for you” was a part of every day language.

Old men would be playing cards and jokingly taunt each other, saying, “You’d better not be bluffing, or the Marten will come.” Children would scare each other on the playground with stories of seeing the Marten staring at them from behind their backyard fences, and mothers would blackmail their children into telling the truth by threatening them that the Marten would come for them if they didn’t.

I have a clear memory of watching an episode of a crime procedural where a serial killer set his victims’ houses on fire, and the local community blames it on the Marten. I can even picture, in my mind’s eye, the actor who played the Marten on the show. He, of course, wasn’t a supernatural firestarter in the gritty Scandinavian noir series. He was simply a man who became a suspect because witnesses had spotted him at several of the crime scenes. He was innocent. It was just a small town, and he would show up whenever he saw a fire in the distance. He also happened to wear the same type of hat as the Marten of legend.

But here’s the thing: no one remembers the Marten, and there are no urban legends on Bornholm about him.

I’ve visited the island several times, and each time I’ve gone, I’ve asked locals about an urban legend involving a marten. No one knows what I’m talking about. No one remembers “The Marten will come for you” being a saying in the 1990s or 2000s, and the actor I remember playing the Marten on that gritty Scandinavian noir crime procedural was never on the show, and the show never had an episode like the one I remember.

I won’t say I’ve been haunted by the memory of a fake urban legend, but I’ve always wondered what series of events, half-remembered stories, and fragments of media created a false memory of an urban legend I remember remembering as a child.

Well, at least I wasn’t haunted by the memory of this fake urban legend until I found out it was real.

There are no martens on Bornholm, the animal, that is.

But do you know where there are martens?

In Sweden, which is where Bornholm is located geographically despite being part of Denmark.

See, in the 1600s, all of southern Sweden was part of Denmark. Culturally and ethnically, it was a mixture of the two countries, though definitely more Swedish than Danish. The Swedes tried to buy the region several times and eventually sort of did. But we were never happy with the terms of the deal, and they never paid more than a down payment, so we never handed it over.

Sweden, in a move straight out of our own playbook, waited until Denmark was once again engaged in yet another war with France, England, and/or Germany, and they then invaded and took the land they wanted.

There was, of course, resistance to the occupation initially, especially in the southern province of Skåne. Even today, many people there don’t fully accept Sweden’s rule over them. They speak a dialect closer to Danish and fly a flag that combines the symbols of both countries, though it’s usually clear which one they think more fondly of.

While their rebellious spirit was never extinguished, they eventually laid down their arms and submitted to Swedish rule.

But off the coast of Skåne, on the island of Bornholm, they did not.

The islanders refused to acknowledge that they were subjects of the Swedish crown and refused to pay taxes to what they saw as an illegitimate king. That was probably just an excuse, because they hadn’t exactly been enthusiastic taxpayers under the king they considered legitimate either, but that’s a story for another time.

The Swedish government appointed one of its most ruthless officials as governor of the island: Johan Printzenskjöld.

He quickly became hated by the islanders. His tax collection efforts were usually accompanied by a regiment of armed soldiers. Often there was a fight. Sometimes people died.

One morning, like any other, Johan Printzenskjöld got up, got dressed, put on his warm coat and his marten-fur hat, and marched with a regiment of soldiers to the home of one of the island’s most outspoken tax dodgers.

The first thing he learned after arriving on the island was that many of the former Danes were armed, that a great many of them were excellent marksmen, and that they always shot at officers, never privates.

So as the soldiers marched onto the woman’s property, the governor took cover behind a stone fence with a hole in it that he could look through. It gave him a good view of the house, and he crouched down, made himself comfortable, and waited to see what would happen next.

He knew she wouldn’t pay, so he had already decided to make an example of her. After the soldiers knocked on her door several times and received no answer, they began preparing for what would happen next.

The governor saw the woman through a window, and she saw him.

They locked eyes as the soldiers set the house on fire, and they maintained their gaze as the flames spread through the building.

The governor later wrote in a letter that he was certain the woman maintained eye contact even after she herself had caught fire.

While the incident would not be the spark that ignited the rebellion, it would give birth to the legend of the Marten: an invading presence, an animal from the mainland that didn’t belong, vermin to be eradicated.

When war once again broke out between Denmark and Sweden, the locals took up arms against their occupiers. They laid siege to the fortress of Hammershus, where Johan Printzenskjöld was hiding, but he somehow managed to escape on horseback and rode to Hasle, where he was granted amnesty by the mayor, who was on friendlier terms with the Swedes than most of the islanders.

The rebels soon arrived and demanded that he show himself.

He did.

At first, he tried to negotiate the rebels’ surrender. When that failed, he attempted to negotiate his own safe passage back to Sweden. That failed as well.

The islanders grew impatient, and a fistfight broke out between them and the governor and the few men who remained loyal to him.

He escaped once again.

But as he ran down the street, a rebel saw him approaching, drew a pistol, and shot him in the head at point-blank range.

The Marten was dead.

I’m not from Bornholm. I grew up 500 kilometers away, as far from Bornholm as you can get while still remaining in Denmark, on the opposite side of the country on a different island.

This is not a story we learn about in school, as we generally don’t spend much time discussing wars fought against countries that are now among our closest friends. There is no way I would have heard the story of the Marten in school or from any adult I knew.

This story is so obscure that many of the details I’ve told you here haven’t been publicly known until recently.

I’m sure there is a logical explanation for how I created a fake urban legend in my mind as a child, only to discover that it was somehow rooted in a real event I had no knowledge of until recently.

I just haven’t figured out what that explanation is yet.

When people ask what I do for a living, I lie and tell them that I’m a writer, that I travel to strange places where weird things happen and investigate claims of the supernatural.

It’s easier than explaining that I’m a venture capitalist who digs up dirt on big national companies so blackmail them into giving me part of their businesss. and pay me a substantial sum for it, so I can pay their former employees more money than they were paying them to do the same job.

Instead of using the profits of those ventures to buy property and amass wealth, I use them to travel to strange places to hunt ghosts and climb mountains.

The follow-up question is usually cautious: “So, you believe in that stuff?”

I lie and tell them that I don’t, but that I like good stories, and that I think people’s belief in things science cannot rationally explain is fascinating, and that we can often learn a lot about a period of history and the people who lived in it if we examine their fears, hopes, and dreams.

It’s easier than explaining that I’m open to the possibility of the supernatural existing, but that I haven’t seen anything myself or examined any claims I believe to be true. People tend to conflate being open to having your mind changed with already fully believing there are things out there that defy rational explanation, which I don’t.

That inevitably leads to the question: “Have you experienced anything supernatural yourself?”

Again, I lie, and I tell them that I have, and follow it up with: if you spend enough time outdoors by yourself, you will eventually experience something you cannot rationalize.

It’s easier than explaining my thoughts on how isolation in nature affects us on a primal level we do not consciously register, how it alters our perception and hinders our ability to determine what is real and what isn’t. And it allows me to tell the story of my encounter with a so-called “not-deer.”

(Not-Deer are supetnatural creatures that disguise themselves as deer, but not very convincingly. They walk strange and have front facing eyes.)

I live on an island, and my company delivers mail there. Because my credit was nonexistent when I started my company, I couldn’t take out a business loan or take on debt, so I had to be very hands-on because I couldn’t afford to hire anyone, and I worked about 100 hours a week for the first three years, delivering most of the mail myself.

(I still can’t get a loan because I never took on any debt, so I don’t have a credit score, which is a very funny position to be in when I’m technically part of the 1%.)

One of our jobs is to go to the mainland, pick up library books from a depot, transport them back, and deliver them to the two libraries on the island.

The ferry only docks on the mainland for about 20 minutes while passengers from the island disembark and passengers from the mainland board. Except for the 9:40 crossing on Wednesdays, when the ferry stays docked for about an hour on the mainland. Most islanders use this ferry to go to doctor’s appointments or to go shopping in Frederikshavn, but I used it to pick up library books from the depot and transport them back to the ferry.

During summer, when tourists come to the island, there are two ferries making the crossing five or six times a day, and therefore there isn’t a need for one of them to stay docked for an hour, because the other one will arrive 90 minutes after the last one left.

But in 2024 there was a problem. The Wednesday one hour dock got axed about a month before the double ferry schedule started, so I couldn’t take one ferry over and another one back, and I ended up stranded on the mainland for five hours every Wednesday.

I decided to make the best of it and use the five hour window to go on adventures. Sometimes I would bring my car and drive out to a museum. Other times I would go on foot and find a hiking trail somewhere nearby and go for a walk.

At some point I noticed that no matter where I was in the city or the surrounding area, I could always see the same hill in the distance. One day, while disembarking from the ferry, I decided I wanted to find it and climb it.

So after dropping off the books at the ferry terminal, I set out and walked through the city until there was no more city, then through the suburbs until there were no more suburbs, and eventually I found myself in what had recently been a forest but was now cleared land with new developments popping up here and there.

I spotted the hill I had seen so many times on my previous adventures, and I walked up it and sat down.

After admiring the view for a while, I realized I hadn’t seen a survey marker. Hills in Denmark are a rare sight, and each one usually has a marker indicating that it’s the tallest point in the area, but this one didn’t.

Then I looked behind me and noticed that the trees were taller than they should have been, and then it occurred to me that the trees weren’t especially tall, they were just standing on a hill taller than the one I was on, and the thick shrubbery was disguising it.

At this point I should probably mention that while this development already had about twenty houses built on it, and several of them were clearly lived in, I hadn’t seen a single person yet, and the entire neighborhood was completely silent.

So, I was already a bit on edge when I heard a sound I didn’t recognize coming from inside the shrubbery up the hill. It sounded a bit like a bark, a bit like a loud bird chirp, but mostly it sounded like firing a Colt M95.

I looked at a map and saw there was a military base just up the hill and figured what I’d heard was target practice, and that made sense until I heard it again.

That’s not an M95. It’s too slow, too bass-heavy, and it sounded ever so slightly different the second time around.

My fear senses were tingling and I was unsure what to do. Something was wrong.

Then the sound repeated a couple of times, and with the repetition of each strange bark, the sound became more familiar, and my fear started to fade.

I mustered up the courage and pushed my way through the shrubbery. On the other side I saw the hill that had been hiding from me, but I also saw something out of the corner of my eye, and it was running toward me.

It was a deer.

It stopped a few meters in front of me, reared up on its hind legs, stomped the ground, and barked.

That was the sound I’d been hearing. The unnatural half-dog, half-gunshot bark.

Deer are not supposed to bark, and they are definitely not supposed to run up to you and act like this.

This was some kind of demon creature.

I froze in fear, the kind of fear that makes all the heat leave your body in an instant and chills you to the bone. My brain couldn’t compute what I was looking at, but eventually it chose between fight or flight, and I turned around and sprinted through the shrubbery and down the hill.

About halfway down, I realized that demons aren’t real, and I stopped running.

The sound had stopped.

Did that even happen?

Or had I just run into a confused deer at the exact moment someone fired a gun in the distance, and my brain assumed the deer had made the sound?

Yeah. That sounded more likely than demonic creatures being real.

I let my heartbeat settle to a bearable pace, then turned around and began walking back up the hill toward the shrubbery.

I felt something staring at me, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I scanned the houses behind me, figuring someone had finally come home and was wondering what the homeless looking idiot was doing up on the hill, but I felt no eyes on me from that direction.

I turned back toward the shrubbery, and through a tiny gap in the leaves I could see the deer perched on the hill. Deer can’t see very well, but that thing was definitely making eye contact with me, and when I took a step toward it, it barked.

I threw myself to the ground, which I’m still not sure why I did, but then I went, “Fuck you, demon,” got back up, charged into the bushes, bolted up the hill, and started chasing after it.

It ran ahead of me at a speed that was clearly nowhere near its limit, and it let out a succession of shorter barks that felt almost mocking in tone, like it was laughing at me.

I lost sight of it about halfway up the hill when the incline became so steep I had to climb on my hands and knees.

Reaching the top, I scanned for the demon deer and locked eyes with it. It had already made it to the top of an even taller hill, and it was glaring at me menacingly.

It barked again, and I began walking toward it.

Something inside me screamed to look at my feet, and I did, and saw that I was just about to step into a massive hole in the ground. I realized what was happening just in time and awkwardly stumbled sideways and fell over.

I looked down into the hole and saw that it was some kind of bunker, probably from the Cold War, or maybe even from the occupation.

The adrenaline powering my fight against the demon deer was wearing off, and I could feel dread creeping over me. It started in my extremities and slowly worked its way upward through my limbs. In another minute or so I knew I would panic if I didn’t get out of there.

I yelled at the demon deer and threw a branch at it, then hurled myself down the hill, tumbling through the shrubbery and landing in the field below.

I was safe.

I don’t know how long I stayed there in the grass looking up at the sun, but it was a while. I tried to process what had just happened and gauge how much of it had been my mind playing tricks on me, and how much had actually happened.

Not sure why I chased after it. I don’t think I wanted to hurt it. I think I just wanted to confront it.

I had managed to film some of my encounter with the demon deer, and when I showed it to people, it freaked them out. The kind of reaction I had seen before, when someone is confronted with something they don’t want to acknowledge might be real, so they quickly change the subject, and if you later remind them of it, they claim to have no recollection of seeing it at all.

So, I stopped bringing it up and archived the footage on one of my hard drives.

Over a year went by.

Then one day I heard a commotion outside my house. It sounded like someone was murdering a kitten, so I ran outside and saw a deer chasing one of my cats. I grabbed a rake and hurled it at the deer, and it did a backflip and retreated for a bit before charging at me.

I prepared myself to get the shit kicked out of me by a deer, but just as I was about to close my eyes and accept my fate, the deer stopped and reared up on its hind legs. It stomped around for a bit and headbutted the air a couple of times.

But it didn’t attack.

While it was doing its little dance, I got a better look at it. It had patchy fur, was making a weird raspy sound, and looked scared and malnourished.

A car passed by on the road near the house, spooking the deer, and it ran away.

The next day I was talking to my neighbor about something else, and I mentioned that a deer had attacked one of my cats. He asked if it had looked “right,” and I said it had looked patchy and malnourished.

He told me it was probably the wasting disease infecting the local deer population. Apparently, there’s a parasite that attaches itself to the inside of their throats, and as it grows it gradually blocks the deer’s ability to eat, then drink, then eventually breathe.

It had been ravaging the population over the last year, and during the final stages it could make them behave quite aggressively.

I asked why he had wanted to know what it looked like, and he explained that deer can also behave that way during mating season. On rare occasions they’ll attack people if they feel their territory is being threatened. It’s just not something we see very often in this country because there’s usually plenty of space, but elsewhere, especially in urban environments, it happens more frequently.

“You can usually tell if there’s an aggressive one nearby,” he said, “because it makes a sound a bit like a dog barking.”

Instantly, I was transported back to what had happened the year before.

The puzzle pieces fell into place.

I hadn’t been stalked by a cryptid mimicking a deer. I had trespassed into an animal’s territory during mating season, and it had warned me exactly the way nature intended it to.

The new development nearby had reduced its habitat by about ninety percent and cut it off from the wider forest. Its back had literally been against the wall, and it had simply been defending what little of its home remained.

I hope he found a doe that year. And I hope he eventually found a new home.

And that’s how these stories often go, in my experience.

The forest does something to your mind. Even when you consciously know you are safe, there is still a primal part of you that becomes hyper-alert when you are isolated. On some level it must interfere with your reasoning abilities, making unfamiliar things harder to rationalize and the urge to flee much stronger than it otherwise would be.

I have been in situations where I could tell isolation was impairing my judgment, and I think if I had seen that deer in my own yard it would have clicked instantly, but because I was alone out there, it became a cryptid.

I’m not saying there’s no possibility that undiscovered creatures exist. I’m not. But I think the vast majority of Bigfoot sightings and stories like that are people making bad judgment calls because their mental faculties are impaired by isolation and heightened senses.

I think if we return to the places where we had these encounters, we might discover there was nothing supernatural there at all.

Maybe your not-deer sighting was just like this one: a horny little buck telling you not to cockblock him.

I’m in this nondescript town in the middle of nowhere. I’m supposed to be on a boat, enroute back home to the island I live on, but there’s a storm brewing on the horizon, so I can’t leave. There are no establishments here. No shops, no restaurants, not even a hairdresser. There is nothing in this town. I’m confined to a boat club’s small gathering house for the entire weekend. Bored out of my skull, I start researching the local area’s history and find some things.

I read about the blue ghost seen out in the bog, the story of Alba 24 years old, and the fire that burned down the town 150 years ago. The locals back then thought it was arson, but they never caught the arsonist. Then I read about the skeleton from the Neolithic Age that was found about three kilometers north of town. She was discovered inside a dolmen, and I decide to hike out to see where she was found, because that sure as hell beats sitting on an uncomfortable couch watching Netflix on my laptop.

(A dolmen is a Neolithic grave site and landscape marker.)

Off I go.

I trek through the rolling hills of the Mid-Jutland countryside in the middle of a sandstorm, and I take a turn onto a road leading toward a village that is really just three houses. Beyond it, the road turns from asphalt to gravel to dirt path, and then I see something.

It’s not the dolmen from the Neolithic era that I was on my way to visit.

It’s a burned-down house.

I pause for a moment. I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to remember, but I don’t.

I continue toward the dolmen and eventually find it. I can see where the shoreline used to be, and how the dolmen once stood on it, but still high enough in the landscape that people in small boats could have used it for navigation.

A little farther down toward the fjord there’s a small harbor. A dozen or so Mellerup boats, the kind the town is famous for, are anchored there. What’s special about them is that they only sit three centimeters beneath the water’s surface, so they can take off and dock practically anywhere. In waters like these, where there are no waves, they’re perfect for getting around. Back in the day, locals rowed them or used small sails, but today teenagers bolt massive engines onto them that tilt the boats forty-five degrees upward when they sail.

Then I turn around to see if I can spot the dolmen from the harbor, and I can’t. Trees and shrubbery block the view.

But a little ways off to my left there’s something the trees aren’t covering.

A house. Or what’s left of one.

At some point the owners must have wanted a better view of the fjord, so they cut down the trees around the property, and now it’s giving me a clear view of what I swear are still-smoldering ruins of a burned down cottage.

And then I remember.

The fire all those years ago.

This fire obviously can’t be connected to the incident 150 years ago, but it’s still a weird coincidence that there was just another fire in a town famous for unsolved arson cases.

I approach the burned down cottage.

Something in my gut tells me this was arson, so I start looking for evidence that it wasn’t.

The boiler is intact. It didn’t explode or catch fire. The damage is external.

None of the space heaters around the property look like the cause of a fire either.

Then I notice the glass.

There are shards scattered across the deck and on the north and east sides of the property. That suggests the windows shattered outward due to the fire raging inside.

But there are no shards on the south side.

Inside the ruins near the south wall, however, I find glass fragments of a completely different shape. Long, narrow shards.

The kind created when something is thrown through a window.

Not the kind created by heat blast.

This could theoretically have been firefighters breaking a window to gain entry.

Except I checked.

By the time firefighters arrived, the house was already fully engulfed.

That means the windows would already have blown out on their own, and firefighters would have focused on containing the blaze, not entering the structure.

This was arson.

And I think it’s only the latest case in a string of fires stretching back 150 years.

As impossible as that sounds.

I should probably explain where I am and how I got here.

A friend of the family, Brian, sent me a message saying he’d bought a sailboat for 150 euros and that he and a friend were going to get it ready and sail it back to the island where we live. But his friend backed out of the trip at the last minute, so he asked if I had time to go.

Of course I did.

Five days later we’re sitting on the ferry on our way to the mainland. Brian tells me that his uncle Erland was originally supposed to come along, but ever since he had a heart attack, he’s become nervous about being at sea, so he pulled out of the trip.

Brian says he would have gone by himself, but because of his own heart episode not too long ago, he thought it would be best not to spend that many hours alone in a place where there is no help to get.

I can only agree.

Erland is supposed to pick us up on the mainland and drive us down to Mellerup, just across the border into Mid-Jutland.

Except Erland isn’t the one driving.

He’s there, but his friend Lars is behind the wheel.

See, Erland is a drunk. A serious drunk.

It’s 7:30 in the morning when we meet up with him, and he is absolutely plastered. He hasn’t emptied the trunk of his car and seems surprised that we brought luggage, apparently having forgotten why he’s giving us a ride in the first place.

So, we awkwardly cram backpacks, emergency suits, gas canisters, and ourselves into the back seat while Erland parks himself in the passenger seat and Lars drives.

There’s a bottle of orange juice between Erland’s feet that he keeps sipping from, and every time he opens it the entire car smells like vodka. The smell only disappears for five or ten minutes at a time whenever he rolls down the window to smoke another cigarette. He smoked at least ten during the one-hour drive that somehow took three hours because they decided it would be best to take a “shortcut” through the countryside.

The drive itself was mostly unremarkable. It’s one of those stretches of country where everything looks the same and it’s hard to imagine why anyone would live there.

Lars did tell an interesting story as we passed by a castle called Lindenborg.

He said that when he was a child in the 1980s, he was fishing in the river nearby when he and some other people saw a snake in the water that was at least three meters long. The snake was never caught, and nobody ever reported a giant snake missing, so the story became a local mystery.

What Lars didn’t know is that giant snakes have supposedly been seen in that area as early as the medieval era.

Lindenborg translates roughly to Snake Fortress in Old Norse, and lindorme are mythical creatures from the Viking Age that heroes slew to save princesses. Local newspapers have reported encounters like his since at least the 1700s, and the last sighting I could find happened sometime in the 2000s.

The man had no idea what Lindenborg meant, or that the area was known for stories like that, so I completely believe he saw something in the water that wasn’t supposed to be there.

I don’t think it was a runaway python.

But what did he see?

I don’t know.

Probably something rational.

Still, I’d like to go back there one day and investigate properly.

I mentally snap back and realize I’m still trapped in a car with these two colorful characters, and somehow, we’ve managed to get lost despite having both a driver and a navigator.

I guess the navigator typed in the wrong address between gulps of spicy orange juice.

My patience is being tested.

I know I’m out of touch, and it’s not just because I live abroad a lot of the time.

There’s a concept in Denmark called Outer Edge Denmark. It refers to areas of the country that are geographically isolated and economically deprived. Læsø where I’m from is about as geographically isolated as you can get. It’s in the middle of the sea, and when I was a kid we watched Swedish television because the broadcast tower in Gothenburg was closer than the one in Aalborg.

We like to think of ourselves as part of Outer Edge Denmark because we are literally the outer edge of Denmark.

But even though we have the highest unemployment rate in the country and among the lowest average salaries, and corruption that would make an eastern European bureaucrat blush, people around here somehow feel less poor. Not just economically, but socially.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood growing up poor, but I never ate pasta with ketchup for dinner, and I never really felt poor. People where I’m from are resourceful. Everyone I know can cook at least one great meal from scratch, and we’re deeply involved in our communities. Our population is so small that you grow up around people from every walk of life, and those people become lifelong friends.

So, when you meet people who are from the outer edge of Denmark socially, it’s a culture shock.

You’re suddenly confronted with an alternate version of yourself. A version shaped by a different environment.

These people had the same opportunities I had, and in some cases even better ones, because they weren’t separated from the mainland by the sea, and yet they seem far more lost.

Closer to the ugly stereotype of poverty.

It’s difficult to explain, but they feel like people who have experienced less love. Like they’re disconnected from their communities. Like they inherited a kind of negativity from their surroundings.

Where I’m from, that generational negativity doesn’t exist.

While I’m zoning out and half-listening to another conversation about how terrible the government is, we finally arrive.

If we’d taken the motorway, we would have been here by nine.

It’s already eleven.

Then the second culture shock hits.

I’m used to small towns. The island capital where I live has a population of 400 people. But it’s still a real town. We have municipal services, a large grocery store, four restaurants, a movie theater, and a handful of shops.

Mellerup has almost nothing.

Two churches. Two schools. A ferry dock. A boathouse.

That’s it.

Compared to this place, my hometown feels like a metropolis.

But we’re not going to be here long.

Right?

We arrive at Mellerup Harbor, and the sellers show up soon after.

Something immediately feels off.

They told us there was a pump onboard. There isn’t.

They neglected to mention that all the electronics are fried, meaning we can’t sail at night because we have no depth sensor and no lights.

They insist the boat was on the water last year, but it clearly wasn’t. The lines are green with algae and practically fused to the hull. The straps meant to secure them rotted away years ago.

This boat hasn’t been out this decade by the looks of it, and later some locals confirm as much.

Still, it’s an incredible deal for the price, and the sellers help us mount the motor and seem like decent enough guys otherwise. So, we ignore the inconsistencies, thank them, and they leave.

Lars and Erland leave too.

Now it’s just us.

People from the local boat club start showing up one by one, and they’re all unbelievably friendly. They tell us we’re free to use their facilities, and that generosity ends up saving the trip.

I’d assumed we’d arrive, rig the sails, launch the boat, and leave immediately.

But the crane isn’t coming until tomorrow.

We’re just here early to make sure everything works.

We get the sails up quickly, inspect the hull, and go through the boat. It’s old and worn down, but it’s seaworthy. We can absolutely sail it home.

We just have to be careful.

No storms, because we don’t have a pump.

No night sailing, because we don’t have lights.

And no relying on electronics, because there aren’t any.

Then I notice darkness in the horizon.

It looks like there is a storm brewing out there, and I swear I can see it moving towards us.

We’re not going home tomorrow, are we?

We finish up and head over to the boat club to talk with the locals.

Across the fjord I spot an overturned sailboat and ask about it.

They tell me the owner anchored it offshore because he didn’t want to pay harbor fees. Then a storm hit, the anchor snapped, and the boat smashed into the shoreline and flipped over.

It’s taken on so much mud and water that it can’t be moved, and because it’s not obstructing freight traffic into Randers, the municipality simply left it there.

Now it’s part of the landscape.

Then I notice another boat.

A wooden ship. It didn’t catch me eye because it’s a wooden ship, though that’s unusual enough, but because it isn’t moving.

The mast doesn’t sway at all.

Then I realize why.

It’s sitting on the seabed.

One of the club members explains that it belongs to a man who’s been banned from every harbor in the region for refusing to pay docking fees. The ship has taken on water, and there’s a pump inside powered by a tiny windmill mounted to the mast.

As we’re discussing it, we watch the owner row out, walk around onboard for a few minutes, then row back to shore.

That ship is never leaving the fjord again.

Within a year it’ll split apart and sink for good.

Brian tells me that Erland used to own a ship just like it.

It met the same fate.

I’d actually heard that story before.

Years ago, when I lived near Aalborg, there was a patch of blackberry bushes and my brother and I used to go there to gather berries to make homemade liquor. It was behind a marina, and one day I got chatting with a man who showed me a wreck sitting at the bottom of the harbor and told me the story of some idiot who let it sink.

The idiot was Erland.

The storm is even closer now.

Dinner time.

We order kebabs from the next town over, and I get a good laugh listening to Brian and the Middle Eastern owner struggle to understand each other’s accents over the phone.

It’s good kebab in exactly the way cheap small-town kebab should be.

Afterward we walk down to the town’s closest thing to an attraction: Denmark’s shortest ferry route.

The crossing takes five minutes.

The ferry can carry maybe three cars depending on size.

As we approach, the ferry docks, and since it’s the final crossing of the day, the captain invites us aboard to take a look around. He tells us about the route’s history and how the operation survives financially.

Apparently, it’s Denmark’s oldest ferry route, transporting people across the fjord for over 400 years.

We head back to the harbor afterward. Brian goes to bed early while I stay up in the clubhouse researching the town.

The boat club members have generously agreed to let us be the first boat craned into the water tomorrow. It still looks unlikely we’ll actually leave because of the weather, but they want us ready in case the storm clears.

I hope it does.

Still, I continue researching the town, so I’ll at least have something to do if we end up stranded another day.

By the time I finally go to sleep, the storm is directly overhead.

The noise is deafening. Ropes slam against masts all across the harbor, creating this endless metallic clanging in the darkness.

But I’m exhausted.

I insisted Brian take the larger cabin partly because he’s older than me, but mostly because I sleep better in confined spaces. I crawl into the tiny bunk beneath the deck and pass out almost immediately.

By first light the crane has already arrived.

We lower the boat into the water and prepare it for departure.

Then we wait.

We help launch the other boats and afterward the club members invite us inside for breakfast.

I try to engage in small talk, but waiting around like this drives me insane.

Eventually I tell Brian I’m going for a walk, and I head out into the hills toward the Neolithic dolmen.

Which brings us back to where this story started.

As I’m walking around the ruins of the burned down cottage looking for any evidence that can disprove arson, I think about the big fire 150 years ago, and I know in my gut that it’s connected to this recent fire.

Midnight. Thursday, September 14th, 1899.

Farmer Christian Søndergård is jolted awake. He knows something is off but can’t figure out what. Then he looks out his window and sees a faint glow coming from the barn of his neighbor, wagon driver Jens Nielsen.

He jumps out of bed, wakes his family, and still in their nightclothes they run over to sound the alarm.

But by then the fire has already taken hold of the property.

Jens Nielsen escapes through a window with his wife and three children and manages to free his livestock before the flames spread further.

The fire spreads to the nearby farms. Christian Søndergård, the farmer who had run over to Jens Nielsen to warn him, his farm is engulfed in flames by the time they let the livestock out, and the neighbor on the other side P. Rasmussen, his farm caught fire at the same time, and because the farm had recently been occupied by a hoarder, they weren’t able to save any of their belongings because they couldn’t get to them in the mess and the chaos of the situation.

Then a small house nearby owned by a teacher catches fire, and he unfortunately didn’t have fire insurance, so he suffered financially as well mentally from the ordeal.

The neighboring house closest to him also burns down, and then a large farm next to that. Every building on the north side of Main Street catches fire before the flames leap across the road itself.

By now the local fire department has arrived, but the town pond has dried up because a nearby waterway was redirected years earlier.

There isn’t enough water to save thee town.

They try to contain the fire, so it doesn’t reach the town’s school, but the wind picks up and the school burns down.

Erhard Jensen’s farm connects the north side to the south side of the town, so fire fighters focus their efforts there, and while the farm does catch fire multiple times throughout the night, it never manages to take hold of the farm, and the south side of the town is safe.

By dawn, a 3^rd of the town had burned down, and the entire town center was gone. It was one of the most expensive insurance claims cases in the 19^th century, and while some chickens perished and most of the towns’ grain supply was destroyed, no human life was lost.

But the townsfolk weren’t relieved. This was the 4^th fire in 4 years, and it wouldn’t the last. The town would burn 10 more times over the next decade and a half.

The magistrate investigated, but the results were never made public. The townsfolk were certain that it was arson, but who to blame, they did not know.

I contacted the local archive to ask whether the fires were ever solved.

The closest authorities ever came was in 1917, when two boys confessed to accidentally starting a fire while playing with matches.

So, what does any of that have to do with a burned house in 2026?

While searching through the archive, I couldn’t do a keyword search the local newspaper’s archive hasn’t been properly digitized yet, so I couldn’t produce a list of articles about fires after the 1899 incident. But in most of the articles I read about the town in the decades that followed, there was this sense that the fires were still happening, but were rarely acknowledged and never directly talked about, almost like the townsfolk wanted to keep them a secret.

They’re referenced in an article about an old weird woman who lived in the woods in the early 1900s, and they’re mentioned again during the Nazi occupation, and then once more in the 1960s when locals began collecting stories about the town.

There is no doubt that the fires kept happening throughout the 20th century, and once local newspapers became digitized on the 1st of January 2001, they could no longer be kept quiet.

12th June 2001
A fire erupts at a children’s home in the village of Mellerup. The ten children living there, along with the night watchman, make it out safely.

The fire is still burning by the time the incident is reported in the news, so no investigation has been conducted yet.

13th August 2003
A 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, both living at a children’s home in Mellerup, get into an argument that escalates into shoving. The boy follows the girl to her room and punches her.

Later that night he wakes up after midnight because his ear hurts. He gets dressed and, armed with a deodorant can and a lighter, climbs out of his window. After wandering around for a while, he unscrews the fuel cap on the school bus and attempts to set fire to the tank, but without much success.

Afterward, he goes to the girl’s window, sprays it with deodorant, and sets it on fire. He returns to his own room, and later goes to the bathroom where he encounters the night watchman extinguishing the flames. The girl is rescued from her room and suffers no injuries.

The boy is sentenced to live at a secure institution until his mental state can be evaluated.

29th January 2013 – 09:53
Randers Fire Department is called out to a fire at a children’s home. By the time firefighters arrive, the fire has already been extinguished by employees.

7th October 2015
Mellerup power plant is shut down after hay bales in a storage facility catch fire and damage electronic infrastructure. The cause of the fire remains unknown.

14th August 2016
On a Sunday afternoon, the power plant in Mellerup catches fire again, this time more severely.

Forty tons of hay bales catch fire, and it takes firefighters more than five hours to get the blaze under control.

Authorities suspect a mechanical failure.

6th January 2018 – 18:15
Firefighters are called out to Støvringgårdvej in Mellerup after reports of excessive smoke coming from a property.

Police and firefighters arrive at the scene and discover that a pile of wooden bricks has caught fire. Firefighters quickly bring the blaze under control, but have to drill a hole through the floor to ensure there are no embers beneath the floorboards. The owner of the house isn’t home, so firefighters smash a window to gain entry.

It is a neighbor who notices the smoke and calls emergency services after first attempting to investigate the source himself.

Fire department spokesperson Per Allan Nielsen says the fire may have self-ignited because the wooden bricks were moist.

18th March 2020 – 18:09
Police and firefighters are called to an abandoned house on Støvringgårdvej in Mellerup.

Firefighters extinguish the blaze quickly and no one is injured. Police suspect arson.

24th July 2021
East Jutland Police request witnesses to come forward after a property on Murhusbakken between Harridslev and Mellerup burns down. Arson is suspected.

27th March 2022 – 15:29
A fire erupts at a farm in Mellerup. By the time firefighters arrive, the thatched roof is already engulfed in flames.

29th May 2023
Near Mellerup, a barn full of hay bales catches fire. Firefighters from two stations are called in to get the blaze under control.

4th February 2026
A vacation home on Svinget Road between Uggelhuse and Mellerup burns to the ground. It is an old wooden house, so the fire spreads quickly. By the time firefighters arrive, the house is already fully engulfed in flames, according to operations chief Lasse Magnussen.

Firefighters extinguish the fire and leave the scene within an hour. No one is hurt.

And then there is the latest one.

The one I had a look at myself.

12th April 2026 – 22:30
A vacation home on Skalmstrupvej near Mellerup catches fire. Firefighters are called out and manage to contain the blaze, but the house burns down completely.

I take one last look at the burned-down house, then turn around and walk down the driveway leading back to the dirt road into town.

As I walk down the hill, trying and failing to shield myself from the sandstorm, I think about the arson cases.

The incidents obviously can’t be connected. An immortal arsonist terrorizing a town for the better part of two centuries would make for a sensational headline, but something tells me that isn’t what we’re dealing with here.

Still, there is something strange about this place and the fires.

If you look at almost any other place in the country, or in any country really, you’ll notice the arson rate per capita is much lower. Denmark sees somewhere between 500 and 1,500 arson cases a year. About 100 happen in the nearby regional capital of Aarhus, and around 20 in the nearby city of Randers. Those numbers are higher than Mellerup’s average of one fire every three years, but those cities have populations of 300,000 and 60,000 respectively, meaning their per capita arson rates are dramatically lower.

What separates the Mellerup fires from most other arson cases is that they aren’t sprees. Arsonists usually set a large number of fires within a short period of time and in the same area. There have been years where 100% of Randers’ arson cases were the work of a single person, like back in 2024.

The Mellerup fires are usually isolated incidents. If a fire is set in the same area more than once, it’s often months, if not years, later.

So I don’t think the town is somehow breeding arsonists, because if it were, there would be far more fires.

I snap out of my thoughts for a moment and realize I’m back in town. I’ve looked at the town from a distance plenty of times, but I haven’t properly walked through it. The storm seems to be clearing up, so we’re definitely leaving by first light tomorrow. If I want to get a proper look at the place, it’s now or never, and since there is absolutely nothing to see around here, it shouldn’t take long.

I walk past the old houses that survived the fires in the 1800s, and past the newer houses built on top of the ones that burned down. I pass what is genuinely one of the ugliest and saddest little churches I have ever seen in my life, and I wonder why the town has such a sad, ugly church. Then, a couple hundred meters further down the road, I find out why.

There is a free church here, established about a hundred years ago and dedicated to the teachings of Grundtvig.

He was a priest who accidentally killed religion in Denmark.

He wanted to reform the church and make it less corrupt, so he took all the good parts of Christianity; the community, the songs, the charity, the shared identity, and built a people’s movement around them. In doing so, he democratized the one thing that had kept the church powerful: its ability to gatekeep belonging.

Without that monopoly, church attendance collapsed. Within decades, congregations dwindled to less than a fraction of a fraction of what they once were, and today fewer than 20,000 people in this country sit in a church pew on Sundays.

That number is bullshit, by the way.

The church stopped properly counting attendance when it dropped to around 20,000, and that was a long time ago. A lot of old people have died since then.

In a few places, apparently including this one, so-called free congregations sprang up. Some felt the national church was no longer spreading the word of God properly. Some formed for more questionable reasons. And some, like this one, wanted to combine Grundtvig’s teachings with Christianity.

They call themselves The Elected Congregation, and unlike regular churches, where the congregation elects a council that then approves a priest, they elect the priest directly.

They actually seem to be doing good work. Their church is a nice little Gothic building that’s well maintained, and according to their website they host a lot of community events and seem particularly fond of holding concerts in the church.

While I’m standing there taking pictures, I notice members of the congregation staring at me from the corner of my eye. I’m used to it by now, but it never stops being weird when a gang of Jesus fans in matching outfits watches me from a distance.

I’m guessing they’ve just finished some kind of event over at the rectory, and I understand why a long-haired man with a large beard appearing out of nowhere might seem funny at a site dedicated to a guy who looked exactly like that.

I start heading back toward the harbor, and as I walk down what was once a bustling main street, I begin thinking about the fires again.

Maybe the explanation is something as mundane as the fires inspiring bored kids to set more fires. Maybe the fires in Mellerup are a social contagion.

One fire was set in 1896, and it was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in town. So some kids set another in 1897, and another in 1898, and so on and so on.

The reason the fires sometimes seem to stop for a decade or two could simply be that one generation of children realizes how serious arson actually is, and then years later a new generation hears stories about the fires from their parents and becomes fascinated by them.

That would also explain why most of the arson cases, at least in modern times, occur in abandoned houses, near landmarks outside town, in abandoned factories on weekends, and in forests. Those are all places children tend to gather, places hidden from the eyes of adults.

Mellerup is full of quiet little spots for kids to hang around in, and the town has suffered significant depopulation over the last thirty years, leaving behind plenty of vacant properties.

And if there’s one thing the town doesn’t lack, it’s children.

It might not have a grocery store, a bar, a hotel, or even a hairdresser. But it does have a private school, a boarding school, a special-needs school, and a home for children who require 24/7 supervision.

And it has boredom.

Boredom is how I accidentally started a fire myself when I was ten years old, after saving leftover fireworks from New Year’s Eve and lighting them in a dry summer field.

The only three fires set inside the town itself were all connected to the home for children requiring supervision, and every other fire was within biking distance of it, usually on days when the children were under lighter supervision.

That’s probably the answer, a self igniting urban legend, pun intended.

I make it back to the harbor. The locals have gone home for the day, and only Brian remains in the boathouse. He’s even more restless than I am, and we order one final durum before he once again heads to bed early while I once again stay up late in the boathouse.

Around midnight I head back to the boat and get a couple hours of sleep.

I wake suddenly because of a strange sensation.

It’s below freezing.

I must have shifted against the hull in my sleep, and what woke me was the frost literally hitting the ship.

I reposition myself in my tiny cubbyhole and let the gentle rocking of the waves lull me back to sleep.

A couple of hours later Brian wakes me and tells me to come have some coffee. I do, and then I have another cup, because you can never have just one coffee in the morning.

We head back to the boat and cast off just as dawn breaks.

The fjord is narrow and shallow, so we have to sail carefully between the buoys or we’ll run aground. An hour later we reach the mouth of the fjord, enter the open sea, and set course for home.

In twelve hours, we’ll be docking at Vesterø Harbor, and I can’t wait to be back home.

I turn around for one final look at the town I will probably never see again, the town where all those friendly people live that I will never forget.

And just before it disappears behind a hill, I notice a thin column of smoke rising somewhere inland.

Another fire, maybe.

Or maybe someone is just burning leaves.

In Mellerup it’s hard to tell the difference.

In Ross-on-Wye, in the county of Hereford, lived a tall, ugly, and gaunt man who always seemed so sad. Most people avoided him and avoided passing by his cottage if they could, but on certain days someone from a village in the county would come to fetch him because he had a special task to perform. When the body of a deceased person was carried from their home and onto the funeral cart, a loaf of bread would be passed over the body and given to the gaunt man, and he would eat it. Then a bowl of beer would be passed over the body, and he would drink it, and afterward he would be handed a sixpence.

With those three rites performed, the gaunt man had taken upon himself the unresolved guilt of the deceased, and they could enter the afterlife unburdened, for the man was a sin-eater.

This practice was supposedly common in Wales and the English counties across the border, but folklorists have had trouble finding sin-eaters mentioned in historical records.

The reason for that, I think, can be found in how a sin-eater was created. In 1906 an old woman told a story from her youth about how a woman in her village had become a sin-eater. She had overdosed on poppy tea and was so close to death that a priest was summoned to give her absolution. The rite was performed, but the woman didn’t die. Since she had been given absolution, she was now free of her own sins and could take on other people’s. She did this by consuming bread and salt that had been laid on the shrouds of the dead, and after the act she was given a sum of thirty pennies for her troubles.

Becoming a real sin-eater was a rare phenomenon, so if one wasn’t around, the town would make do by paying a poor person to perform the rite, or worse, tricking a homeless person into eating the sins by offering them bread and salt without disclosing that it had been resting on the shroud of a corpse. As a result, it became common knowledge among tramps and wanderers not to accept hospitality from houses where a death had recently occurred.

I think the shame of this practice made it hard to track down evidence of it, simply because i don’t think a lot of people willingly wrote down that they took part in it.

People of less morally objectionable character found another way. Instead of forcing one person to take on the sins of the deceased, the whole community would perform the rite of sin-eating. That way, no single person would take on the sins alone, and no one would enter the afterlife burdened by them. It became commonplace for mourners to consume bread and cake in the presence of a coffin and wash down the sins of the deceased with ale or wine.

A Herefordshire farmer in the nineteenth century is quoted as saying, “You must drink, sir, it’s like the sacrament. It’s to kill the sins of my sister.” And a farmer’s daughter in Derbyshire once said, “When you drink wine at a funeral, every drop you drink is a sin which the deceased has committed. You thereby take away the dead man’s sins and bear them yourself.”

While I don’t think we can truly take on the sins of other people, I do see how sharing a final meal with someone, even after they’re gone, can be meaningful. Much of human culture revolves around food, and many of our clearest memories happen around a dinner table. So it feels fitting that our last memory of a person might be the act of sharing food in their presence, taking a small piece of who they were, and carrying it with us for the rest of our lives.

In the early 2000s, two security guards were working the night shift at a department store. One of them was new in the job, and his more seasoned colleague had been showing him the ropes. Even though they had just met a few days earlier, the two of them were becoming fast friends. They were messing about in the break room, playfully fighting over the box of pastries the day shift had left behind when a beep from the security office cut their break short.

They went to check the cameras and saw that a motion sensor activated camera had picked up two drunk guys loitering outside one of the main doors. They didn’t look like they were going to cause any trouble, so the two guards debated whether it was even worth going out there to tell them to move along.

Eventually they agreed that it would be best if they went and dealt with it, because if they didn’t and those guys broke a window or accidentally tripped the alarm, the two of them were going to be buried in paperwork until the next night shift.

The older of the two later stated in an interview that he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary as he and the guard he named as Sunny were making their way to the front door. They chatted about having to deal with the drunkards, and Sunny mentioned that while the working hours weren’t ideal, he was enjoying the job well enough and was planning to stick around for the foreseeable future.

They made it outside and politely asked the drunks if they could move the party somewhere else. The men obliged without causing any fuss, and within a minute or two they had stumbled halfway down the street and out of view, all while singing some song that they didn’t seem to remember all the lyrics to.

Security cameras confirms this part of the story. Upon reviewing the footage investigators later confirmed that it shows the two guards patting each other on the back and having a good laugh about the drunks. Then they head back inside and begin walking towards the security office.

Nothing out of the ordinary, until something was.

According to the older guard, this is what happened next:

“Sunny realized there were still snacks left in the break room, and he began running ahead. He joked that if he didn’t get there first, I was going to eat all of them before he could have any. He ran about 15 meters ahead of me, and then he tripped. I distinctly remember the little sound he made when he realized he was going to fall over, that little half-cry, half-laugh we all make when gravity doesn’t agree with us.

But instead of hitting the ground, he just vanished.

I thought Sunny was playing a trick on me, that he had been taking some stage magic lessons and was pulling some kind of prank using an optical illusion. So, I yelled out, commending him on pulling off his disappearance so well. But I didn’t get any reply. I yelled again and still got no reply.

I started to get creeped out by the situation, so I hastily made my way to the security office and checked the footage. To my horror, I realized my eyes hadn’t been playing a trick on me, and Sunny wasn’t a skilled illusionist. Clear as day, I saw him in the playback run ahead of me, trip, and then vanish. The best way I can describe it is that it looked like he fell through an invisible doorway or trapdoor.”

Several people were shown the CCTV footage, and they all confirmed seeing what the older guard had described. Sunny ran ahead, tripped, and then vanished. Initially as freaked out as the older guard, the others quickly rationalized what they had seen. Surely the camera had just dropped some frames, and that’s why Sunny appeared to disappear out of plain sight.

Their boss said he got a call from Sunny. He explained that the job just wasn’t for him and that he had decided to move on.

After that, the others started giving the older guard strange looks whenever he brought up the situation, so he stopped.

But then something weird happened.

“The freakiest thing happened about a week after his disappearance,” the guard explained. “While working the night shift, I got a call on the work phone. That in itself is unsettling, because in all my years working there, I could count on one hand the number of calls I received on that thing.

It was an unknown number. Normally I wouldn’t answer one of those, but it was the work phone, and the rules were that if it rang, we had to answer.

I picked it up, but all I heard was static. As my ears started to adjust to it, I could hear a voice through all the noise. They were saying something, but I couldn’t make out what.

Something in my gut told me that it was Sunny, calling me from wherever he was.

I told my coworkers about the call, and they all agreed that it was creepy, but they obviously weren’t as freaked out as I was. I stopped bringing up Sunny in conversation after that. It was clear the others didn’t want to hear him anymore and just wanted to move on from the incident.

I don’t think about it much myself anymore, but if someone brings up the paranormal or asks if I have a bizarre story from my time working nights, I always think of Sunny and that night.”

When I initially looked at the footage, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But then I came across an unrelated interview that had been filmed in the department store at the exact same spot where Sunny disappeared.

In the CCTV footage from the night the vanishing, there is what looks like a smudge or stain on the ground where Sunny disappears. In fact, it looks like Sunny trips over the smudge and then vanishes.

The stain is gone by the time the interview takes place a few weeks later.

I rationalized the discrepancy, thinking that the stain had been cleaned up after the incident with Sunny. But something in my gut told me to investigate it, and I gained access to the entire file of security footage from that day.

In the footage you can see that the smudge isn’t there when Sunny and the older guard are confronting the two drunks outside. It materializes as they’re walking back to the office.

It’s not a smudge or a stain.

It’s a shadow.

And it disappears after Sunny vanishes.

It wasn’t the first time a shadow took someone.

About seventy years earlier, a farmer and his family living in the same area were finishing dinner. It was July, so by the time they were done clearing the table, it was still bright outside, and they decided to go for a stroll through a nearby grassy field.

The wife and children were picking flowers, and the farmer was walking a little ways ahead by himself when he suddenly cried out to his family:

“Where are you? I can’t see anything! Everything’s gone dark!”

His wife looked up to see what he was talking about, but she couldn’t see him. His children thought he was joking, so they ran over to where he had been moments earlier to find him. They giggled with anticipation as they searched the area, fearing and hoping he would jump out at them from his hiding place.

But he didn’t.

They searched the entire field, and he was nowhere to be found. Yet they could hear him.

During their search, his whimpering cries for help turned into blood-curdling screams, growing more terrified with each plea for his family to come find him.

They never did.

The wife sent their son to fetch his grandfather. The grandfather fetched the neighbors, and the neighbors fetched the town. They walked through the field in a line, all holding hands as to not miss an inch in their search, but the farmer was never found.

Day turned into night, and one day into two, then three. His voice grew hoarser and hoarser, and his family became more frantic. Even though they could hear him, he didn’t seem able to hear them.

Still, someone always stayed near the spot where he had disappeared, just to keep him company.

By the fourth day his voice had grown so weak that it was barely audible.

By the fifth day it disappeared.

And it never came back.

The farmer has never been seen since.

The neighbors later said they believed no one ever built a home on that plot of land because of the strangeness surrounding it. Some even claimed they would occasionally see a shadow in the middle of the field, despite there being no trees or terrain tall enough to cast one.

I’ve read many of the accounts about the shadow spots that make people vanish, but the account that frightens me the most comes from one of Peter Underwood’s books, the famous ghost hunter from the British Isles.

He met with a man from a tiny village near Amlwch on Ynys Môn, the largest island off the coast of Wales, and the man told him a story about his grandmother.

My grandmother Suzannah lost her mother when she was very young, and because her father was away often, she stayed home and took care of her younger siblings for several more years than was common back then. So, by the time she left to serve as a maid at a manor, she was an adult and had a good head on her shoulders, which made what happened to her all the more believable.

Back in those days, maids lived at their place of employment, and they were only allowed one day off each week to visit their families. Although it wasn’t really a day off, like others in her position, Suzannah still had to help with chores at home, but she enjoyed it because she still got to spend time with her family.

Her day off was usually Monday. So one early Sunday evening, when she was released from her duties at Tyddyn Mawr near Bryn-y-Mor, she walked out through the back gate and followed the path that would take her to her family’s home in Llys Dulas.

She walked the path as she had many times before.

Then suddenly her vision went black.

It wasn’t like the darkness of nighttime where you can still sense things around you and the stars provide some light. It was total blackness. She later described it as if she had been shoved inside a closed box completely devoid of light.

Paralyzed and unable to move any part of her body, and feeling as if her feet were glued to the ground, she could do nothing but scream.

She screamed and screamed, but she couldn’t hear anything in the darkness aside from her own voice.

It felt like she had been screaming for an eternity, though it was probably only a few minutes.

When she stopped to catch her breath, she heard a voice.

It was the voice of her master from Tyddyn Mawr.

“Suzannah, Suzannah, are you there?”

Overjoyed to hear him, she shouted back:

“Yes! Yes, I’m here! Come and help me, I’m here!”

“Where? I can’t see you!” he replied, frantically searching the area where the sound was coming from.

“It’s all dark! I don’t know where I am!” she shouted.

But he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t even see the black patch that Suzannah later said she had noticed on the path before everything went dark.

Then suddenly she was no longer trapped in the darkness. She could see the manor and her master, and he could see her too.

Moments earlier there had been nothing but empty landscape before him.

Then she appeared.

They hurried back to the manor to tell the mistress what had happened. She didn’t believe them. At first, she accused Suzannah of playing a trick on her master, and then she accused both of them of conspiring together to fool her.

But her master was adamant.

“I could see everything all around me, the fields and the footpath were completely empty. The sun was shining everywhere. I could hear the girl shouting and crying so close, as if she were just yards in front of me, and yet she wasn’t there!”

He struck his fist into his palm to emphasize his words.

“Then there she was! One minute emptiness, then she appeared exactly where I was looking.”

All three stood silent for quite some time. If thinking made noise, the room would have been louder than a locomotive. But none of them could find a rational explanation for what had happened.

As the days passed, they spoke of it less and less, and then eventually, not at all.

This is the only story I have found where someone who disappeared into the shadow made it back. It is eerie that it matches the details of the earlier story almost perfectly.

The stories might seem unrelated. The first two took place in North Carolina, and the last one in Wales. But while the ocean separates them today, those lands were once part of the same mountain chain.

Maybe something ancient, something beyond human comprehension, still lingers in both places.

Intrigued by the story, I decided to walk the route from Tyddyn Mawr to Llys Dulas myself.

I drove from Llandudno to Bryn-y-Mor. I couldn’t find anything that looked like a manor, but there was a path leading from Bryn-y-Mor to Llys Dulas, and I began walking.

Twenty minutes later I was at the other end of it.

I walked back the way I came, and since I’m alive to write this, I think it’s safe to say that if there ever was a shadow on the ground that could transport someone into a black void, it’s gone now.

On the island of Ynys Môn, known as Anglesey in English, sits Llanallgo church. Like many other churches in Wales, it’s named after a saint with little connection to the building or the people that congregate in it on Sundays. It was built hundreds of years before the pope declared its namesake a saint so it may once have had another name, and if its construction year is to be believed, it was built right in the middle of a thriving heathen iron age settlement decades before Christianity would make it to the region. Meaning it was not always a church, at least not a Christian one.

If a ship out in the bay had not made good time and arrived ahead of schedule, and if the winds in the mountains hadn’t unexpectedly picked up and changed direction, we would have never heard of Llanallgo. The tranquil life in the little church would have gone on like it had for a thousand years prior, an endless cycle of births, marriages and deaths to fill the pews of its small church house. But a ship out in the bay did make good time and arrived ahead of schedule, and the winds in the mountains did unexpectedly pick up and change direction, and because they did. I can tell you the fascinating story of The Tall Man Haunting.

October 1859, Bound for Liverpool, the magnificent clipper ship, Royal Charter glides past the village of Moelfre. Aboard it are four hundred people coming back from Australia and a cargo full of gold. The passengers were almost all miners from Britain who had joined the gold rush to Australia and they were returning home in triumph, each with their own personal fortune of gold. Some wore their money in body belts, others in pockets or purses, and gold coins and ingots lying in the safe room inside the ship, came to a value of 330,440 pounds, a vast fortune in 1859.

All the passengers were happy and excited, coming to the end of their two-month journey, and expecting to dock in Liverpool the next morning, but as the wind started to thrum in the rigging, and the seas became more turbulent, more than one of them stared up nervously at the gathering clouds. Darkness fell early. The night was thick and black, and at 10.00 pm the wind was reaching hurricane strength. Maneuvering the Charter became increasingly difficult. The waves were now mountainous, their tops sheered cleanly off by the wind, and the noise was so deafening that the crew on deck couldn’t shout loud enough to hear one another. Despite their best efforts, the crew could not stop the clipper from drifting towards the granite teeth of the Moelfire cliffs. Thirty-foot waves towered over the doomed ship and the crew worked tirelessly to anchor themselves against the storm, but over the next 5 hours, the cables anchoring the ship to safety snapped one by one. At 3 am, the final one snapped, and the Charter was driven onto the granite reefs, crashing violently to her end. The giant waves alternatively sucked her away then hurled her against the rocks with thunderous force.

Most of the women and children were below decks, sheltering in the warm and cosy saloons, but the passengers and crew on deck were thrown overboard. Some were drowned by the weight of the gold they were carrying, others by their heavy and cumbersome Victorian clothes, but the majority were killed by being smashed repeatedly against the rocks and the wreckage.

One man who miraculously survived, later said that he could see the mutilated bodies of his companions in the waves as they were dragged against the ship and over the deck, their remains pelting him and the ever decreasing number of survivors. The bodies rose from the waters distorted beyond belief, missing limbs and heads, some so badly mangled they didn’t even resemble people anymore.

As this was going on, the once beautiful clipper snapped like a dry stick, the two halves of the hull turning to face the oncoming sea, the waves sweeping along inside the exposed body of the ship, washing out and drowning the terrified women and the children trapped inside- none of them would survive that night. There were nearly five hundred people aboard the Royal Charter and only about forty people survived. The villagers of Moelfre sprang into action. They tied ropes around their waists, went into the tide and saved what few survivors made it off the ship alive. They carried them over slippery rocks and up the steep paths to the cottages. They put them in their own beds, tended to the injured, fed them, and did everything in their power to help.

The dead were carried to Llanallgo church. For days the tide continued to throw up eviscerated bodies, limbs and severed heads, all of which were taken up to the church and placed in the care of Reverend Stephen Roose Hughes.

They were all gently laid in rows on the floor of the church near the pulpit and must have made for a horrific scene. When the news broke, relatives of the missing trekked from all over the country, and for weeks, Moelfre was crammed with grieving people. The church became the focal point of those searching for loved ones, and those who couldn’t travel, wrote urgently to the Vicar for news, giving details of each person or child, eye color, hair length, clothes, tattoos, etc. and the Reverend Roose Hughes moved quietly amongst the pitiful remains trying to perform the nearly impossible task of identifying crushed and partial bodies, before he carefully numbered them, prior to numbering the graves in which they were solemnly buried.

When Charles Dickens visited Moelfre at the end of December that year, he was immensely impressed by the courtesy, courage and selfless dedication of the Vicar. He was told that a hundred and forty bodies were buried at Llanallgo, another thirty-four in the churchyard of his brother, also a Vicar, and many more in the churchyards alongside the coast, as the tides washed up the dead. Hundreds of people visited the little church and the vicarage of Llanallgo, and Reverend Hughes took on the task of comforting them, which he did with great gentleness and fortitude. He received over one thousand letters, and answered each and every one in detail, even sending money from his meagre stipend to those who had lost their breadwinners. With every letter and each word of comfort, Reverend Hughes gave something of himself both physically and spiritually, until he was completely worn out and, just over two years later, this good man died quietly by his fireside chair at the Rectory, at the age of forty-seven.

The tragedy put the town on the map and people began making the journey here from all over the country. Initially to pay their respects and to get a look at the cliffs that claimed so many lives, it was the Victorian era after all, and nothing was more interesting to the Victorians than the site of a massacre. But as the years went on, the story of the Royal Charter slowly faded into the background, and people began coming here to enjoy the peace and quiet, the pathways, the beaches, the fresh air, it became a holiday destination.

It was commonly accepted among the locals that the ghosts of their deceased ancestors would occasionally re-enact the rescue operation that had made their town so famous, every once in a while.

But there was also something else out there in the hills. People driving into town would spot a silent figure in their headlights, a tall man moving slowly through the graveyard, who would vanish if people stopped to see who it was. Sometimes he was seen walking from the church to the graveyard and sometimes walking between the graves themselves near the outer wall, but no one ever got a close enough look to see what he looked like.

Intrigued by the sightings of the spectre of a tall man tending to the graveyard in Llanallgo, author Peter Underwood invited his friend Mr. Roberts over for a cup of tea in front of the fire, and Mr. Roberts told him what he knew of the tall man.

The Rectory in Llanallgo used to employ a servant girl. She would stay in service until she became of age, and then she would leave and a younger one would come and take her place. There were three sisters who lived in the area, and they each in their turn, went to work at the Rectory one after the other. I knew their Aunt Margaret and I heard this story from her: The eldest girl Mair had been working there happily for a time, but one evening when she was carrying a hot water bottle upstairs to the Vicar’s bed, she came to an abrupt stop. She could feel something pressing against her chest, but when she looked down there was nothing to see, yet she was certain that she could feel the weight of a man’s head pressed against her chest. As she stood there frozen in shock, she noticed that she could hear slow tortured breathing all around her. Nothing was visible, the sound didn’t have a source, but she could hear it, and she could feel it, the man’s head against her chest. She snapped out of her paralysis and bolted up the stairs and threw the water bottle unto the Vicar’s bed and ran back to the stairs. She took pause, she listened, she looked down, but she couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t feel anything, except the hammering of her own heart. Everything was still and normal, so she took a deep breath and then she rapidly descended the stairs, this time pressing herself up against the railing as much as she could, to avoid crossing the path she took when going up.

She had the same terrifying experience many more times through out the week, but she kept her mouth shut. On her day off work she went to visit her family, and as she was helping hang out the laundry, she confided in her mother what had happened. As Mair finished recounting her experiences with the spectre, and how she had learned to dodge it by keeping close to the wall on the stairs and going up and down as fast as she could, her mother said she intended to go with Mair back to the Rectory and explain to the Vicar that she couldn’t work there anymore, and why. But Mair knowing how precious her wages were to her family’s finances, shook her head and said she would like to keep working there. The two of them didn’t speak of it any further, as they both knew that Mair’s sisters would have to serve their time at the Rectory when they came of age, and knowing what they would have to deal with, wouldn’t do them any good. Mair went back and she continued working at the Rectory until she became of age. She encountered the spectre many times, and she was frightened many times, but apart from the nervous dread that overcame her each time, the spectre never harmed her in any way.

Her sisters also encountered the spectre, and when they came running home to tell their mother about it, Mair was there to reassure them that the spectre would never physically harm them.

What’s strange is that the spectre never seemed to harass the Vicar or his wife, or any of the Vicars or wives who would occupy the Rectory.

Sometime before Mair was in service, a woman named Nia Owens served at the house. During that time it was common for the Reverend to make house visits in the evening, and it was the house rule that as soon as the reverend came back from his evening visits, the maid must prepare his supper at once. One day Nia was out in the garden calling for the cat to come get his supper, and in the bright moonlit night she saw the reverend coming in through the back gate and walk through the back door. She immediately went inside and began setting the table in the dining room for supper. The reverend’s wife walked in the room and asked why on earth she was setting the table when the reverend wasn’t due back for another hour.

Nia replied that she had just seen him walk through the back door. The wife went into the hall and shouted asking if he was there, but no one replied. She shouted up the stairs, but no one replied.

Nia was sure she had seen a man walk through the back door, and she and the reverend’s wife came to the only logical conclusion that it must have been a burglar if not the reverend. When the reverend came home at his usual time, Nia repeated her story and did so with such conviction that the reverend searched every room for the would-be burglar, but besides the 3 of them, the Rectory was empty.

The last Vicar to stay at the Rectory was Canon Wooding who lived there with his sister. Due to other commitments he had to spend one month out of the year in Bangor. On a dark night his sister waved him goodbye at the front door, and then she retreated inside to warm herself up at the fireplace. She read until bedtime, and then she made her nightly round, locking doors and making sure the windows were tightly shut and turning off all the lights downstairs. She then began making her way upstairs to retire for the night, and like Mair many years ago, she felt something. Something pressing against her chest, and the cacophony of labored breaths. The shock of what was happening made her freeze on the spot, and when she looked down and saw that there was no head leaning against her chest, she turned and fled down the stairs, across the hall and into the front room, slamming and locking the door behind her. She listened for her would be assailant to come running at her, but there was nothing, just the hammering of her own heartbeat. She picked up the phone and called her brother, and with trembling voice she said: “oh come and get me- I can’t stay here- I can’t stay all night in this house!”

Canon asked what had happened, and his sister recounted the events that had just happened. He had trouble understanding as she became increasingly less coherent as the tale went on, but one thing he could make out for certain, were her repeated pleas for him to return and get her out of there.

An hour later when the Canon made it back to the house, his sister swore that she would never spend another night in that house, and she never did. He resigned, and at the hearing where he had to explain his resignation and decide who the next Vicar of Llanallgo should be, he stood up and declared: Llanallgo must never be a Rectory again.

He then told them about his sister’s experience, and how it had left her speechless for 3 weeks after the incident because of the shock, and he told them of the previous maids similar encounters and that he believed every word of them.

The committee was stunned. They knew the Canon’s sister to be a woman of sound mind, and the congregations in Llanallgo and the next parish over had been declining in numbers, so after much discussion, they made the decision to combine the two and put Llanallgo Vicarage up for sale.

The vicarage was bought by a couple from Manchester, the Clarke’s, and in the early 2000’s Peter Underwood went to visit them. Mr. Clarke had died some years prior, but Mrs. Clarke was still alive and well aware of the stories surrounding her home, and she is quoted as having said:

“I live here with my married daughter and grandchildren, and none of us have ever felt anything odd, but the house is so full of children, all noisy and busy with computers and TV, I’m sure no self-respecting ghost would be seen dead here.”

The common theory is that the tall man that haunted the Llanallgo Rectory was the spectre of Reverend Hughes, who in death sought the comfort that he himself had given to so many in life, and that when a new family moved in, one that was happy, he too found happiness and moved on. But I don’t think that’s the case.

Let’s go back to Mr. Roberts, because he had more stories.

Many years before the Royal Charter made Llannallgo church famous, a Reverend Parry was the Vicar there. The church needed restoration and enlarging, and during the renovation, the altar which had occupied the same site for centuries was moved, and below it, the builders found an ancient decayed coffin, and in it was a skeleton that judging by its length must have been the remains of a very tall man. If someone was buried under the altar, it must have been their wish, and the bones should have been placed back where they found and covered up again and left alone. But Mr. Parry took them away and had them buried elsewhere, and from that day on he was haunted for the rest of his life. Shortly after the incident he wouldn’t go out alone in the dark, and he became convinced that someone was following him, and he was always looking over his shoulder. As the years passed, he seemed to age faster than he should, and the years of constant worrying began to take their toll on him, and he died a very young man.

In Scandinavia there we have sites called Giant Graves. As far as anyone can remember they’ve always been there. There are holes in the ground that contain the remains of very large skeletons. Not so large you would call it a giant, but larger than a human, at least for the time. The only thing we know about the giant graves is that you do not disturb the bones, because if you do, you will be haunted by the tall man. If you become haunted by the tall man, the only way to break the curse is to put the bones back where you found them or abandon your home. And I think that’s what happened. Reverend Parry moved the bones of the tall man, and the tall man haunted the families of every Vicar to call the place home since that day. His attacks on the women who tended to the house, could have been misunderstood attempts to ask for their help to find his bones so they could put back, and when he wasn’t haunting them, he was out in the graveyard looking for them himself, and when the Rectory was abandoned, his curse was lifted.

As I alluded to in the very beginning, when this church was built it probably wasn’t originally a Christian construction, it was something else, something older.

When they were enlarging Llaneugrad Church over in the next parish, a man who was digging the foundation for the extension came across a lot of human bones. He called the Vicar over and asked what he should do with them, and the Vicar replied: Leave them exactly where they are, don’t disturb them in any way, whatever you do, if you want to stay free of being haunted, those bones must be left in peace.

Because while the people of Ynys Mon might not be aware that they live in the ruins of an older civilization that predate the Christianization of the island by thousands of years, they still instinctively know that you do not disturb the bones of the tall man.

On a hill overlooking the sleepy seaside town of Llandudno sits Marl Hall. It has been abandoned for years, but back in the 1800s it was a thriving hotel. It was close by Llandudno Junction, a station where many people would arrive and wait for their connecting trains to take them to their final destinations. Because it was the 1800s, such waits could be long, sometimes even overnight, and many chose to spend that time at Marl Hall. Many did, but no matter how busy it became, there was always one room that remained vacant.

Not because the owners did not want to rent it out, but because they couldn’t. not after what had happened to the last occupant who stayed there.

For years, guests who rented the room, regardless of how long they had intended to stay, would leave the very next day, usually in a hurry. The owners were kind people, and none of the visitors could bring themselves to complain about the room, so they made excuses for their sudden departures. It took years before the proprietors learned what happened there after dark.

Captain Ponsonby checked into the hotel during the day, and after spending a hot and sultry afternoon by the seaside, he retired to his room. He sat by the window, watching day turn into night. It was one of those perfect evenings when the moon was so bright that it illuminated the entire world.

When the Captain turned his gaze from the moonlit sea outside his window to his bed, he noticed something unusual. There was a depression in the bed, as if someone had been lying on it after it had been made. He wondered if the maid had taken a nap after finishing her work. Mildly annoyed, he considered raising a complaint with the manager but decided to wait until morning. If he still felt aggrieved, he would mention it then.

Captain Ponsonby undressed in his usual leisurely and methodical way and went to bed, soon falling asleep. He had no idea how long he had been asleep when he suddenly awoke with the distinct awareness that he was no longer alone in the room. Reaching out to switch on the light, his hand touched what felt like a head of dripping wet hair.

With a startled scream, he leapt from the bed and rushed to turn on the light by the door. To his relief, the room was empty. He searched thoroughly, looking everywhere, but found nothing that could explain what he had touched. He turned off the light and returned to bed, but sleep had deserted him. After lying awake for some time, he switched on the bedside lamp and read until morning.

At breakfast, he considered sharing his experience with a fellow guest or the proprietor, but he could already imagine their reactions: they would blame his imagination, a dream, or the beginnings of a nightmare. In the end, he said nothing, though he was convinced that something not of this world had entered his room. He decided to discover the truth behind the experience.

That night, soon after retiring but before falling asleep, he heard strange sounds outside his bedroom door, slow, shuffling footsteps, as though some large and clumsy person was moving about barefoot. Hardly daring to breathe, and carefully avoiding the furniture, the Captain crept silently to the door. He checked that it was locked, then placed his ear to the keyhole.

He strained to hear more, but all was now silent. Still, he was certain something was there, and a chill of fear crept over him. Quietly, he returned to his bed, switched on the bedside lamp, and turned to face the door for once again he thought he heard movement.

What he saw was the most terrifying sight of his life.

There, on the wall beyond the door, was the shadow of a figure, yet unlike any human form he had ever seen or imagined. It was misshapen, grotesque, seemingly naked, hunched, and covered in hair. Its long arms stretched out before it as it slid, or slithered, from one side of the room to the other. Yet there was nothing solid present to cast such a shadow.

Frozen with terror, the Captain watched as the noiseless form moved along the wall toward the bed. Then suddenly, it vanished, but at the same moment, the bed springs creaked, and a depression formed in the covers, as though something heavy had settled there. It was the same kind of impression he had seen the previous evening.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, Captain Ponsonby resolved not to share his bed with an invisible presence. He dressed hurriedly, left the hotel, and spent the rest of the night walking along the seafront. Only when daylight came did he dare return to his room to rest.

When he awoke, it was mid-afternoon. He washed, ate an early meal, and determined to stay awake through the night, as he was no longer tired, he found a book he had long intended to read and settled himself comfortably, facing the bedroom door with the lamp behind him.

He endured several hours of darkness, but the room grew steadily colder, not just the temperature, the mood of the room as well. By midnight, he was overcome by a sudden and overwhelming terror, and once again he fled to the safety of the streets.

He walked and walked, eventually leaving the town behind. At last, he came to a crossroads and sat down to rest. Though dawn seemed near, the sky remained a dark velvet, filled with stars. Then he heard it, a familiar sound behind him: slow, shuffling footsteps, like those he had heard outside his door.

As the sound drew nearer, he stood and turned toward it, but saw nothing. He began to run back toward Llandudno. Behind him, the footsteps followed. Several times he stopped, and each time he thought he heard them, faint but unmistakable. Still following.

Yet by the time he reached the town, the sound had ceased.

Back at the hotel, exhausted, the Captain threw himself onto the bed and slept undisturbed until morning. Later that day, out out options, he finally resolved to directly ask the proprietor if he could shed any light on the strange occurrences.

Taking him aside, the quiet little man told a story that explained one of the strangest hauntings imaginable.

In their youth, he and his wife had had a son, born with a misshapen body and a mind that never developed beyond infancy. Despite his appearance, the boy had been gentle and affectionate, but ashamed of how guests might react, his parents kept him hidden from view.

When the boy was nineteen, a niece came to visit with her fiancé. One moonlit night, the couple went for a walk to the very crossroads where Captain Ponsonby had rested. Unbeknownst to them, the son had been watching and followed them into the night.

He meant no harm, he had simply been captivated by the young woman’s beauty. But when he suddenly emerged from the darkness, they were terrified and fled back to the hotel.

The boy was never seen alive again.

Two days later, his battered body was found among rocks at the base of nearby cliffs.

It was after this tragedy that strange occurrences began in the boy’s former room.

For a time, the room was never let. But as years passed, it was occasionally used again. When no complaints were made, it gradually returned to regular use—until Captain Ponsonby’s experience.

After hearing his account, the proprietors locked the room and never rented it again.

When this story was published, Marl Hall had burned down some years ago, and it was the belief that the destruction of the hotel had severed the boys connection to the place. But in the 150 years since, Marl Hall has been rebuilt, and it seems like it has never found rest itself. It has served many purposes but usually not for long. Every time it has opened up under a new banner, it has closed its doors after only a few years. Most recently it was an outdoor educational center, but it only served that purpose for 6 years, and has stood empty since 2011

Told by a farmer in Restrup, 1859:

My father told me that when he was in Kare, there were two karls who were on their way back to town after their conscription had ended. As they were walking home, they passed an inn. It looked like everyone inside was having a great time, so they decided to join them.

When they finally set out to walk the rest of the way home, they were quite drunk, and it was very late. They took a shortcut through a small forest, and as they were walking, the first man said to the second, “Don’t you want to see how many adders there are in this forest?” The second replied that he would.

They went over to the tallest tree in the forest, and the first man told the second to climb as high as he could, which he did. The first man then took a branch and etched a circle in the dirt around himself. As soon as the circle was complete, adders began crawling out of the bushes and placing their noses along its edge. More and more appeared, climbing over one another, until the writhing column of snakes rose high enough that the top ones reached the first man’s belt.

The first man then called up to the second in the tree and asked how low the sun was. The second replied that it was almost below the horizon. The first man said, “When the sun is beneath the hill, my grave will be revealed, and you must not move until the sun has risen again, or it will be yours as well.”

The sun then sank behind the hill, and the adders attacked the first man and devoured him. The second man remained in the tree until sunrise. When he finally climbed down, the adders were gone, and he had to return home to tell the first man’s parents of his death.

The adder king lives in a large hole in the heathland. He is completely white, with a black streak down his back. He is no larger than the other snakes, but he can be recognized as their king because he is always surrounded by a court. I have seen the hole many times, as well as the smaller holes around it. Adders can sing a beautiful song when they place their tails in their mouths, and they can run as fast as a horse and leap as high as a man is tall. Whoever eats the adder king can see into people, perceive the soul within them, and behold the one who walks upon the open sea.

In Old Danish folklore there are dwarves, but since they are not really dwarves like what you’re probably picturing right now, I will call them by their other name:
The Mountainfolk.

They’re more akin to the fae from the legends across the sea in Ireland and Britain, but in traditional Danish fashion, they’re written about in a very manner of fact way and much of the writing about them are about the mundanity of their lives, not the tricks they play on the humans that live next to them.

You might hear the name Mountainfolk and think, but Denmark doesn’t have mountains? And while I will die on the flat hill that Denmark does indeed have mountains, the mountain in mountainfolk does not refer to the majestic landscape of the Danish countryside but instead the globe itself. In Danish folklore, the planet is referred to as the mountain, and little people live inside it, and the mountains and hills around the globe are the gates into that mountain.

According to the legends, they live fairly ordinary lives, they grow crops, tend to livestock, go to work, attend church, but they are all capable of illusionary magic and the crafts they create are of better quality than even the finest crafts made by humans, and should a human be able to get a hold of one of these crafts or hold of one of the caps the mountainfolk wear, they will be given a part of their power, though most people did not dare to try and steal from the mountainfolk.

On the mainland, dotted across the landscape, many of the hills and barrows are dedicated to the mountainfolk, if a place has “høj” in its name, there is a good chance it is the source of at least one local legend about small people who live inside the earth. Troll hill, Man mountain, Dwarf hill, Foghill, Dancing hill, Smithing hill are among the most popular and common ones.

We don’t have any hills here on Læsø, but there are legends of a place the dwarves once called home. Excitingly it doesn’t appear on any of our modern maps, but I think if we examine the legend and explore the history surrounding the time it was told in, we’ll find enough clues to locate, The Dwarf Dune.

In the old days there were an awful lot of dwarves on the island, and a place of note was the dwarf dune which lies next to Vesterø church.

It wasn’t all people that could see dwarves, and you probably had to be a bit psychic to sense them, and it was best if you were alone when you went looking, because then they were more likely to come out and play then. A young girl was once passing by the dwarf dune around midnight, and she saw 4 golden-haired little boys all wearing white shirts. They danced around in a ring and then they vanished into thin air. An apple then was thrown from the dune and it hit her. She picked it up and noticed that it was an unusually large and very nice-looking apple, but she dared not eat it until she had carved a holy cross into it to sanctify it.

There were both adult dwarves and dwarf children, the latter could be quite pretty, while the former were very hairy, wrinkly and generally very ugly.

Dwarves would hang out their laundry in bushes around on the island, and one of the places where dwarf laundry could be seen more often than not, was in the shrubbery around the dwarf dune and in the bushes around the church nearby. In these bushes, shirts, sweaters, pants and skirts would be hanging, but if someone tried to touch any of these delicate articles they would vanish in front of their eyes. There was a woman however who managed to make off with a piece of clothing. She passed by a collection of drying dwarf laundry one day, and she just happened to have a sewing needle on her. She poked a shirt with it, and because it was made of iron, it severed its magical connection to its owner and couldn’t vanish, as sorcery must yield to steel. Many have seen this shirt and it apparently looks just like a doll’s shirt, a well crafted doll’s shirt, but otherwise unremarkable.

In some cases, the dwarves would lure children to their dune, but they would usually let them go home again if the children were baptized. One time they didn’t, however. They lured a girl to the dune, and she must not have been properly baptized, because they kept her. She was allowed to go and visit her family every once in a while, and play with her siblings, but when a finger would appear in front of her and wave, then she had to return to the dune at once. One day she neglected to follow the instructions of the waving finger and stayed with her siblings for another few hours, and the next day she was found crushed to death in a collapsed hole. That was the dwarves punishment for defying them.

So according to the legend the Dwarf dune should be out next to Vesterø Church, but it’s not.

The dune must have moved over the centuries or it has been plowed by a farmer like so many other barrows have around the country. Case closed, no dune, no dwarves, thank you for watching… Or that would be what I would say if I didn’t read this account about the Dwarves in Achton Friis’s travel journal.

In one of his other stories he stays at a farm in Tørkeriet and during the day he walks into town and visits someone and insinuates that it’s a very short walk and no big bother, and the reason he stayed at Tørkeriet was because he wanted to sleep and build up his strength before making the long journey to Vesterø where he would board his ship.

That sounds insignificant until you realise where the person he visited lived, and how far away Vesterø is.

Look here on a map of Tørkeriet. I’ve marked about where Friis stayed, where the person he visited lived, and where Vesterø is. They’re the same distance apart, but they are in different parts of the island. And I went over a few instances of this in his writing and in the writing of other people. The island back then was divided into 3 regions for lack of a better term. Vesterø, Byrum and Østerby.

It seems that anything inside a region was near, but anything outside it was far. So for Friis walking 5 kilometers to visit a judge on a farm in Byrum was just a short stroll, but making the exact same distance down to Vesterø was an arduous journey that would take all day. We can see it again when he leisurely walks from a place on the northern coast about 9 kilometers from Byrum like it’s nothing, but catches a carriage ride to Østerby which is about the same distance, and we see it again in the book Language on Læsø when the family the story is about walks into town and goes to church which is about 5 kilometers away, but pack a lunch and stay the night when making their way out to a fishing hut that is closer to their house than the church is, the only difference being that the hut was part of the østerby region, and the church part of the byrum region just like the farm they lived on.

And I think that’s a human thing to do, to create these arbitrary lines that are tiring to cross, no matter how long it takes or how far you have to travel. I know it well myself. Driving to Sweden or Germany from where I live is a quest, but driving the exact same distance down to south Fyn is a commute, because it’s within the arbitrary line that we define as the country of Denmark, and therefor it’s not far away.

If you walk from Vesterø Harbour out to the church, you will on the halfway point find a dune. It’s not remotely close by our modern understanding of “next to”, but I think it was to the old islanders, and I think it’s the dwarf dune from local folklore.

If there ever was a dune that could host a dwarf population, I think it would be this one. Put a chimney up there and place a couple windows around and I think it would be a very nice place for a village of dwarves to live.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this stupid little adventure in my backyard, I know I’ve enjoyed going on it.

In the barony of Vilhelmsborg, there was a bay that ships would use to load and unload cargo, so no one thought anything of it when a ship one day entered the bay, cast anchor, lowered a boat into the water and then sailed off when the boat had returned.

But the ship hadn’t dropped off any cargo, at least not the kind you would expect. It had dropped off a woman.

She walked up to the nearby Moesgaard Manor where the residents couldn’t understand what she was saying or what she wanted. They had her taken to a hospital, where she became even more incoherent.

She got the name Russi Kabussi because the language she spoke sounded like Russian but couldn’t be understood by Russian speakers. No one ever managed to piece together who she was or what her story was from her incoherent ramblings, but there were rumors that King Frederik the 6^th would visit her when he was in the area, and that his successor Christian the 8^th made improvements to her accommodation

She died in 1868 and the newspapers wrote that Aarhus had lost one of its colorful characters. They wrote what little they knew about her: That she had arrived in the beginning of the century, that she had lived in a convent ever since arriving, and that she was probably 70 years old when she died. They speculated whether she might have been one of the Romanovs or one of the Boyars, many of whom had been displaced or fled during one war or the other, around the same time Russi Kabussi showed up in the forest outside Moesgaard.

Between the towns of Mårslet and Beder lies the village of Skumstrup, and up on the hill you’ll find Vilhelmsborg manor. Like many other manors around the country, it is supposedly haunted.

The legend goes that Baroness Julie Gyldenkrone was attending a ball in nearby Aarhus, and going back to Vilhelmsborg she shared a carriage with a military officer who was stationed nearby. The officer assaulted the baroness and 9 months later she gave birth to a son.

Her father ordered his men to take the baby from her, and they drowned it in a nearby pond and buried it in an unmarked grave with its share of the family inheritance in the form of jewelry.

Not long after, Julie herself passed, either from grief or suicide. But she wasn’t gone for long. On quiet nights she can be seen walking from Vilhemsborg down to where her son was buried and back. It’s advised that if you see her that you turn around and walk in the other direction. Julie has been known to mistake people who walk in the same direction as her for grave robbers out to steal her son’s inheritance, and she has attacked them in the past.

Stories of her nightly walks and attacks on would be grave robbers, are so well known in the area that the path she walks has been officially named on town maps as “Julie’s Path”.

The tallest peak in Denmark is known as Sky Mountain. It’s a charming little rise in the landscape, surrounded by picturesque scenery and winding walking paths that lead visitors up to its summit. At its base flows the mighty God Stream, the largest river in the country. Several times a day, a steamboat docks at the small harbor below the mountain, ferrying passengers across from the town on the opposite shore. At the top, a lookout tower stands proudly, offering an even broader view of the surrounding countryside than the peak itself.

Sky Mountain has everything you’d expect from the tallest peak in any other country; restaurants, souvenir shops, an information kiosk, even a bus stop. It’s a mountain experience in like any other, and Danes treat it as such. But here’s the funny part: its peak rises just 146 meters above sea level. Even funnier, it’s not actually Denmark’s highest point. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top three.

The true tallest points in Denmark aren’t particularly impressive. They’re mostly just the highest spots on farmland. Flat, unremarkable hilltops, and often lacking anything of note, except for one topped by a burial mound. They don’t feel like mountains. Sky Mountain does. That’s why it matters.

We often laugh at our ancestors, imagining how silly they must have been to think this was the country’s highest point when it was really only fourth place. But I suspect they knew. I think they chose this spot deliberately, not because of its height, but because of everything else it offers.

How the mountain makes you feel is a lot more important than how far above the shoreline it rests, and Sky Mountain feels like a mountain.

Thank you for reading. Below are some pictures I took from a family trip to the “mountain” in 2023