The Hushed House of Borgvattnet

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Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath come home, or one that lieth dead in the desert, or a ghost unburied, or a demon or a ghoul whatever thou be until thou art removed thou shalt find here no water to drink thou shalt not stretch forth thy hand to our own Into our house enter thou not Through our fence break through thou not We are protected though we may be frightened Our life you may not steal Though we may be scared to death

Welcome to Scared to Death, Creeps, Peepers, Robbers and Annabelles. I'm Dan. Hello, Dan. I'm Lulu Marie. Hello. Thank you, everybody, for the recent ratings and reviews and love from Spotify Wrapped. We are honored to make many of your lists of the most listened to podcasts on Spotify. And yeah, just thanks for continuing to listen and rate and review and support us.

And just let us, you know, keep doing what we're doing here. Yes. So please, please keep doing that. We really appreciate it. I know we've said it before in the past. It seems like such a silly thing, but ratings and reviews truly, truly, truly matter. So if you have. Sometimes I think you can do it twice. So, you know, if you would like to give us a holiday gift that costs nothing, rate and review everywhere you can.

Yeah, thank you. Please, please. That's all I want for Christmas. And what true paranormal listener encounter tales are you sharing with us this week? From those sent in to my story at scaredtodeathpodcast.com. Yes. Well, I have a, what I'm calling a strange woman double header. Okay. Okay. My first tale takes us to a haunted house, but not how you're thinking. And I don't want to.

Give it away because it's a fun setup once we get into it. And then my second story, it is actually very hard to explain. It's not a long story. My first one's quite lengthy. And my second one is one of those like. Quick and ooh kind of tales. All right. Some mystery. Yeah. You know, let's lead with mystery. I have a double header as well today. I have two stories and both of them are from Sweden.

Sweden? Yeah, I just decided. I was like, you know what? Like, what is a country I really haven't explored as far as for haunted tales specifically? And I just looked like, you know, like Sweden's most haunted, most, you know, scary paranormal tales kind of thing. All kinds of stuff came up. So we'll revisit it again later down the road. Love. But two today, two haunted houses, long haunted, but haunted in very different ways. Two places that once housed priests before running them off.

My first story will be about Borvagnet Vicarage. For nearly a century, this remote rural house, terrified priests, terrified guests, paranormal investigators with apparitions, phantom voices. and a grieving specter known only as the Grey Lady. And then my second story is set deep in the forests of Vomland, or Vomland, uh, Fremagorn.

is an 18th century parsonage so haunted that priests, investigators, and overnight guests, many of them had fled in terror from crawling shadow figures. Yikes. Yeah, to violent attacks and the infamous black hallway. This house's spirits seem less interested in communicating and more interested in hunting. So once you've showcased this week's spoopy socks, I will get started. Okay, I know these aren't like traditionally like...

holiday December socks, but I just thought it would actually be quite fun to have these silly little flamingo socks. I got them on the cruise. Unfortunately, I can't remember who gave them to me. I don't remember getting a note with them, but you know, like, listen, there are people who have holidays in. warm climate and these socks make me think of Christmas in Florida. Okay. Love them. Okay. Great. Well, I will just jump in now. Time now for the tale of the hushed house of Borvignet.

There are lonely places in the world where the silence feels older than the building standing in it. Places where time doesn't just pass, it settles and sleeps. It gathers in corners like dust no broom can touch. And one of those places, one of Sweden's most notoriously haunted locations, sits in the tiny isolated village of Borbagnet, deep in the forests of Jompland County, a place the locals still whisper about.

a place even pastors have abandoned. A place known simply as the Borvagnet Vicarage, but most often called something else, Sweden's most haunted house. Borvagnet is not the kind of place one really stumbles upon. It's not exactly found along the beaten path. It's a six hour drive north of Stockholm. And to get there, you have to head deep into Sweden's rural north, past pine forests.

frost-shrouded meadows, and long stretches of nothing but quiet snow in the hint of mountains beyond. In the winter, the landscape looks like something out of a Scandinavian folktale, the kind with trolls in the woods and hungry spirits watching from the treeline.

And right in the middle of all of that rests, or maybe doesn't rest, a two-story wooden vicarage built in 1876. Originally, it housed the parish priest and his family, serving as both the residence and a community center for the village. There's nothing gothic or sinister about it at first glance. No spires, no gargoyles, no grotesque architecture. It actually looks incredibly benign. Just another pale wooden Swedish house. This one staring out over the marshlands.

but something about it feels different, even in the daylight. Visitors often describe the same sensation stepping inside, like the air has weight, like the house is listening, like it was waiting for me. For over a century, this quiet little vicarage has been associated with apparitions, poltergeist activity, disembodied voices, unseen hands grabbing visitors, and even physical assaults. And it all began with some priests.

Men of faith. Men who weren't supposed to believe in ghosts, but they did because they saw them. For decades, the early priests of Borvagnet reported nothing unusual, at least not publicly. But private letters later discovered suggest occasional mentions of footsteps in empty rooms, disembodied voices singing late at night, cold drafts with no source, and the unsettling feeling of being watched.

In the early 1900s, priests still considered such claims embarrassing and even shameful, something that could end a clergyman's career. So, the vicarage kept its secrets. Until 1927. when Pastor Niels Hedlund moved into the house and began experiencing things he could not ignore. One of his earliest claims involved something as mundane as laundry, but the experience was far from mundane.

His mother, Marta, had died in the house during childbirth back in 1907. His father, Pear, couldn't face the fact his wife passed away and buried her in the backyard. Niels would come back to live at the vicarage after his father died.

and he saw all his laundry being pulled from the drying rack in the garden by invisible hands that he believed belonged to his mother's ghost. He himself later described seeing a gray figure dart through the house late at night as well, a, quote, shadow not belonging to any man. He also reportedly heard footsteps pacing the hallway outside his room in the middle of the night. And more disturbingly, he heard weeping coming from the empty guest room.

He eventually documented several encounters, and though he never claimed the house was evil, he also never denied that something lived there with him for the three final years he was there. In 1930, Hedland's successor experienced something strange as well. Vicar Rudolf Tengdane saw a lady dressed in gray at the house. She was walking slowly towards him through the big hall, but decided to take the turn to the expedition room, the office where the vicars used to work.

He wanted to talk to her, ask her what she was doing inside his house, but when he went to the expedition room, there was no one inside. The haunting continued in 1936 when Pastor Otto Lindgren and his wife moved into the vicarage.

Lindgren was a serious, studious man, the last person to indulge in ghost stories. But he was also one of the first priests who didn't keep silent. He and his wife claim to have heard footsteps walking to the house and doors opening and closing as if someone was moving from one room to another. Mrs. Lindgren also had a strange encounter at the kitchen. She was home alone one day when she heard music coming from there behind the closed door.

She opened the kitchen door and the music suddenly stopped. The same thing happened again later when Otto was back home. Again, they heard music in the kitchen, but when they checked it out, the sound suddenly stopped. Vicar Eric Lindgren moved into the vicarage in 1945, and he also started to experience strange things immediately. One night in a room upstairs, he claimed that he sat down in a large rocking chair near the window to read before going to bed.

and that as he sat there, the chair began to move. Not a little creak, and not from anything he was doing. He stood up immediately, unnerved, and turned on an additional light. And when he turned back around, he said he saw something that changed him forever. Now sitting in the chair was an older woman in a gray dress, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Her face was pale and her expression was mournful, and she rocked slowly, continuously as if in grief.

Lindgren would write in his journal, She turned toward me, but her face did not fully exist. Only sadness, only longing. A weight of sorrow, almost unbearable. When he blinked, she was gone. Kind of. He couldn't see her, but the chair still rocked. In 1947, Eric was talking about the ghost to some fellow vicars at a gathering. A journalist immediately picked it up, asked for an interview with Eric, and he agreed.

And this is how Borvagnet Vicarage became world famous. The newspaper, the Esterson Post, published Eric's interview on December 4th, 1947. In this interview... He talked about hearing footsteps, seeing candles being blown out when there was no wind, and even sometimes bumping into an unseen person. He also told the journalist that he would frequently hear footsteps in the garden that came toward the house via the wooden bridge, but that there was never anyone out there.

His interview was quite controversial, for clergymen never spoke of ghosts, especially not in 1947. He claimed he always felt uncomfortable in the expedition room, which was his office, because he always felt as if someone else was there looking over his shoulder.

Sometimes he even sensed a person sitting next to him, which made it impossible to work. Eric eventually started to get used to all the activity in the house, though. Over the next month, several additional visitors will claim to also see this gray lady figure. appearing in hallways, sitting in corners, watching from bedside beds, always, oh, excuse me, watching from beside beds, always with that same expression of exhausted sorrow.

One visiting deacon claimed that in the middle of the night, he actually woke to find the Grey Lady leaning over his bed, her face inches from his, and weeping silently. And the Grey Lady is not the only entity believed to haunt Borvagnet Vicarage. Another infamous story concerns the so-called bishop's chair, an old wooden seat still kept in one of the rooms. Multiple guests have sworn that when they sit in the bishop's chair, something pushes them out of it.

One woman described it like a firm, invisible hand shoving her shoulder. A visitor in the 1970s insisted he was thrown so violently, he actually fell to the floor. And one Swedish journalist said it felt like a cold wave rising up through the wood and then a command, leave. The house became known for this particular phenomena, a violent territorial spirit that didn't want anyone sitting where it once sat.

By the 1970s, word of this haunting had spread all around Sweden. The house no longer had a resident priest, and the village began renting it to visitors. People curious about the phenomena were thrill-seekers hungry for proof of the supernatural. Dozens of accounts poured in from overnight guests of phenomena such as but not limited to voices whispering from closets, footsteps running across the attic, laughter from empty rooms, someone sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark.

and a woman screaming just outside the locked front door. Many of these reports were written in the house's guest book. One entry from the mid-1990s photographed and circulated online reads, Something stroked my hair while I slept. Thought it was my girlfriend. She was in the other room. Another entry read, saw a woman through the mirror behind me. Turned around. No one was there. The mirror fogged on its own. And yet another.

There are voices in the walls. They do not sleep. By the early 2000s, Borvacnet Vicarage had become a full-fledged paranormal destination. Several Swedish television producers filmed episodes inside the house, capturing alleged EVPs and unexplained bangs. Paranormal enthusiasts traveled from across Europe to spend a night in the infamous rooms.

But the house's most disturbing stories came not from the media, but from lesser-known personal claims, where some have reported that the vicarage is not just haunted, but that some of its spirits still follow people home.

Which brings us to a chilling story posted on a Swedish paranormal forum in 2019. A story written by a young man who claimed he spent a night there for his birthday. He titled it, My One Night in the Blue Room. Here's what he wrote. My name is Jonas. I'm 28 years old, a grad student at Umeå University. Something happened to me in Borvagnet in October, and I need to tell someone. Even now, I have moments when I'm not sure I believe everything that happened.

I keep telling myself I imagine things, that the darkness played tricks on me, that the house's reputation is really what got into my head. But when I think about the footprints, the mirror, and what I heard that night, I know something was in that house with me.

and something left with me. I was given a stay at the vicarage as a dare and a gift from two friends. They thought it would be funny. Happy birthday, Jonas. They were supposed to come with me, but plans changed and they dropped out. I decided to go anyway. I don't normally scare easily. I arrived at the house around 5.30 p.m. It was already dusk, and the air felt strange. Too heavy, perhaps. Hard to explain.

I unlocked the door with the key the owner left for me in a little metal box. When I stepped inside, the house felt strangely muffled. The floors creaked under my feet. The smell of old wood, dust, and something else. Something sour hung in the air. I chose the blue room to sleep in. Why? I don't know. Maybe I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't scared of anything the house had in store. The blue room had an old rocking chair in it. At least when I was there, it did.

Nothing happened for the first couple of hours, just like I expected. I explored the rooms, took some photos, and made dinner in the little kitchen I'd packed food for. I was starting to think I wasn't going to come home with any story at all, but around 9 p.m., things started feeling different.

The house became noticeably colder. I put on a jacket, but it didn't help much. Then upstairs, I heard the first sound, a woman crying, very softly and very close. It sounded like she was sitting just beyond the door of the blue room. I walked upstairs to check and she wasn't there. The hallway was empty and the crying had stopped. I remembered that the crying had stopped very suddenly, like someone held their breath the moment I looked for them.

I still thought someone was nearby, so I checked the entire upstairs, the attic stairs, even the hallway closets. I couldn't find anyone, though. I told myself it was some trick of the wind or maybe an animal outside. But then I heard slow... Deliberate footsteps behind me. Sounded like bare feet on wood. When I turned around, they stopped and I couldn't see anyone. All of what I already described upset me, but it never felt threatening, so I stayed.

Around 10.45 p.m., I was ready to go to sleep, so I went into the small bathroom to brush my teeth. There was a mirror above the sink, old and thin, with a frame that looked like the wood was about to rot. And as I was brushing...

A woman moved behind me in the reflection. I can't believe I didn't scream. It startled me so badly. My heart started hammering so hard I felt dizzy. When I turned around, she was gone, but the floorboards were still moving slightly, like someone was still stepping on them. Now I was scared. I felt nauseous and I splashed some cold water on my face, tried to calm myself back down. When I looked back up after splashing my face, the mirror had fogged.

It made no sense. The bathroom wasn't steamy, my shower had not been used, and the temperature in the room was not even warm. Even more upsetting, someone had written one word on the glass. Go. Now I didn't want to stay in the blue room anymore.

So I sat downstairs on the sofa in the living room with all the lights on and hoped to fall asleep. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't safe. By midnight, I forced myself to head upstairs and try and lie in bed there. I left a lamp on. I even kept my shoes on in case I needed to run. But I couldn't sleep no matter how tired I began to feel. And then around 1.15 a.m., I heard the rocking chair move. A single creak. Then it was quiet. But after a little while, another. Then slowly...

Steadily, the chair began to rock on its own. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and watched it from the bed. No wind moved in the room. There was no reason for it to move. But it rocked. And as it rocked, a shape began to appear in it. The grave figure of a woman. She looked right at me. And after a moment, she whispered, You should not be here. I wanted to get up and run. I tried to get up, but something held me still. It wasn't sleep paralysis. I've had that before. No, this was different.

I could move a little, but it felt like a hand pressed down firmly on my chest so I couldn't leave. Then the mattress beside me dipped and something sat on the edge of the bed. I felt the weight. I felt the shift of the springs. I felt cold fingers brush the side of my neck.

And I heard that word again, go. And when she said that, the pressure lifted from my chest and I scrambled upright, grabbed my bag and bolted for the door. I was ready to sleep in my car if necessary or drive the night to get home. But then on the stairs, something grabbed the back of my jacket hard. It yanked me backwards so violently I almost fell. When I twisted around to pull free, I saw, I swear, fingers, pale, long, thin fingers curled into the fabric. And then in a moment, they were gone.

I ran out of the house after that, stumbling through the snow to my car. I didn't go back for the key. I didn't lock the door. I didn't care. I drove until the sky started to lighten. I was so exhausted when I made it home. But, at least since I told myself it was over, that I was safe again. But the next day, I smelled it again. The same sour odor I had smelled back in the vicarage. Also, my apartment felt too silent now.

And that night when I woke up from a bad dream and turned my bedroom light on, I saw footprints on my floor, bare footprints, muddy and wet, trailing from my front door to the mirror across the room. Gave me the chills. It hadn't rained. and the ground outside my building was dry, and the footprints were far too small to be mine. I called a friend who knows a lot about the supernatural, asked them what I should do. She gave me some prayers to recite and told me to burn some cedar. I did that.

And I think it might have worked. I haven't had anything else happen since and it's been several weeks now. Placebo effect? Was it all in my head somehow? Or did something real fall on me? Did those prayers and smoke send it back?

Or did they just weaken it until it's strong enough to come back later? And that's where Jonas' story ends. Other visitors to Borvagnet Vicarage in recent years have reported the same things that Jonas described. A woman crying, footsteps. A gray woman in a chair? Who is she? Some believe she's a former servant. Others believe she's a grieving mother who lost a child in the house. Some think she's the spirit of a vicar's wife who supposedly died there under mysterious circumstances.

Others say she's not really a person at all, but grief itself, given form, a lingering sadness, maybe older than the house itself. Whatever she is, she seems to actively watch some of the visitors. And maybe, just maybe, she follows some of them home when they don't leave when she first tells them to. That was awesome. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah, just like, so creepy. Mm-hmm. So strange. The, like...

For me, the scariest part is after Jonas leaves and goes back home, like the footprints at his house, like get the fuck out of here. Yeah. That's wild. I like the history that goes back a long time to where like these vicars. You know, these religious men staying in the house where like during a time when it wasn't. In vogue. Yeah. Like it was frowned upon to talk about things like that. They were like, I don't know. Something's here.

And I think of the Swedish people as like very stoic people. Yeah. Historically very stoic. Yeah. So, you know, for us, like what we've said here before that I still hold true on is, you know, there are certain stories that when they come from a specific source, like. Law enforcement, a firefighter, a scientist, like somebody who generally needs to see the vast majority of life through a...

scientific lens or a pragmatic. Yes, exactly. So when I think of a Swedish person being like, you know, a longstanding history, I think like, okay, that carries a little bit extra weight with me. Yeah. You know, I was surprised when I looked into like supernatural beliefs in Sweden.

And I want to say that the percentage that stuck out of one thing I found was like 45% of Swedes today believe in some form of the supernatural. Interesting. And that kind of shocked me because I have always thought of them as like very stoic, no nonsense. Mm-hmm. Not traditionally religious either, right? I mean, not as much as most of Europe. I mean, yes, Christianity spread to Sweden as well. But yeah, I don't think it's...

I'm trying to think of how to phrase it. Maybe not taken as seriously by as many people per capita as in like most Western countries. Because generally the paranormal and religion go hand in hand, right? You know, when we get a lot of horror stories.

true hauntings, et cetera, et cetera, from like Latin America where like, yeah, like that tracks so much because there is such a strong sense of faith there. Good and evil, God and the devil. Like it, it almost makes more sense to me that they would be more open to it because they're open to.

spirituality in general so yeah yeah it's cool it's cool to see like uh people from yet another culture uh share many of the same kind of stories we hear from the rest of the world i think it's such a cool thing that paranormal beliefs and interests and suspicions know no bounds. Yeah, yeah, me too. Yeah, do you have pictures? I do, and some of the pictures come with a little more details. Okay. So this first one...

This is just a picture of Borvagnet Vicarage. Why is that so beautiful to me? I know. It looks like a cool place to stay in the winter. It's like... Looks very, very Swedish and clearly like they've modernized the windows and things. It's really pretty. I know. I have, you know, I have this like weird obsession with the idea of trying to live in Iceland during the winter. Just the idea of, it reminds me of.

The only thing I loved about COVID, which was like, you had to stay home. You know, you had to bunker down. And there's something about removing the option for activities and obligations that is so freeing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is nice. It was like such a different thing where it's like you're not stuck at home feeling like, oh, man, I'm missing out on doing this. We could be doing that. We could be doing this other thing. Yeah. Like, nope, those options have been taken off the table. So it's like, just enjoy it.

Could we just have like a shutdown for two weeks across America? A non-disease shutdown. Yeah, that doesn't affect businesses or anything. I know, it's a magical shutdown. Oh, I'd love it. This next one is spookier photo of the house from thelittlehouseofwhores.com. That's a fun website.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Just like a really dark sky. And yeah. I think that must be the different. Yeah. Oh, I guess without all the snow and everything. It looks very different. And taken from a different angle as well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. This next one, a photo of the infamous rocking chair. It's a beautiful quilt or runner or whatever on it. Yeah, it's funny. It does look like a table runner, but maybe there's a thing like a chair runner. It's really pretty.

Hand stitched. And you can catch all of these photos on our Instagram at scared to death podcast or Facebook. Or if you're, again, reminder, if you're listening on YouTube, just take a second and look over there and the photos are embedded in the listening experience. Yeah, in the video there, yeah. This next one, a photo of the Blue Room where Jonas said he slept, where the rocking chair was that night. Wait, do we know why it's called the Blue Room?

I don't know. They just themed them. I think it's more of a recent thing. I don't think they were always called that. Okay. Yeah. There's like some blue bedding, but I was expecting like blue walls or something. I don't know. No, I think, I think they're calling these things now, but like, I think they were called different things in the past. I'm guessing a little bit, but just.

looking at the website i was like oh okay you guys just like themed it out a little differently for like uh because you know they rent it out to guests now sure sure A lot of people who spend the night in the blue room claim to have been woken up by the sound of heavy furniture being moved around, according to the same website, thelittlehouseofwhores.com. There's also a ghost here that likes to apparently pull bedsheets off people in the middle of the night.

Perhaps that is the small boy whose apparition has been seen in this room. The sound of a baby sometimes heard here, a baby screaming. And sometimes people feel unnaturally sad and depressed in this room. Oh, the blue room. So maybe that's why they themed it. Yeah. This next one is the pink room. Okay. A lot of pink there in the colors. Yeah. At the end of the 19th century, a 19-year-old pregnant girl was allegedly locked inside this room, considered a disgrace because she was not married.

She was probably pregnant by a priest. When the child was born, it was born either stillborn or killed right after birth, according to the legend. The baby was supposedly buried at the north side of the house, just outside of the pink room. And both mother and child are now believed to haunt this room. Sounds of screaming, baby crying, and a small shadow figure have been seen here.

Do you know if the house has ever been cleansed? Have they ever tried to rid the home? Okay. I mean, now they're kind of like marketing it. Well, yeah. Now they're probably like, you can't cleanse it. Sure, sure. And then this is the yellow room. Just another cool little photo. And that's it. Cool, cool. Yeah, it's a pretty house. Yeah. Yep, that's all I got. Okay, well, I think that's all I've got too, so. Let's leave this Swedish haunted house and head to another one. Okay.

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Thanks for listening to our sponsor deals, creeps and peepers. Time now for the tale of the house of evil. Some haunted places feel sad. Some feel lonely. Some feel heavy, as grief and so much of it has pooled into the walls and floors over generations. But some places feel angry, hostile, predatory.

places that seem to be waiting or hoping for someone unwary enough to walk inside and test them, so they can follow them, so they can hurt them. In the deep forests of Vamlin County, near the small 300-ish people Swedish parish of Schillingmark, sits a building with one of the darkest reputations in Scandinavian paranormal history, Framagorn, a centuries-old parsonage so notorious that many of the people who have entered it have refused to go back. This is a house that priests have abandoned.

a house seasoned ghost hunters have fled from, a house locals have called for generations the house of evil. Let's find out why. The red and white wooden structure of Framagorn looks deceptively simple, peaceful almost. Again, like in our previous tale, it looks very typically Swedish. But sometime in the late 1700s, it was intended as a quiet residence for the parish priest, a place for reflection, study, and rest.

But from the earliest written mentions, the house seemed unable to provide any of those things. The forest surrounding it is dense, ancient, and mysterious. Many have said that the wind there doesn't sound like the wind. It sounds more like voices trying to communicate. The winters are, of course, long, the darkness deep as it is everywhere that far north, and the silence is so complete in the very rural area of western Sweden that even your own breath can sound loud.

And this quiet isolation, I imagine it has intensified the feeling of this haunting. When things have gone bump in the night, in the middle of the winter, especially prior to the advent of the automobile, where could you go? As soon as the first families moved into the parsonage, things started to happen, things they did not talk about publicly, but things that showed up in letters, in the diaries of clergy wives, and in the margins of church historical records.

One of the oldest surviving accounts comes from 1796, written by the wife of the parish priest at the time. And her entry reads, I did not sleep well here. I hear the sound of a child crying in the walls. My husband does not believe me. He says it is the timbers settling, but I know the sound of a child. Again, that comes all the way back from 1796, long before ghost stories were commonly passed around or we knew all of the tropes that we know today about haunted houses.

Another line in her entry is even more troubling. Something walks outside our bedroom door. It stops when I pray. The priest himself, a man named Lars Ribholm, was said to have held a quiet blessing ceremony in the home not long afterwards. Curiously, it was not listed as a housewarming blessing, which would be traditional. The parish already had a record of that. It was listed under the category of cleansing, which was unusual for the time.

The 1800s brought even more whispers of supernatural encounters and more unease. Various families living there complained of knocking on the walls at night, footsteps pacing the upstairs when everyone was downstairs. doors slamming on their own, and the feeling of a presence standing near or behind them. One fairly well-known story for those familiar with this haunted location involves a young maidservant who lived at Framagorn around 1840.

Records list her as Anna Greta, age 17. She died suddenly. The cause listed only as lungs, which sometimes would indicate pneumonia, but maybe indicated something else in this instance. According to village folklore, Anna Greta was strangely not buried in the main churchyard, which would have been traditional, but in the far corner near a cluster of older graves. No one seems to know why.

Locals claim that before her death, the girl often complained of dreams where someone was standing over her bed, watching her and breathing loudly. And, way more upsetting, staring at her with, quote, a face she could not fully see.

Some villagers said that after she died, the next residents of Framagorn could hear her weeping in her old room, and the crying grew louder if anyone entered after dark. It seems the poor girl, who was tormented by something in a haunted house, added to that same haunting when she died there.

By the early 1900s, the house's reputation was slipping out of folklore and into something more tangible. Multiple pastors assigned to Schillingmark requested reassignment within a year or two, a pattern that was highly unusual for a small parish at the time.

One priest allegedly refused to sleep inside the house at all. He stayed in the church office instead. Another in the 1930s reportedly said to a colleague, The walls here listen. I feel it. Something in this house is waiting for me to sleep. During the post-war era, villagers began calling the home the Black House, the Priest Nightmare, and eventually the House of Evil. By the 1980s, ghost sightings there had become commonplace.

One visiting deacon claimed he once saw something straight out of a Hollywood horror movie. He said he saw a human-like figure crawling across the ceiling of the upstairs hallway. A figure he described as being long-limbed and slow-moving. He said its head turned toward him at an impossible angle. Get the fuck out. Oh my God, yes. That is terrifying. He resigned from the clergy within six months.

In the 1990s, paranormal investigators started making their way to Framagorn to check out this supposedly intensely haunted place. One Swedish team caught growling on audio and not the distant, maybe it was the wind kind.

This was growling so close to the microphone, the team leader said, it felt like something was inches from my face. Another investigator left the house with finger-shaped bruises across her back, even though no one had touched her. Perhaps the most disturbing report came from 2008. when a three-person team from a small paranormal group in Vomland conducted an overnight recording session in the basement.

15 minutes into the session, one member, a woman in her 20s, began crying uncontrollably, saying that she felt something trying to get inside my chest. How creepy is that? If that wasn't real, it certainly felt real to her because she vomited, collapsed, and begged to be taken outside. The team left the investigation unfinished, never returned.

Ask anyone who has spent significant time in Framagorn which room is the worst and many will give the same answer. The upstairs hallway. The black hallway. And they don't say that because the hallway is actually physically dark in any way. It's not. There are small windows at either end. It's called Black because of the atmosphere. Visitors have reported sudden overwhelming sensations of oppression, dizziness, extreme fear, nausea, and the feeling that someone is standing right next to them.

Even worse, shadow figures have been spotted in doorways off the hallway, but not the blurry kind. Witnesses have said consistently that these shadows have faces. Distorted faces. Faces that have been described as being, quote, too close to human but not human. One Swedish journalist who stayed overnight in the hallway for a dare lasted a full 18 minutes before she allegedly ran out of the house. She later wrote, I've never felt fear like that. I felt like prey.

The following account was shared by an anonymous user on a Swedish paranormal forum in late 2018. The poster used the name Elin R. She claims she and her friend Camilla booked Framagorn for a private overnight investigation, something the house still allows. It's actually booked up for quite a while. What follows is her story. My name is Elin. I'm 31.

I've been interested in the paranormal since I was a teenager, and I've explored maybe a dozen haunted sites across Scandinavia. Whatever is inside Framagorn is different. It is honestly dangerous. And if you're reading this because you are thinking about going there, do not.

My friend Camille and I got to the house around 4.30 p.m. It was early November, so of course it was already dark. Very dark. You know the kind of darkness that feels heavier in rural places? Like the light disappears faster than it should? That's how it felt. The forest surrounding the house was dead silent. No wind, no birds, nothing. Just us and a house that seemed to watch us walk towards it. We got the key from the little metal box the owner leaves for guests and walked inside.

The first thing I felt was the cold, but not a normal cold. A deep, deep cold, like something to drain the heat out of the air on purpose. Camilla stopped in the doorway and whispered, Do you feel that? I nodded. We should have left then, but we didn't. We set our bags down in the entry room and explored the house for at least an hour, taking photos. And we didn't encounter anything doing that. No orbs, no strange shadows, just a creepy old house.

But then when we went downstairs, we heard it from upstairs. A long dragging sound, like someone shuffling their feet across the floor. And then that sound changed into footsteps that were slow and deliberate, walking from one end of the hallway.

to the other we froze there was no one else in the house we had just looked all around if anyone else was with us we would have seen them but still we continued to hear what definitely sounded like someone walking and camilla whispered there's something up there

She didn't say it, but I knew she meant that this something was somebody who was no longer alive. When the footsteps stopped, we heard a single tap on the floorboards, like a knock, like that something was saying hello to us. We were both too scared to say anything back.

We were also curious about what other encounters we might have and we were not ready to leave. So feeling more confident staying together than either of us would have been if we were alone, we explored the house further. There's a room upstairs called the Thomas Room.

named after a former resident. It has a cradle in the corner, and supposedly sometimes people will hear that cradle rocking at night. We wondered if that's where we had heard the knock come from, and we went in, and something was in there with us.

The air inside that room felt thicker immediately. It made it a little harder to breathe. And then when I asked if Camilla was okay, the moment she opened her mouth to answer, something shoved her. Hard. She hit the wall with a thud and I rushed to her and asked what happened.

She just shook her head, eyes wide, and said, The shadow. What shadow, I asked. She pointed toward the floor by the door, and when I turned to look, I swear to God I saw it. A shape, flat and black, crawling across the floorboards, like a person dragging themselves forward. It slid like that toward the center of the room and then it stood up. Not fully, though. Not like a normal person. More like something unraveling itself, stretching upwards in a jerky, impossible way. I blinked.

and it dissolved, like smoke being sucked away into a vent. And then the cradle beside us began to rock. Slow and steady, back and forth, back and forth. I grabbed Camilla's hand and pulled her out of the room. We were both now very shaken.

But we'd also been on numerous ghost hunts, and we were still not ready to be done with this one. We wanted to check the hallway, the infamous stretch people warned us about. We'd been able to handle everything so far, and we thought we could handle this as well. The hallway felt even colder than the Thomas room. The air smelled like damp wood and something sour like old breath. We walked maybe halfway down when the overhead light flickered and then went out. It really did.

Camilla grabbed my arm so hard her nails dug in and I tried to turn on my flashlight, but it wouldn't work. And then we heard someone running. They were moving fast. They sounded heavy and like they were coming straight towards us. Both of us pressed our backs against the wall. I braced for impact.

But nothing hit us. However, the footsteps we heard stopped right in front of us. And now I could feel something breathing, warm breath brushing the side of my face. And then the light flicked on for half a second and we both saw it. A pale face, less than a meter from ours. But then darkness again. That was it for Camilla. She began sobbing, and I dragged her toward the stairs. Behind us, as if we needed any more reason to leave, something whispered, Stay.

Maybe we should have ran out the front door at that point, but our equipment was still downstairs in the basement and we needed our keys for the car. When we stepped onto the basement stairs, all the lights downstairs were already off. Thankfully, my flashlight was working again though. The basement smelled wrong.

Damp earth, mold, and something else. Coppery, like blood. Before we could gather up all of our things, but after we'd at least grabbed our keys, we both heard something move behind the furnace. and not skittering like some animal, but a slow slide, like something standing up. Camilla whispered, Elin, there's something in here. I raised the flashlight and the beam landed on something crouched in the far corner, a person-shaped figure.

Or maybe monster is a better word. I'm not sure I would believe someone else telling me that they had seen this thing, but I swear it's what I saw, what we both saw. It looked like a human, except its arms were far too long, so long its fingers dragged along the floor. and his head was tilted at an impossible angle, almost like it was completely upside down. Its face was blurry. Camille and I have both talked about what we remember, and sometimes we'll remember that it had eyes.

Sometimes very small black ones. Sometimes large ones with too much white. Sometimes no eyes. I don't know if its face kept changing or something was so wrong with it that our brains couldn't process what we were looking at. While we both can't quite remember what its face really looked like if we saw its face at all, we both agreed we heard it growl like some dangerous beast. A deep, chest-rattling growl that shook us to our cores. Camilla screamed and ran for the stairs.

I followed and saw something grab at and yank her shirt as she ran, ripping the fabric down the back. She fell forward onto the steps and then I pushed her up ahead of me. We both ran. We didn't look back. We didn't want to look at whatever was chasing us. When we got to the front door, it wouldn't open. The lock wouldn't turn. Camilla tried to, but couldn't budge it.

As we kept trying, we heard the thing coming up the stairs with slow, heavy, deliberate steps. We were screaming, and finally the lock gave, and the door burst open so hard we almost fell out onto the cold ground. Then we ran to the car, jumped in, and backed out of the long driveway.

As we did, both of us heard a single loud slam from inside the house. I looked up at a second floor window through the mirror as we began to pull forward and something was standing there. It watched us drive away. I think it was that thing from the basement.

When we made it back home, Camilla showed me that she had three long bruises on her back like finger marks from where that thing had grabbed her. I posted this story because I can't stop thinking about what we saw. We went in expecting a haunting. but we left feeling like we had survived an attack. So if you're reading this because you are curious about Framagorn, don't go. It's not worth it. Something there truly will want to hurt you. It felt so evil, so wrong.

I expect it to do more than hurt someone someday. I think it might kill someone. It'll definitely try, so don't let that person be you. Despite this not being the only claim of a violent attack, Framagorn remains open to guests. and visitors still spend the night there. Ghost hunters still investigate, and many of them continue to report the same things. A hallway that breathes, a crawling shadow, something in the basement that growls.

Whether these manifestations are restless spirits, residual trauma, something older and more malevolent, nobody knows. But one thing is certain. Some haunted houses want attention. Others want justice. Some want to be understood. And others perhaps... mostly want new victims. That's wildly intense. Uh-huh. Yeah, there's some creepy, creepy stuff reported there. Holy cow. I wrote down one note. Yeah. Nope.

Oh my God. Yeah. See, I mean, if I was going to see an entity, like, you know, like what, how scary, like, as far as like the. What would be the scariest way to see an entity? I can't immediately think of a scarier sight than seeing something crawling along the ceiling. I know. That, I think, because it's so unnatural. It's like a spider. Yeah.

There you go. Yep. Just crawling along there. Oh my God. My mouth doesn't do sounds. I can't do that. I don't know. My spider's very slow. Could be a slow little crawling spider. You could kill it. Yeah. Do you have photos to go along? You know, I only have one. I couldn't find a lot of interior things. It seems like I couldn't find a website for this place. It's interesting.

I found, before I showed this photo, I found an article about it on visitsweden.com. And it said this place, and this is like a recent article, it said it's booked until 2027. Holy Hades. But again, I couldn't find, like there's a number.

A phone number, but not a website. And I wonder if they're intentionally keeping like photos off the website to build mystery. I love that. Where it's like, oh yeah, if you want to find out about this place, you have to go there. Okay. That's pretty cool, actually. Uh-huh. So I could only find photos of the exterior and it looks so nice.

It looks like just normal. It looks like a very just, I mean, Scandinavian, your basic house, you know? Yeah, simple structure, two stories. Yep. Red and white, almost like a barn. Kind of like coloring, you know? Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah. And even the architecture is reminiscent to me of a barn. It's like a very simple rectangle. Yeah. With just that little peaked roof and a little chimney in the middle there. Dang. Yeah.

But that place is something to be deeply feared. Yeah. Yeah. Like the most, you know, to be feared haunted house in Sweden. Wild. Okay. Those are great stories. I'm so glad that you thought about like. other countries. Like, where have we not spent a lot of time? Yeah, it was cool. And in Sweden, too, like, you know, again, thank God for translators.

you know, translation devices and stuff on the web, but also because everybody speaks English in Scandinavia. I know, we're so spoiled. We're so spoiled. You can find a fair amount of articles about, at least in Sweden, and I assume probably in Denmark, Norway, you know, as well. Um, maybe not Finland. I don't know if England is as well. I think it actually is pretty common there as well, but yeah, you can probably find all kinds of stuff, uh, in Scandinavia.

as far as like paranormal stories online. But I noticed you have to look a little harder. Like they're not like as well searched over here. So they don't show up as quickly. Yeah, I got to dig a little deeper. Google results. Results, yeah. Do you feel connected to these stories because of your familial background?

Uh, no, but it is funny, like, the rhythm of people talking and things, and I was trying to find, like, videos for pronunciation stuff, and that was tricky to find them in English. Oh, sure. And when the whole video was in Swedish. Julian couldn't help you? Julian Miguel, yeah, our pronunciation YouTube person. Uh.

it's basically worthless if the whole thing is in Swedish because I'm like, well, I don't know what they're talking about. Right, right. You're like, I don't know when the word I'm looking for is being spoken. But when I was listening to those, it was very, like, nostalgic, I guess. Uh-huh. And I just felt like I was a little kid of my great-grandfather.

grandparents' house because I spent so much time there all the way through like eighth grade. Yeah. Where I'm like, yeah, you just hear them just like, just like that rhythm. Yeah, it is kind of cool. I love that. That's sweet. Okay. Well.

I'm ready to tell my stories if you are prepared with a Layla. I am. Have a yellow Layla. La-la-layla. Sweet, sweet yellow Layla. Actually, she matches my flamingo socks. So that's very exciting. You came prepared. Okay, good. All right. Here we go. Settle in. We have a really long tail.

Hello, fellow creeps and peepers. I have been binge listening to your podcast for a few months now after hearing about y'all from Believing in the Bizarre. Oh, nice. Love the show and can't get enough of the funny reactions Lindsay has. You're welcome. My dog daughter and I love to listen to all the creepy, spooky stories people send in while driving. Shout out to Jovi. My family is kind of a paranormal magnet, per se.

We always seem to find ourselves in situations where unexplained events happen around us, which is great for gathering stories, but also scary as to what may attach to us. I grew up in a small town near Dallas, Texas, and for as long as I can remember, there has never been a time when I did not have some sort of connection to the paranormal.

My aunt used to say that spirits liked my energy because we came from a bloodline of spiritual practitioners, healers, and white witches. When I was younger, I thought it was cool that I had a magical bloodline, though I never got my Hogwarts letter. This story is about an experience my family had that starts like a bad horror story set up. My dad decided he wanted to throw a Halloween party to remember.

This year, my parents were planning to permanently hang up their Halloween aprons for good now that all of the kids were grown up. Plus, it was getting harder for my dad to decorate our house every year. He'd almost fallen off the roof on multiple occasions. My parents decided that before I went off to college, we would throw a massive Halloween party with all of our friends and family. It was the fall of 2013, and my family was preparing to host said party.

We loved decorating for the spooky season, crafting elaborate mazes and themed displays. Halloween was our month. Christmas only got the bare minimum from us. When October 1st arrived, we dove straight into planning our Halloween designs. My dad wanted to decorate every room in the house with a different theme, a hospital surgery room. A witch's library, a clown carnival, which my mom hated, you name it. The guest room? That was going to be decorated in an exorcist theme.

We had an animatronic girl crawling up and down the walls, another dressed as a priest, and candles hanging from the ceiling. It looked incredible. Super spooky with the Exorcist theme song playing in the background. My dad thought it was missing. One thing that would really sell it. In a move of, as my dad called it, atmospheric genius, he bought a fake Ouija board, which he placed on the desk at the room's entrance.

I warned him of what it was and asked him not to buy it, stressing that even though a toy company was selling it, it was still a tool not to be messed with and it should not be let into our home. He argued that I was being paranoid, that no one would even use it. Total Darren move. We compromised. He would wait until the party to lay it out, and he would never leave the planchette on the board by itself.

We had an amazing party. Everyone loved our spooky haunted theme house and we partied until three or four in the morning. Once the party ended and after everyone had left for home or a hotel, I picked up around the house before heading off to bed. While I was doing that, my dad went to tend to my mom who had passed out in the closet drunk. The night was a success, but I couldn't help but feel that there was a subtle shift in the house.

A few weeks after the party, we were still taking down the decorations. We left the exorcist room for last because no one really used that room. As I walked in, I noticed that the Ouija board looked like it had been moved a bit on the table. It was understandable because any guest could have been in there during the party. What concerned me was that the planchette was lying right on top, despite our agreement to not allow that.

I put it back in the box and ran to my dad. He brushed me off, of course. I told him we needed to properly dispose of the board by finding a coven who could seal it and destroy it. He laughed. Where would we find a coven? He told me to put it in the box, put it in storage and move on. A week later and our house was back in order when I started to notice some strange things. I was in my room working on a project when I heard my mom call my name. I looked at the time.

and was confused. Had she come home early? I heard the garage door being closed. It was a heavy door that you had to push to close. I heard footsteps echoing outside my room. I got up to greet her, but no one was there. Mom? I called out, but there was no answer. No one was home, only me and my three dogs. Then cold spots began to form in the house, which made zero sense because our heater was on full blast all winter long. And my dogs were constantly on alert, never leaving my side.

Could I have been imagining all of these events or was there really something in the house? I had no answers and it was starting to take a toll on me. About three weeks post-party, I was asleep in bed dreaming. I was in a cabin.

in the bathroom, brushing my hair in front of a mirror. A fun conversation with the young woman beside me was unfolding. We chatted about activities we were going to do now that we were here on this trip. We talked about the family drama that had happened and so on. She was young, maybe mid-20s or early 30s, about my height, with long black hair that went past her shoulders. She wore a long, sleeveless, white dress. I finished my hair and churned so that we could leave.

But my new friend was not beside me. Confused, I looked in the mirror. She was there, still standing next to me. I was fully paying attention now. I noticed a deep black void where her face should have been. The realization that throughout our entire conversation, she had never spoken a word hit me. I knew what her responses were, even if I couldn't hear her voice. Her mood had been playful, curious.

and elated that I was paying attention to her. She wanted to be acknowledged. She wanted my attention. She stood there looking at me as a new emotion came into play. An evil satisfaction now that she had permission. To do what? I don't know. I was processing the situation and found myself asking her one question. Who are you?

And then I woke up. A true cliche horror plot, I know. But it really did go down like that. I woke up in my bed so confused about what had happened. And I didn't tell my parents. Part of me didn't fully comprehend what had happened. But deep down, I knew the woman was real and that she was happy when I saw her. She wanted me to know that she was the reason for the recent unexplained events in our home.

It was like a low-budget villain was stood in the background waiting for the protagonist to put together the pieces of their puzzle before revealing themselves. During winter break, my friend Sean decided to stay at my house so we could hang out for the whole winter break together. I set him up in the guest room and we stayed up playing Xbox until midnight and then went to bed. The next morning, I noticed Sean looked wrecked. He looked anxious.

He asked me if I had snuck into his room the night before and touched him while he slept and had my dad turn the AC on during the night because it was freezing in the guest room. I told him no on both accounts. He insisted that I listen to him. Wrists, you have to believe me. It was freezing cold in that room. I felt a woman's hand roaming all over my body. It was so fucking weird. I'm certain I heard the door open and close last night.

Wanting to soothe his worries, we went back over the room, but nothing was out of place. And there were only two ways into the room, the door or the window, and both were locked. There was no way someone could have gotten in. Unless... They were already in the room. A terrifying thought. We were scared now as we turned towards the closet. That was the only place someone could hide without anyone noticing. The door was cracked slightly open.

The only things in there were old clothes, a couple of board games, and my older sister's full-length mirror she had left a few years ago. I had angled it away because I would scare the shit out of myself anytime I opened that closet and saw my own reflection. forgetting it was in there. I slowly opened the door and the mirror had clearly been moved. It was now facing us. I hadn't moved it. I knew I didn't. And Sean hadn't touched it. He didn't even know it was in there.

And my parents, they rarely used that room. We quickly and quietly turned the mirror back around before we closed the door. Sean no longer felt comfortable staying, which was valid. I was shaken but still didn't tell my parents. Because how could I explain this without any proof? I know, I know, I should have told them. I just didn't know how or where to start because I didn't fully understand how this all started.

How could I say our house was haunted without sounding crazy? More time passed with no new incidents. Christmas was growing closer and closer, and we started getting decor down from storage. Exhausted from all the decorating, my family and I had lied down for the night. It was close to 3am when I woke to my mom screaming from her room.

Fearing there was a break-in and someone was trying to hurt my parents, I bolted out of bed and straight for their room. My dogs already in their room were barking in terror. As soon as I came into the room, I turned on the lights. I only saw my mom sobbing while shaking my dad awake. My dad did not understand what was happening. We all moved into the living room, and once my mom calmed down, we asked her what had happened.

She cried and explained that while she was lying in bed next to my dad, she saw a woman in a long white dress with long black hair straddling my dad. The woman was holding something over her head as she locked. As she looked more closely in the dark, my mom saw the woman holding one of my mom's baking trays. It looked like the woman was about to slam it down onto my dad's head.

My mom was paralyzed, couldn't make a sound. She said the woman had no face but radiated joy at recognizing my mom's fear. She wanted to feel more and was gaining a sick pleasure from this interaction. Finally, after what had felt like an eternity, as the woman moved to slam the tray down on my dad, my mom screamed, and the woman disappeared as I rushed in.

My mom tried to brush it off as some kind of nightmare from stress and work and paying the bills. I knew this was no dream, though. Working up the courage, I finally told my parents everything that had happened. They were horrified. We sat there in the living room, feeling trapped in our own home because some ghost was getting a kick out of messing with us. I tried to lighten the moment. Well, we can say it's official. We are the haunted house on the street.

And my dad chuckled a little. And then he quietly shared that he too had had some strange dreams. Not of the woman, but of tiny creatures that would sit on top of his dresser. They would watch him as he slept with beady red eyes. Sometimes, in the quietness of the night, he would hear a distorted giggling coming from the dresser.

My dad said the creatures were there when he closed his eyes, that he could hear them speak, but only inside his head. And he couldn't understand them. Their voices were grating, though. They taunted him by mocking every poor choice he'd ever made. And other times, they watched him. It took a toll on my dad and he began sleeping in another room to avoid them. We all hugged each other and then agreed that we needed to do something. Whatever was in this house...

had to go before things grew worse. While looking for answers and ways to rid ourselves of an unwanted guest, we named the woman The Lady in White. Fitting and uncreative. Anytime something spooky happened, we blamed her or the little gremlins that seemed to have attached themselves to my dad. Voices? Tis the lady and her minions. Have strange dreams? The lady wants your attention.

Every little thing was put on her because she was the primary thing we interacted with. She especially loved coming into my dreams to play. And she was with us for about a year. Then one day, Sean and I were talking about my ghost guests. Sean had an idea that may help us. He had looked into ways to exercise homes and people. He picked up one of his incense sticks and said he would bless the house.

I laughed. I believed this only worked if you believed in God and were a priest. Sean shot back that it was worth a shot. Just maybe this would work.

He lit the incense and began to smudge the house while pretending to be a holy saint. This was funny shit, watching him go from room to room, smudging and speaking in a deep voice, saying the Lord's Prayer, and adding his own addition. I call upon my dear... and our lord in heaven and ask all who are here to leave now for you are no longer welcome in this dwelling your time here has come to an end leave now peacefully and never return to this dwelling for its inhabitants

no longer welcome you I couldn't take him seriously but whatever I let him do his thing then I did notice though that once he was done going around the house a second time It felt like a weight had been lifted. We laughed so hard. He really had cleansed my house of my paranormal infestation. Since then, my lady in white never visits my dreams.

My parents haven't experienced anything else either. I was relieved, but also a part of me was a little sad she was gone. Thanks for reading your fellow creep, Marissa. Thank you, Marissa. Man, there was a lot of stuff there. It sounds like a succubus. Like maybe perhaps where like with Sean and her dad, like Sean talked about when he first encountered this lady in white. Okay, wait, I think you're confused. Sean is a friend. Right, Sean stayed the night. Yeah.

Oh, yes. And then Sean went and told Marissa, like, hey, I felt something touching my body. Oh, I didn't even think about that. And then Marissa said her mom. Woke up to find the lady in white straddling her dad. Yes, kind of like getting ready to strike him with something maybe. Yeah. But I'm like straddling, touching the body. Okay, okay. I'm like, just for a second, I was like, is this like a succubus type energy thing? Could be, absolutely.

there could have been some sexual energy there that yeah and then the whole thing about like it's starting at the Halloween party and what a badass Halloween like house they set up that's better than most like it sounds like that was as good as a lot of like Places you paid to go to. Yeah, no, it sounded awesome. Yeah, themed rooms. Yeah, the animatronic crawling across the ceiling. Like, your parents sound amazing. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, but I never thought about...

Or at least not that I can recall. I don't think I've thought about like decorating your house for Halloween, like creating your own sort of themed or haunted house within your own home. And then that potentially being.

the onset of a paranormal infestation. Yeah, that Ouija board her dad brought in. It sounds like that's what Marissa suspected, you know, was what did it. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, that was a really entertaining story. I thought so too. And it had a nice little ending. Yeah. You know, Sean was able to...

Come up with his own little twist on a cleansing kind of prayer situation, house exorcism, and seems to have pulled it off. I know. I love, like, Marissa's like, get the fuck out of here. Uh-huh. You know, just like laughing, but then like, ah. Shit. I think that worked. He went full Ed Warren there. I love it. I love it. It was really silly. But listen, whatever it takes, you know. Yeah. Gotta live in peace again. Okay.

Do you want to hear maybe just one more story? I would love to. Okay, well then let's do it. And we dive right in. The Woman in the Woods. I grew up on the edge of a tiny mountain town in Colorado where our backyard wasn't really a yard. It was endless forest. No close neighbors, no streetlights. Just the sound of wind through the trees and the feeling that something was always watching. My mom was a Celtic pagan, a wild 70s hippie turned mountain witch.

And my dad was a biker who used to run with the Hells Angels. Between the two of them, life was unconventional. When I was little, I spent my days exploring those woods. But at night... Things grew strange. Sometimes, just before bed, I'd feel an overwhelming pull to look out my window. Every time I did, she was there. A tall, cloaked figure standing at the edge of the trees. Feminine. Still. Watching. She only appeared on nights with no moon. And every time she did...

The next morning, we'd find dead crows scattered around the property. Once perfectly arranged in a circle. I was terrified, but I never told my parents. I think I was more afraid that they... would believe me. Years later, when I was a teenager, deep in my wild phase, festivals, late nights, no sleep for days, I came home one night exhausted and collapsed into bed. I was...

seconds from sleep, when I realized I couldn't move. My eyes shot open, but my body was completely frozen. That's when I saw it. Something was crawling across my ceiling, something that looked exactly like Me. Same face, same hair. But its skin was bluish-gray, its eyes hollow in black. It grinned as it reached both hands towards my throat. The air went freezing cold. My whole body buzzed like static. Just as its fingers were about to touch me, my bedside lamp clicked itself on. In the light?

It was gone. My body released all at once and I bolted to my parents' room. I didn't sleep a second that night. Eventually, I moved out with my boyfriend, now husband. He's from Mexico and he's had his own share of strange experiences. But that's another story. Years later, we bought a small, creaky house built in 1951. We loved it. Original wood floors, mountain views, a big yard for the kids. It felt peaceful. And then...

Our oldest daughter, who was eight at the time, started talking about the shadow man outside her bedroom window. She said he whispered for her to come outside, to come play. Thank God she never did. For years, she'd say he tried to convince her, Quick, come out! Your family needs your help! Things an eight-year-old would easily believe. We finally brought in a psychic medium to cleanse the house. She told us that between my Celtic roots and my husband's Aztec ancestry, our family was naturally

attuned, that certain energies were drawn to us, and that they can follow bloodlines. I don't know if that's true, but I do know what I saw on that ceiling, and I know what my daughter saw on her window. And some nights... When the moon disappears, I still feel that pull, that urge to look outside. I never do, though. I'm afraid one night, she will be there. Sarah.

And what is it about people crawling on the ceilings? I know. We haven't had a story that features that and I don't even know how long. Dancing on the ceiling. And then, yeah, we don't. Can we turn that into a horror song? Sure. We don't compare notes before we record episodes. I have no idea what Lindsay's going to, you know, share with me. And she has no idea what I'm going to share with her. Yeah. And so it always just cracks me up when...

we will just have like this kind of a theme. Synergy. Magically appear in the episode. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. Man, that was a good one too. I know. Sometimes it's like it doesn't take much and that was just so well written, Sarah, that like it didn't need more. Yeah, yeah. Man, the dead crows accompanying siding. Oh my God.

That was a really creepy detail. In a perfect circle? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Also, Sarah, I don't know what your relationship is with your parents, but they sound real fucking fun. Yeah, pagan Celtic witch biker who was a former Hell's Angel. That's quite the combo. And like opposite ends of the spectrum. There is crossover, but like, you know.

It's just really, I was like, okay, these are cool people. Man, Colorado is such a beautiful state too. Like just having driven through it and driven around it a few different times and just, you know, toured there over the years. It's such a pretty, pretty state. And just I could really picture like this backyard, like, you know, growing up in a little mountain town, too. But like, that's so cool. It is such a cool thing, especially as a kid.

when your backyard doesn't just bump up against the backyard of another person in your subdivision or whatever, but when it just like flows into the mountain. Yeah. Or flows into the wilderness. It's like a really magical thing as a kid. I think so too. I think it like, I think it touches something inside of us that goes back to our ancestors long ago when everybody or most people lived in areas like that. I don't know, something really like primal.

Yeah, and I think, you know, for a kid, it creates a lot of space to explore both physically and mentally. Yeah, so much imagination. You build out stories. Yeah. Yeah. Like one of my favorite books growing up as a kid was The Secret Garden. And it's that same kind of thing, you know, where it's just this magical place where you can build worlds because there's no interruption of anything else. Yeah. So wonderfully. Quiet. Yeah. And just really simple. You can't make that.

You know, it's like you can build the best tree fort. You can have the coolest bicycle. But there's just something uniquely magical about a garden, a forest, a space that is generally untouched by man. Yeah, absolutely.

I remember as a kid, like playing out in the woods and, you know, and you just never knew when you were going to see like a coyote or a deer or a raccoon or some other little forest creature or when you were going to stumble upon maybe an old campsite from long ago or an old coin from like minor.

in the area long ago or even like arrowheads on the side of like a little creek bed and stuff and then it would just send your mind into like mind into all these different places wondering how these people live there and what they did and you just build this little world in your head and it was just all free and all simple and yeah, it's really special.

Yeah. I think, you know, just knowing you and, you know, knowing your history and where you come from and, you know, this place that we visit regularly, it makes so much sense that you're a storyteller because it was just almost ingrained in you to, you know, as a child, build your own stories, build your own entertainment. And then.

You're just natural proclivity for that. You know, it just makes so much sense. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Yeah. No, I mean, you had to like build your own stories, you know, like when you didn't have as many things to watch, especially as a little kid. And we only had for a while before we had this big satellite configuration. We only had like. I think three channels in town. Yeah. Like cable didn't come into town even. Uh-huh. It felt like I was from another era.

It's not that far-fetched, though. Like, I mean, I know kids in my neighborhood had cable, but we didn't. And so since we didn't, we had 3, 5, 18, 19, and 43. We had five channels. Yeah, just a couple channels, whatever comes over the airways. And I wasn't allowed to watch TV, really. My mom was like, get outside, get outside, get outside. You know, she was horrible.

Terrified that I wanted to watch 90210. She's like, I don't know. I don't think so. Just like, why do you need that? You know, what do you need that exposure for? And I mean, you know. Times change and things shift, but... Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. If you are a parent and...

Life allows you to send your kids outside or take them outside, you know, because we know life is challenging and difficult and we're just dealing with a different set of circumstances in 2025. But, you know, if that's a thing you can do from two people, you know. who really found like how cool it was to be able to be outside, you know.

Maybe consider prioritizing that in 2026. Yeah. Get the kids out in the yard somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's magical. Even just being able to go camping is magical. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And camp in your backyard. It's pretty fun. Yeah. I did that as a little kid. Sure. Yep. Put the tent in the backyard. It's great. Yeah.

All right. Want to thank some Annabelles? I do. I do. I would like to thank the following Annabelles for their endless support and love on Patreon. Tiffany Gerard, Ed Delgado, Shane Mossbarger. Dusty's Peach 696. There's a story there. Carmelo Mabry. Peter Delaney. Amber Schwank. Oh, boy. Schwank. Schwanky. Schwanky.

Amber, what's going on with this last name? Shwinky Dink Dink. S-C-H-W-A-N-K-E. Shwanky. Shwanky. You're shwanky. Amber Shwanky. I would pronounce that shlamalama ding dong. Okay, she loves that. Uh-huh. And Leora Stroud. Okay. And I'd like to thank the following Annabelle's. Again, thank you so much. Halcyon Newman, Mark Simon, Ades, or it's like A space D-E-S, Ades.

Grim Knight, Simon Freeburn, Gen Mom, Unraveling Crown. At first I thought that was Unraveling Clown, which is a very different image. Yes, this is true. And Rebecca. Oh, this looks like a Czechoslovakian name. Rebecca... Oh my God. I remember giving it to you and thinking like... Certain Slavic names. I'm like, I don't know. I think it's... Well, I think the W is like a V. Kastrezva. Oh, Kastrezva. Okay. That's my guess. Rebecca, we're very confident about Rebecca.

We're very firm about the Becca part. Yeah, we got Rebecca nailed. Crushed it. But if you could let us know, okay, here's my vote. My vote is Kostrezva. I like that. Let's go with what you said. That's your name, whether you like it or not. All right. And just two quick spoopy shout outs to Sasha from Rudy. Happy. Oh, from your dad, Rudy. Happy 13th birthday, Bambi. Let's plan another Disney cruise. Yay. So fun. I just saw my first Disney cruise ship when we were doing Crime Wave at Sea.

And I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. They're massive. Uh-huh. And just like if you're a kid. Oh, yeah. All the fun things. Magical. Well, just all the characters that you love. Like I was like, oh, okay. Even on the helm of the ship, I was like, oh, wow. Okay. Okay. All right. You are going to love this one. Okay. To Jebediah from Jebedora, a.k.a. Beefy Debra. Beefy Debra.

And Jebediah. Love this. I love this. We were emailing back and forth. I was crying. I was laughing so hard. Thank you for being my person. You're truly the light of my life in each and every lifetime. Thank you for being with me. I love you. Amazing. Jebediah and Jebedora.

All right, beefy Debra. Oh, my God. That's our show. Thank you for continuing to send in your personal tales of terror to my story at scaredodeathpodcast.com. You can email us for everything else at info at scaredodeathpodcast.com. Thanks to Logan Keith for scoring today's show. Thanks to Heather Rylander organizing the My Story emails, to book editor Drew Atana polishing and preparing listener stories for book number seven. I was able to find the stories I shared today.

We're on Facebook and Instagram where we post our pics and more at Scared to Death Podcast. We also have a private Facebook group called Creeps and Peepers. full of fellow horror lovers, moderated by the all-seeing eyes. Thanks so much for making our community such a fun and welcoming place for so many. Thank you to Beefy Debra for having an amazing name.

Enjoy your nightmares, creeps and peepers. Hope you were scared to death. Bye. If spirits threaten me in this place, fight water by water and fire by fire. Banish their souls into nothingness. And remove their powers until the last trace. Let these evil beings bleed. Through time and space. The only pass through but has no home here within. Scared to death. It always just cracks me up when we will just have this kind of a theme magically appear in the episode. Yeah, I like it.

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