Stories Fables Ghostly Tales

The last night — and the one I nearly didn't write...
Mørketid ends tonight. Sweden.
Fair warning on this one...
This episode is about children. The bäckahästen drowns them and the Myling is one that was left in the woods to die, and while I've kept the detail out, it's there for the whole half-hour. If that's a hard subject for you, take this one at your own pace or skip it — the series works without it and I'd rather you were alright than completist.
What I worked out while writing it...
The bäckahästen is a white horse standing in a summer meadow. A child climbs on. Nothing happens, so a second climbs on behind them. And there's room. However many climb on, there is room, because the back gets longer — never suddenly, just, each time, space for one more. And a child being helped onto a horse isn't measuring the horse.
Then it walks — walks, not gallops — into the water.
Sweden has close to a hundred thousand lakes and children drowned in the summer in numbers we'd find unbearable now. And I don't think this story is a warning to children at all. It's far too appealing for that, and it clearly didn't work.
It's for the parents. It's a story in which it wasn't the water and nobody looked up too late and nothing could have been done, because a beautiful white horse chose them.
And the myling...
A child left in the woods, which waits by the road and cries and asks to be carried to the churchyard so it can be buried properly. It gets heavier the closer you get to the gate — so the last two hundred yards are worse than the whole mile before them. If you make it, it rests. If you put it down, it kills you.
I kept trying to work out why it gets heavier, and the answer isn't cruelty. It's that the nearer you get, the more it becomes a child, and the more the entire weight of what was done — and of a village that knew exactly what had happened and asked nothing — is on one person's back at once, in the dark, in sight of the wall.
What the four nights turned out to be about...
I didn't plan this and I only saw it writing the last Turn. Every one of these countries is dark for a third of the year. Every one had people living six miles from the next house with no light and no help.
And what all four of them built wasn't a set of monsters. It was a set of instructions. Say the name out loud. Turn your coat inside out. Don't laugh at her. Watch what's in her hand. Don't put it down.
Small, stubborn, faintly ridiculous things that a frightened person can actually do.
That's what folklore is, I think. Not an explanation of the dark. A list of things to do while you're in it.
Next week...
Back to Japan True Crime. Back to the hundred candles. Back to the other kind of dark — the kind people do to each other.
Thank you for four nights my librarians of the dark... 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

Night three of Mørketid is out. Norway.
She Carries a Rake...
A craft decision I want to explain...
The draug should have been the finale. He's the better monster by any obvious measure — a drowned fisherman in oilskins with a mass of seaweed where his head should be, sailing half a boat against the wind, screaming out on the water where there is nobody. That's a closing image.
I put him second, and gave the ending to an old woman walking up a path.
Here's why. Everything in these four episodes has a countermeasure. Say the Näkki's name. Turn your coat inside out. Be polite to the Huldra and keep your luck. Stay off the water. Every horror in this series comes with something small and stubborn you can do about it — that's the whole argument the finale makes.
Pesta has nothing. She isn't cruel and she isn't kind and she cannot be bargained with and nothing you did brought her. In 1349 the plague came into Bergen on a ship and Norway lost somewhere between half and two thirds of its people in about eighteen months, and because Norway is a country of valleys reachable by one path each, it didn't sweep. It walked. At the speed of a person, because it was carried by people.
So you knew it was coming. You'd had word. It had been three valleys over, and then two, and then the next one.
And what they made out of that is the most efficient piece of horror I've ever come across. She carries either a rake or a broom. A rake has gaps — things slip between the tines, and some of you live. A broom has none.
And you can see her on the path, a long way down, for about an hour. And the only thing you are doing for that entire hour is trying to work out what's in her hand.
If you want to go deeper...
Theodor Kittelsen painted Pesta over and over in the 1890s and those images are what most Norwegians still picture. Worth looking up before you listen. It's the flatness of her face that does it — she isn't malicious. She's just arriving.
Next Episode...
Sweden. And that one was the hardest of the four to write, so fair warning.
The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

NIGHT TWO — FINLAND
Night two: Finland has a word for a person who isn't lost, isn't taken, and cannot be found — while standing right in front of you.
Night two of Mørketid is out. Finland.
Metsänpeitto
It translates as "the forest cover," and it describes something Finns believed happened often enough that the language needed a word for it.
A person walks into the forest they've known their whole life. They don't come back. The village searches properly — small community, everyone knows the ground, they go out in a line and call.
And the belief isn't that the person wandered off. The belief is that they are still there. Six feet away. Possibly standing directly in front of the search line. And the forest has put something over them.
Here's the part I had to stop reading and walk away from: in the collected accounts, from people who said it had happened to them, the person under the cover is awake the whole time. They can hear the search party. Some of them describe watching people walk past. They can't be seen, can't be heard, and can't make their legs carry them toward the voices.
No creature. Nobody arrives. Nothing hurts you. You are simply removed from the category of things that can be found.
And then there's the cure....
Turn your coat inside out. Put your shirt on backwards. Take your shoes off and swap them onto the wrong feet.
That's it. That was the remedy, believed all across Finland and into Karelia and Estonia. And it makes an awful sense — if the forest has taken the shape of you and put a lid over it, stop being that shape.
But picture actually doing it. A grown adult in failing light who has been shouting for three hours and has stopped shouting, sitting down on the pine needles and very carefully swapping their shoes over, because it is the only thing left in the world that they can try.
That's the cover art for this episode, by the way. Just the boots.
The other half...
The Lemminkäinen section is the saddest thing I've written for this show. His mother rakes the black river of the underworld until she has all eight pieces of him, sews him back together, wakes him — and he stretches and says he's been asleep a long time and slept well.
He never knew. She never told him.
Next Episode...
Norway. An old woman walking up a valley path carrying either a rake or a broom, and everything depends on which.
The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

Four nights of Nordic folklore. Night one: Denmark buried things alive under its churches — and some of them are still working.

Something different for the next four weeks. No true crime at all.
Mørketid — Four Nights North is a mini-series: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, one night each, pure folklore. Night one is out now.
The bit that stopped me while I was writing it...

The kirkegrim isn't a legend in the way the others are. It's a practice. When a new churchyard was consecrated, the belief was that the first body buried there had to stand guard over the ground forever — so rather than doom a person to that, they buried an animal alive instead. Usually a lamb.
That happened. Across Denmark, across Sweden, across England, for centuries. There are churches standing today where the bones are still down there.
I wrote that section three times because I kept making it too gothic. It works better plain — a man in a wool coat, on a cold morning, holding a lamb that isn't frightened because lambs aren't frightened of people. That's the version that's in the episode.
A note on the format...

These aren't candles. The hundred-candle game is specifically Japanese, and burning four of the hundred on Nordic material would break that whole arc. So Mørketid gets its own frame, and it's the exact inverse: in Japan you blow candles out until the dark arrives. Up north the dark is already there — you light one and count nights until the sun comes back.
Four nights, then we go back to Japan.
Next Weekend...

Finland. And Finland is the worst of the four. There's a word up there for what happens when the forest doesn't take you anywhere, doesn't hurt you, and simply stops letting you be found — while you stand in it, awake, listening to the search party call your name.
The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore, one candle at a time.
In June 1981, a Japanese literature student in Paris asked a Dutch classmate to come to his apartment and help him with his German pronunciation. Renée Hartevelt was twenty-five. She said yes because she was the kind of person who noticed when somebody was sitting on their own.
Issei Sagawa confessed within days. He was never convicted, never imprisoned, and never spent a single night in a cell. He spent the next thirty-six years being interviewed, published, booked and paid — and at one point, employed as a restaurant critic.
This episode pairs his case with the jikininki: the Buddhist hungry ghost, cursed to devour the dead every night through a throat too narrow to swallow anything at all. A creature no court can touch, no prison can hold, and no executioner can reach — one that ends only when somebody finally decides to stop feeding it.
Two stories about an appetite that was never the crime.
It was the sentence.
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Contains: graphic violence, cannibalism, sexual violence (referenced, not depicted), and detailed discussion of a real victim. Listener discretion advised.
Chapters
00:00 The Lighting
02:40 The Priest at the Hermitage
15:30 Renée
20:40 The Woman in the Ground-Floor Apartment
27:30 The Eleventh of June
36:00 The Hole in the Law
40:00 The Godfather
43:30 The Rite
50:00 The Ones Who Keep The Candles Lit
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There is an old Japanese game. A hundred candles are lit in a windowless room. Every story told puts one out. Nobody agrees on what arrives when the last one dies — only that you should not be there to see it.
This is Candle 001.
Ninety-nine to go...