Before I begin, I want to say that English is not my first language, so please forgive any mistakes I make. I want today to tell the story of a woman named Valþrúður. I want to tell you of the mystery, the wonder, and ultimately the horror that she brought to my village.
I live in a small town called Ísafjörður, in the Westfjords region of Iceland. Val’s story begins in the winter of 1997, when I was only 5 years old myself. Before I really begin, I want to tell you about the security measures they use at the hospital nursery. Each baby is given an ID band on their wrist and ankle, that have matching barcodes; the mother is also given a wristband with a matching barcode to her baby. These bands are put on shortly after the baby is born and cleaned, and they are not removed until the baby goes home with the parents. Footprints are also taken. This is done to prevent parents from being sent home with the wrong baby. This is not a large concern here in Ísafjörður, though, because not many babies are born here; usually between 20 and 30 in a year, so mix-ups are unlikely.
The reason I’m telling you this is because on that night in 1997, there were two registered births at the hospital recently. Both of those babies were still there, and all the security measures had been followed properly. But that night, as one of the nurses was doing her regular checks, she saw that there was a third baby in the nursery. A girl. This baby had no ID bands, there was no name card on her cradle like the others, and there had been only two pregnant women treated there recently and neither of them had delivered twins. A review of the security footage was done; there was a camera focused on the outside of the nursery door, but no cameras in the room itself. After the videos were watched, there was never a sign of somebody taking a third baby into the room. By all the evidence, this girl had just appeared out of nowhere.
The police were informed, but they had no more insight than the security guard did. Eventually the decision was made that the child would be put up for adoption. The nurse who had first found her volunteered to take her, and this mystery baby became my little sister, Valþrúður.
The typical small town gossip began when the story became known. Most people had decided that the most likely answer was that Val was simply unwanted by her birth parents, and that they had sneaked her into the nursery somehow to be rid of her. My mother always said though that this had been considered and ruled out as an explanation. The intrigue faded over time, and Val was seen as just another child here.
When she started school, that’s when the strange things really started happening. Some of her classmates proved themselves to be typical awful children, and they decided to make Val the main target of their harassment. Usually just childish things like calling her Enginnsdóttir, nobody’s daughter, instead of her real name because of the circumstances of her birth. None of their insults ever seemed to bother Val, and that only made them put more effort into their bullying. I don’t have the full details of what happened here, because Val would never say how she did it, but what I do know is that when she was 16, a plan was made by this boy Jón to lock her in a closet of the art room, downstairs in the basement of the high school and leave her trapped there for the weekend.
His plan succeeded, for the first part anyway. One Friday, at the end of the school day he was able to get her in the closet and he secured the door shut. But as Jón would later find out, Val did not stay in there for the weekend. She reported what he had done to the teachers and showed them how the closet had been barricaded shut. He got in trouble, and the teachers were more concerned with what Jón had done to notice something at first. But later the fact was brought up that the closet was still barricaded shut, with a chair under the handle and a cord securing it further, but Val had gotten out anyway, and apparently she had done it without opening the door.
This incident seemed to frighten Val’s recurring bullies off and they left her alone after that, but rumors started being whispered again. Her escape, along with renewed interest in her mysterious appearance in the nursery led to talk that Val must be a changeling, a child of the Hidden People that they had decided to leave in the care of humans for some reason. According to the old stories, the Hidden People live in a world separate from ours; they can visit ours as they wish, they can only be seen if they want to be, and they have magic.
The rumors started to die away again, but Jón wouldn’t let them disappear completely, telling people that Val wasn’t human, and she couldn’t be trusted. People didn’t pay much mind to him, since she had always been polite and respectful; she worked at a bakery after school, and most of the townsfolk had met her; she certainly wasn’t the evil sorceress that Jón seemed to think she was.
Val moved away from Ísafjörður when she turned 18 to attend nursing school in Reykjavík. She was away for 4 years, and while she was gone Jón finally stopped his ranting about her. After she graduated, she came back here, and started working at the same hospital where this whole story started, and where Val’s story would end. On the morning of the 11th of January 2021, 24 years to the day since Val had appeared in the nursery, one of her coworkers arrived at the hospital for her shift and found Val’s body lying in the parking lot; blood staining the snow red around her, and a knife still lodged in her belly.
Nobody alive in Ísafjörður today had seen a murder committed here, and nobody knew how to process it; a young woman, barely starting her career only to have her life so violently and pointlessly stolen from her. Pretty much everyone suspected Jón right away; at times his talk about Val was bordering on obsession, and he confessed in short order once the police questioned him. And this is also where Jón’s story ends. Here in Ísafjörður there isn’t really a jail, just a drunk tank downstairs in the police building; it has always been a peaceful town, and there was never a need for a jail. After Jón confessed, he was locked in the drunk tank while preparations were made for him to be sent to Reykjavík so he could be formally charged with Val’s murder.
Jón was obsessive about this at times, telling people that Val really was one of the Hidden People. But what he never thought to consider was the fact that she had been left in the hospital nursery; whoever put her there obviously wanted her to be taken care of, and they would be very angry about what was done to her. He learned of their anger in the worst of ways. The night before he was scheduled to be sent to Reykjavík, he had asked the guard for a bottle of water. In the few short moments it took the guard to walk up the stairs, get the water and come back, every bone in Jón’s body had been broken, some so forcefully that they broke the skin and spattered blood around the cell. Just like how it had been when Val appeared in the nursery, the camera never showed anyone else going down there.
Valþrúður Lokadóttir was laid to rest here in Ísafjörður; it’s what she would have wanted. The whole town had come out to say their goodbyes, and I like to think that Val’s birth parents were there too, unseen but seeing that we had cared for her. I think that I’m right about that, that they’ve seen we’re not all like Jón. Because two days ago, a baby was found in the nursery at the hospital; a baby who had no ID bands