Its been 3 days since my uncles funeral.
I live in the nordics, more specific in Finland. There are a lot of traditiones and legends that come from the viking era and the people still practice them to honorate them.
One of the most common legends its the legend of the gjenganger. Its said that he is the a spirit witch comes back in a human form so it doesn’t poses tipical ghost abilities like passing through walls or such. It belongs to people who have comited suicide, have been murderd or are murderers. They are known to target the people they loved in their life time, but they will kill them by pitching them giving some kind a disease that slowly takes over their body resulting in the death of the person.
As I mentioned earyler, my uncle is dead, he killed himself. My family is very christian, so they didn’t want to do any nordic ritual to prevent the gjenganger phenomenom. There are ways of doing that such as circleling around a church with the coffin 3 times, or putting rocks and sticks in a specific formation on the grave or writeing on it:
“For Birginga, the brother carved runes My dear sister, spare me!”
All this are supposed to stop the gjenganger from appearing.
I decided to make the rock formation on the grave without my familys aporoval, but better be safe then sorry.
Once, when we were visiting the grave, my parents noticed the rocks and as they knew that I loved mythology it didn’t take long for them to realise what I had done.
In the end they removed them saying “Its not what God wants.”.
The next days I was very paniced about what they had done so I decided to act diffrently.
I bought a few crosses and gave them to my family, the crosses are known of keeping the gjenganger away.
The rest of my family accepted them gladly and I was finally relived until…
I had noticed a new person around out house, it was a homeless person. It didn’t take long for my parents to start giving him food and money to help him “get off the streats.”.
One day I noticed that my mom wasn’t wearing her cross, and when I asked her she said she gave it away to the homeless guy who needed it more.
I gave her mine.
I suspected that that man was the gjenganger of my uncle so I had to get a new cross. There was only one problem:
The night was coming and they are reported to act at night and to be very smart.
All the churches were closed and there was no place I could get another cross.
I had two optiones: to place the rocks back or to write on the coffin that incantation, or of curce I was wronk about everything.
But in case I wasn’t wrong I had to act.
Quickly left the house and started running towards the cemetery. The streets were empty and frozen by the cold. Everything about that night was cold.
I finally got there and right next to the grave was him. He looked at me with a smile on his face that was making huge wrinkles around his cheeks.
He started heading towards me while I was slowly walking back. It pinched me.
My flesh around the mark starded turning to a dark blue, slowly spreading rotund my arm.
My legs began losing their strenght and I felt down. The grave was about 10 meters from me. He was looking with disgrace at me while I was crawling to the grave grabing every rock that was in my path. He said then:
“You will live, for now, I have one use for you.”
I could feel my eyes watering and I was on the break of crying.
I woke up in my bed. The blanket was full of the mud that was in the cemetery. I slowly made myvwas to my parents bedroom and took their necklaces and threw them off the window.
I stood watching after I opend the door for that man to get in. My parents died in minutes.
“Now its your turn.”, he said while turning his face to me.
He dissapeard as I regained control over my body. I has beginning to feel huge pain because of the illness and with tears running of my eyes, I let myself fall of the window.
With a broken leg I found the crosses and quickly put one on. I noticed that the infectioned slowed down. As I started moving towards the toomb, the gjenganger was looking at me. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
After finally getting there, I place the stones on the dirt and watched as the spirit began fading away.