Norway and the rest of Scandinavia is often touted as the land of the midnight sun, or the land where the sun never sets. What you never hear about is the other side of the story, the other half of the year when the sun doesn’t rise.
This post might not be as action packed and exciting as some of the others on this sub, but every word is true.
I’d like to give some back story on some of the things that have lead to my increased interest in the area of the supernatural, as well as set the mood before I delve into the heart of the intended story. Growing up religious there was always speculation and talk about how if there is a God and a Devil and miracles then there must also be evil occurrences. Me and my friends were always fascinated by these events. Telling each other stories, having horror movie parties in the movie room in the basement of the McCoys mansion. It’s my belief, and it’s been my experience that the more you dwell on these things the more they tend to happen to you, or around you.
My group of friends, consisting of about six other boys my age that had all met each other at school and in the course of moving around our valley had attended the same church together. The McCoys’ father was a leader in the local branch of the church we attended and as such had access to keys several of the buildings in our neighborhood. It was a tradition for our group of friends during the summers, and occasionally on weekends to go to the church after dark to play games. Hide and seek tag and some variation of zombies or fugitive couples with nerf guns were our typical go to. We had a rule that the chapel was off limits for reasons of respect. These sessions would typically last a couple of hours and then we would head back to the mansion basement for an all night horror movie binge and finally go to bed around 5-8 in the morning.
After a long time, and frequent repetitions of these nights, things started to happen around me and my friends while at the churches and eventually at our houses and in our cars. There was an awkward space between the chapel and the gymnasium of the church enclosed on both sides by accordion doors, with a normal door on each side leading into the hallways that was very popular as a hiding spot as no light came in and it was as pitch black in that space as it could possibly be. One particularly rowdy night after much running through and around the chapel Jared came out of the room white faces and gave up his position, losing the game. We managed to pry out of him that something was in the room with him and he could feel it paying attention to him and he had to leave. We used to wedge ourselves between the accordion doors and the walls to hide as it was impossible to see in the cramped space and you would have to fully shove yourself all the way up against the wall to be entirely sure nobody was hiding there, and if you checked the wrong one the person hiding at the other end had enough time to run out the other door before you could get out and tag them.
Jared had squeezed himself into this little gap and was peaking his head out watching the room for the seeker. When the door finally opened and the moonlight and the light of the emergency lights in foyer came flooding in (our eyes being young and having adjusted thoroughly to the dark, the little light provided was enough to make out most shapes in the dark). The seeker gave the cursory glance around, knowing he wouldn’t be able to catch anybody in this room but hoping he might happen to see someone moving to or from a hiding spot. Seeing nothing he turned to leave and that’s when Jared said he saw it. A shadow of a man in the corner of the room opposite him, nearly 12 feet tall and facing right towards him. His heart clenched in his chest and he held his breath as the door slowly swung shut, the sliver of light fading to nothing. I don’t know if he heard something or merely felt the presence moving across the room but he feels sure to this day that it was coming for him. He flew out of his tiny hiding place and slammed into the double doors spilling out in the foyer where several of us who had already been found were waiting for this round to end. After that time we all experienced if not the same exact thing than something very similar in that church.
I myself, when seeking by alone on one occasion went to explore a room that had two very large windows and plenty of moonlight to see by steaming through them. There was one corner of the room that was too dark for me to make out though. I thought perhaps there was a small lectern or stack of chairs there that was making the area more shadowed; and potentially a hiding spot. As a slowly crept forward something seized my heart and twisted. I had never felt anything like it before, and the closer I got to the corner the stronger it became. I could feel my heart clench and beat hard in my chest, it was a truly odd and rather terrifying experience. I made it about 5 feet from the corner and still could make nothing out. I felt like I would have a heart attack at any moment and could stand it no longer. I backed up from the corner as fast as I could without turning around, made it out the door and sprinted as fast as my track and field legs could carry me down the hall to the foyer.
We all kind of knew at this point when one of us would come sprinting down the hall as fast as we could with that certain look on our face that it was time to leave, no questions asked. (We weren’t like those guys in the horror movies, we were absolutely not afraid to leave as fast as we could) Sometimes one of us would show up and say he was here, I saw him, I saw something. And we would all know, time to go. It didn’t happen every time, fairly rarely in fact, or I’m sure we would have stopped going there, but enough that we had unspoken rules in place. But the weird part was when things started to follow to other places. The youngest of the McCoy brothers, Nick, seemed the most susceptible. Often when we would be watching our movies in the basement the door to the storage closet and water heater would creak open on its own until it was standing wide open with its black maw drawing us in. We would throw on the lights, jump over the couch, and slam it closed as fast as we could.
Another time Nick was in his beat up old truck driving to pick up our friend Josh to come hang out with us. (We lived in the rural community outside of town so all our houses were 15 minutes apart) He was cruising down the road when something caught the corner of his eye and he looked up at his rear view mirror and froze. He saw the pale face of an ancient man floating in the darkness of his back seat. Mostly bald with long stringy clumps of hair and a disfigured face was how he described him to us. He sat in the seat grinning at the back of my friend’s head. Nick’s hands gripped the steering wheel, white knuckled as he drove to our friend’s house. He was too afraid to move, to pull out his phone, even to move his neck far enough to look in the mirror again. But he could hear and feel the man’s breathing. When he arrived at Josh’s house, Josh came out and saw nick sitting, gripping the steering wheel and not moving at all. A little curious he came out and got in the truck and they drove back to Nick’s house without incident.
Another time Nick reported sleeping in the living room and waking to a strange feeling. He looked up just in time to the remote on the coffee slide itself over and fall off the edge. He told us of many other things in his room that had happened to him. I can attest that entering his room gave one a strong feeling of unease and we never hung out in there, despite there being a tv and play station, as we couldn’t stand to be in there for more than a few minutes at a time. Countless other incidents and ‘visitors’ if you will, followed me and my friends, and I’m convinced, follow us to this day.
Fast forward several years and I am leaving on my two year church assigned mission to Norway. I was so excited to go visit another country and learn the language and culture. And though I am no longer actively religious it remains one of the best experiences of my life. For those that are unfamiliar with the process, you are assigned a roommate and are not allowed to leave his (or her) side for any reason as long as you live together. You are sent to a random area on your mission country, or boundaries and live there for a random amount of time with that person until you are transferred. After I had been in Norway for about a year, I received my new assignment. I would be moving, in the dead of winter, to a little town called Bodø, just above the arctic circle, with a man named Elder Chew. I would not see the sun until the end of my second month there and it would set again after about ten minutes, but oh was it glorious so to the light of God shining down upon us again. Chew was a funny guy and we really hit it off, but that apartment was the worst place I have lived and probably will be the worst that I ever live in.
I no longer recall the address but I’m sure I can find the house on google maps. It was one of the tall, awkwardly skinny houses. Two stories, white paint peeling off everywhere, no yard, and crammed right up against the house next to it. When you walked in the front door the door to our apartment was directly in front of you, and to the right was a spiral staircase leading up to the apartment above us. Just to the right of our front door was the door leading down into the most terrifying basement I have ever seen. The ancient wooden spiral staircase leads down into the basement with a large space behind the stairs. The space under the stairs was where our freezer that we shared with the upstairs tenant was tucked. The walls are bare crumbling concrete, with no lights in the hallway or in most of the rooms. Every door in the house and basement was decades old and had skeleton key holes in them.
The basement was L shaped with the room directly across from the ottoman of our stairs holding our washing machine. It looked like something out of a sanitarium from the 1800’s, with an empty, severely damaged door frame, cracked concrete walls, and large iron sinks bolted to the walls. There were two rooms on the right hand side before you got to the washroom, and after a sharp right turn from the wash room there were two more rooms on the left and one door directly at the end of the hallway. The two rooms on the right at the bottom of the stairs are of particular interest to our tale. One was barricaded shut with things wedged up against the door handle and dozens of shovels, rakes, brooms and boards, and other household implements leaning against it. The other room was much more accessible.
The door opened outward and had, at some point, been ripped open so that the door jamb where lock and the handle would normally go to secure the door when closed was ripped apart and the door was tied shut by a rope tied to a screw that had been screwed into the door frame. Inside this room was the most eclectic assortment of haphazardly strewn items I’ve ever laid eyes upon. An old upright pump organ with gouges and mouldering wood stood center in the room surrounded by boxes and boxes of papers, random items, suitcases, a pair of skis, figurines, an empty bookcase, what appeared to be a burlap effigy of some kind astride a toy horse. It screamed voodoo doll to me. One day it came upon us to check in some of the boxes. We found an old Nintendo 64 with Mario Party and Zelda Ocarina of Time and two controllers, which we brought upstairs, and to our delight still worked. We filled many of those black days with that thing. I still have that game cartridge that I smuggled home with me in my suitcase, though in hindsight that might have been a mistake. As we rooted around in the mess we bumped one of the alligator skin suitcases and what appeared to be dust spilled out of the cracks. Curious we set it up on the piano and when we opened it to our surprise and horror we found that it was filled with ashes and pieces of what looked like charred bones. We slammed it closed and threw it to the ground, releasing a puff of ash and dust. We looked at each and, saying nothing, we reached for the other suitcases. Both filled with ashes and bones and one with a baby doll that had its head and limbs ripped off. We threw them down and ran upstairs, clutching our loot.
Our apartment upstairs was a very open floor plan. Directly in front of our entrance was our bedroom door and to the right of that, the bathroom. To the left was the kitchen and then the dining room/living room area. Every room in the house was hard wood, old and warped with the edges curling, except for the red room. A tiny room next to the kitchen with a red couch, red curtains, a red lava lamp, and some posters on the wall. It sported the thinnest gray carpet I’ve ever walked on and it was glorious. This is the room we spent the majority of our time in. The lighting situation in the apartment was terrible. Our bedroom had a light, the red room had a light, and the bathroom had a light. Apart from that we had lamps to light the main areas of the house. There were a number of light switches, the old flapper kind, not the modern ones. They made an ungodly loud clacking noise when you flipped them but other than that nothing else happened. The space was always freezing cold so we had a space heater for the bedroom, one for the red room and one more we dragged around with us to wherever we were. The only outlet in the larger living space was about two feet off the ground with a nail hammered into the wall to rest the surge protector on. We had a space heater, two lamps, and one of those anti depression UV lamps plugged into it.
I apologize for the long winded descriptions, but I feel it was integral to the story. Hopefully you can see the setting now in your mind’s eye.
There would often be strange things that would happen at that apartment. Items falling off shelves in the middle of the night. Waking up to a room with our breathe fogging because our space heater has switched itself off in the middle of the night. And we absolutely never showered with our eyes closed. It seemed for one reason or another that the only room in the house where nothing strange ever occurred was the red room. While doing our daily studies in the living area there would be noises in the other rooms. We always kept every single light we were not using off, and every heater in the room we were not in off because our breaker would randomly switch off, and the breaker box was in the basement. We often went together into the basement because things would move around and bang in the closed rooms if we didn’t. Very often a light would shine through the keyhole of the door at the end of the hallway. Even though the sun did not shine and there were no lights. A board fell off a shelf and almost cracked me right on top of my head while sitting at the table reading a book. Our smoke detector fell from the ceiling one day and when I went to place it back it the screw holding it in place was unscrewed halfway from the ceiling. Light switches would flip on and off in the middle of the night clacking loudly. But there were two incidents in particular that stand out to me, even now, years later. The first happened to Chew, but it may have been my fault. The second was the scariest experience of my life.
Our bedroom was sparse. My bed on one side of the room, and Chew’s bed on the other. One chest of drawers. Aside from that were maybe 12 built-in closet/cupboard doors in the wall. Chew insisted that we keep them closed at all times, except when taking clothes out or putting them in. (He has been living there a couple months before I moved in) I thought it was stupid but he assured me that if you left any cupboards or doors open strange things would happen. (We ALWAYS slept with the bedroom door closed) I decided it would be funny to leave one of my doors open one night. I got in bed and pulled my dyne up against the cold. Chew came in and saw the door and immediately moved to close it. I got up and, acting like I forgot something, rummaged around inside it and then went back to my bed. He looked at me and then yelled. “DUDE! What are you doing?!?” Very aggressively. I acted like I didn’t know what he was referring to. He got up and closed it again and I got up and opened it. He jumped out of bed and rounded on me slamming the door closed. There ensued about a 30 second fight with me trying to keep the door open and him trying to close it, while I laughed. He gave up and announced loudly that he would not be sleeping in that room with the door open and marched off to the red room. I triumphantly laid down in my bed and, laughing to myself, I went to sleep.
I was violently shaken awake several hours later by a hysterical Chew demanding that I, “Stop it!! It’s not funny!”. I was still foggy and completely baffled. I asked what I was supposed to have been doing and then we heard scraping and clicking sounds coming from the living room. The space heater and light switch were turning themselves on and off. We looked out the door of the bedroom into the darkness and then back at each other. “That.” We both got up slowly and crept out into the hallway and towards the living room. The light from the entry shed a small amount of ambient light into the large room but we could see nothing but empty space. We ran in and flipped the lamp on, shedding light on the room revealing…..nothing. The heater was off and the switch was no longer flipping. I grabbed some clear packaging tape and taped the light switch down, then we went into the room and hid until we eventually fell asleep.
The last event that I will describe here is one I still don’t fully understand and I can feel my heart clenching now as I think about it. It was a seemingly uneventful day and we retired to our beds to sleep. Mine was on the far wall directly across from the door. I was in that odd stage before sleep where you are drifting off and if someone wakes you you can remember what was going on around you but if you fall asleep you won’t remember when you wake. I was jarred out of my trance to a loud creaking noise from just outside our door. (I forgot to mention this in my earlier descriptions but just outside our bedroom door there was a sagging spot in the wood floor and would creak loudly when you stepped on it. In the moment I didn’t immediately realize what I had heard, just that I was suddenly wide awake and wasn’t quite sure why.
I leaned forward in my bed and looked towards the door. That’s when the door knob rattled loudly as if someone had just grabbed it, scaring the absolute shit out of me. I frantically whispered Chew’s name but he didn’t respond and I was afraid of being any louder, much like Nick McCoy in his truck. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. I laid back down in bed and pulled the covers to my chin. I looked at the door and the handle started to creak, slowly turning open. It stopped halfway and slapped loudly back to the neutral position making me jump. Tears started to leak from the corners of my eyes as lungs tightened and my heart started to pound. I could feel my skin becoming slick with a cold sweat as a chill swept through me and along my spine. The doorknob started to creak downward again, but again just before it finished turning completely, my heart thumping against my ribs, it stopped, and sprung back to where it was. This happened several more times, very slowly, over the course of what felt like 20 minutes. I huddled in my bed shivering, but unable to tear my eyes from the door. My attention was consumed by that ancient doorknob and I forgot about all else. Then it stopped. I muttered a prayer under my breath for God to protect me and for this to all be over. Then something just felt WRONG. I peered closer at the door and realized that whatever it was had given up on the door because it had a better way. The darkness at the bottom of the door was changing. I cannot describe to you what was happening because I don’t think mortal eyes were meant to comprehend it but all I could tell was that the darkness seemed wrong somehow, seemed DEEP. Like it was a hole sucking all the other darkness in the room into it.
The gathering darkness (I have no other way to describe it) liquified I’m the corner of the door and began to grow. It got taller and taller. At about two feet tall I slid down and pulled my cover over my head and just wept because all I knew was that I didn’t want to see whatever was coming next. I silently prayed to God, for help, to save me, to forgive my sins if this was the end. Never in my life have ever experienced such pure unadulterated fear, and I hope to never do so again. I lay there crying and praying when I heard a creak by my bed and felt something, I don’t know what, touch my head, very very softly at first. It didn’t feel like a hand. On a hand you can feel the individual fingers, you can feel a slight difference in pressure between the different points of the hand. This was one solid THING. No points of pressure, no fingers. I’m not sure how to describe it. Like a water balloon pushing exactly equally on all parts of my head that it touched. The touch was so soft as to almost be a caress at first. Every muscle in my body tensed up and froze. I couldn’t move. The pressure gradually increased until my head was being pushed down into my mattress. As if something was trying to get inside my skull, inside of me, but it couldn’t get past some kind of barrier. The pressure increased almost until the point of pain. It seemed like an eternity. And then
It simply stopped. That was it. It was over. I lay on my bed crying until Chew woke the next morning. And then I got up and went about my day. For the rest of the few months that I spent in that apartment strange things would happen, but they all seemed insignificant compared to that night.
Since then I have experienced many small situations that give me pause, seeing people out of the corner of my eye that disappear when I turn to look, hearing my name whispered on the wind when no one is around. Occasionally my dog will lay in front of the bathroom or bedroom door and growl and several minutes, but nothing has ever affected me as much as that night.