The Sauna at Julåsen

Medelpad · Sweden · Farmstead

Every dusk an infant was heard crying by the bathhouse at Julåsen – until the village fetched a priest to read over the child no one had buried.

By a bathhouse in the old village of Julåsen, some ten kilometres south of Erikslund, people in the 1800s often heard a child crying in the evenings – and always precisely at dusk. The district was convinced that a woman had killed her newborn there and hidden the body. In northern Swedish folk belief an unbaptised, murdered child becomes a myling: it weeps and wails until it is given a name and consecrated ground, and it cries by preference in the border hour between day and night. At last the villagers brought in a curate, who walked by the bathhouse one evening and read over the child. After that it fell silent for good. An almost identical legend in the same record concerns the Lokåsen summer pasture further south, where a woman heard a child crying by a hay barn for an entire summer. The account was recorded in 1946.

FAQ

Where is The Sauna at Julåsen located?

The Sauna at Julåsen is in Medelpad, Sweden.