This is the story of when a ghost took away our children’s clothes. The event took place in the winter 1976 in Reykjavík, Iceland in our apartment where I grew up. To give you more context, our apartment and the apartment above were haunted. Our apartment had many spirits for some reason, who would show themselves sometimes, but they were not evil. The ghost in the apartment above was a different case all together.
Our house has 4 apartments, one on top of the other. Our apartment was on the 3rd floor, a large apartment in a middle class neighborhood, within the city. The house built in 1958 and no one had ever died in the house, at least not that we knew of. There was no rhyme or reason, as to why the house would have ghosts on the 3rd and 4th floors.
In our apartment a ghost an old man had been seen sitting in our living room chair, there for a moment and gone the next. A couple of ghosts had been seen by everyone, two men walking together through the hallway of the apartment and disappearing into the master bedroom. Ghosts of people had been seen in our hallway at night, looking at us. I had trouble falling asleep when I was a boy, because of this. Despite this the ghosts in our apartment did not seem hostile towards my family.
In the apartment above there was a different energy. There was one ghost there, and it was a him. He was in the living room but mostly in one bedroom, the bedroom right above my bedroom. Our neighbor’s above did not talk much about it. When I grew up there in the 1970s, there was a family living there, a couple with a boy. They later moved out and an older lady named Jórunn, moved in alone. I would often come up to her apartment, to hand her the mail and newspapers from the lobby downstairs. She would invite me in and give me a chocolate in return. She was a kind and good woman, now long passed. When I came into her apartment and sat in the living room, I could feel a presence, it was a man and he did not like me being there. Strange how you can feel things in the air sometimes We later heard stories about her haunted bedroom, when she rented our the bedroom to a student. The student was from the countryside and he went to the university. He lived in the bedroom for a month or to, until one day he stormed out of the room yelling out that “he would not stay any longer in the room with the bloody ghost”. He left and never came back. The bedroom was never rented out again.
Having given the proper context about our spirit conditions in the building, here is the story of when a ghost took away our children’s clothes. My mother tells this story, because it happened to her.
Now half a century ago in the winter of 1976, my sister and I went out often to play in the snow and we each had two snow outfits to play in. So when one outfit was wet and dirty, we would use the other outfit. This worked fine, because our mother would wash the dirty outfits while we were outside playing. Then one time when she was about to wash out dirty outfits, they were nowhere to be found. Our mother searched for the clothes everywhere, high and low, again and again, but did not find then anywhere. She knew something was very wrong and she knew we were not alone in the apartment. This sort of thing happens often in Iceland. She decided to confront the spirits. She walked into the hallway and said in a loud angry voice “I cannot believe that you would do this to the children!”. Then she walked to the master bedroom at the end of the hallway. When she was walking away, she heard a soft sound and felt a gust of wind behind her. She turned around and saw all the missing clothes scattered around the hallway floor. They were everywhere and looked as it they had been thrown to every corner. All the missing clothes were back. My mother said “thank you … don’t do this again”. My mother told us that this never happened again. We never had trouble from the spirits after that, except from night sightings.
A.G. Munson
