Tradition: Swedish Mythology
Alternative Names: The Phantom Christmas Mass, The Service of the Dead
Category: Ghost
The Myth
At a homestead called Vaderas in Sweden, two women once agreed to ride together to Christmas night Mass. Since clocks were not available in those days, they decided that whichever woman woke at the right time would call for the other. Around midnight, one woman thought she heard her neighbor calling from outside her window, announcing that she was setting out. She hurriedly dressed, took a piece of bread shaped like a cross, and rode off to catch up with her companion. However, she could not find her anywhere along the road.
As she crossed a bridge over a stream flowing into Lake Vidostern, she encountered two witch trolls standing there and washing. One called to the other to hurry and tear the rider’s head from her shoulders. The second troll replied that she could not harm the woman because she carried a piece of cross-shaped bread in her pocket. Protected by the holy symbol, the woman continued her journey and eventually reached the church at Hanger alone.
The church blazed with lights, and the woman believed the Christmas service was already underway. She entered and sat in her usual place, but only then began to notice that something was terribly wrong. The congregation consisted entirely of headless figures, and the priest at the altar wore his full vestments but had no head. A voice warned her that she would have been killed had the speaker not stood as her godfather at her baptism. It urged her to flee immediately before it was too late.
The woman rushed out into the churchyard, where a crowd of specters surrounded her. They seized her broad white woollen mantle, but she threw it off and escaped to a nearby poorhouse, where she awakened the inhabitants. She remained there until the early Mass at four o’clock. When daylight arrived, people discovered that a small piece of her mantle lay on every grave in the churchyard, revealing that the dead had torn it apart.
A similar encounter befell a man and his wife who lived at a hut called Ingas, below Mosled. They arrived at Hanger believing that the service had begun, but found the church locked and barred. The phantom Mass was nearing its end, and they had disturbed the gathering of the dead. When the living congregation assembled for the actual service, pieces of grave earth were found scattered across the places where the specters had recently worshipped. The man and his wife subsequently fell gravely ill, punished, it was believed, for disturbing the dead during their Christmas service.
Sources
Stroebe, Clara, ed. The Swedish Fairy Book. Translated by Frederick H. Martens, illustrated by George W. Hood. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1921. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37193