Borgvattnet Vicarage

Borgvattnet is a tiny village in the forests of northeastern Jämtland, about 100 kilometres from Östersund, with a 1780s church, a lake and a few dozen residents. Its vicarage, a two-storey wooden house, was completed in 1876 for the parish’s first priest, Per Johan Strindberg, and for the next century housed a succession of Church of Sweden clergy. It is now billed as Sweden’s most haunted house – and, unusually, most of its early witnesses were priests.

According to the house’s own history, the first odd event was recorded in 1927, when the curate Nils Hedlund said his laundry had been torn from the drying line in the attic. In 1930 Rudolf Tängdén described seeing a grey female figure in the downstairs dining room, the original “Grey Lady”, and in 1936 Otto Lindgren reported footsteps and doors opening when he was alone. The Church kept the reports quiet until 1947, when a reporter from the Östersund newspaper Länstidningen interviewed the chaplain Erik Lindgren, who had moved in in 1945. Lindgren described dragging noises from the empty upper floor, stamping on the porch with no one there, and a rocking chair that twice threw him onto the floor. He kept a journal of the incidents, and his frankness made national news.

Further stories followed. A diocesan secretary, Inga Flodin, said she woke in the night to see three sad women in black, purple and grey staring at her from a sofa, giving one room the name the “Weeping Women’s Room”. Lindgren’s rocking chair became famous in its own right on the Swedish TV show Hylands Hörna and was later bought by the entertainer Povel Ramel. In 1970 the local shopkeeper Erik Brännholm bought the vicarage, turned it into a guesthouse and began issuing a certificate to anyone brave enough to spend the night; he bought back the chair in 1981.

In the early 1980s another curate, Tore Forslund, became nationally known as “the ghost priest of Borgvattnet” after offering to exorcise the house’s restless spirits; he left the Church of Sweden in 1981 after a dispute with the diocese. Since 2018 the vicarage has been owned by LaxTon Ghost Sweden, a paranormal investigation team, which runs overnight stays, guided tours and a summer café serving “ghost waffles”.

Reported phenomena include a grey woman in the dining room, three women seated on a sofa in an upstairs bedroom, footsteps and dragging sounds on the empty upper floor, doors opening, lights switching on and off, a feeling of being watched, and the famous rocking chair that tipped its occupant out.

The downstairs dining room, the upstairs bedrooms – especially the Weeping Women’s Room and the Yellow Room – the attic and the front porch. Most reports come at night.

Borgvattnet has featured in Swedish radio and TV for decades, in Ghost Hunters International and in the Swedish horror film Psalm 21 (2010), which is set in the village. Overnight guests still collect their certificate, and the owners run a ghost podcast.