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| Moss |
MOSS, Norway —
Like many Europeans, Marianne Haaland Bogdanoff, a travel agency manager in
this southern Norwegian town, does not go to church, except maybe at Christmas,
and is doubtful about the existence of God.
But when “weird
things” — inexplicable computer breakdowns, strange smells and noises and
complaints from staff members of constant headaches — started happening at the
ground-floor travel office, she slowly began to put aside her deep skepticism
about life beyond the here and now. After computer experts, electricians and a
plumber all failed to find the cause of her office’s troubles, she finally got
help from a clairvoyant who claimed powers to communicate with the dead. The
headaches and other problems all vanished.
“I don’t know
what she did,” Ms. Bogdanoff said. “It was very strange,” she added, recalling
how the clairvoyant “cleansed” her travel office of a ghostlike presence
neither she nor her staff had seen but whose existence they had all felt and
feared.
Ghosts, or at
least belief in them, have been around for centuries but they have now found a
particularly strong following in highly secular modern countries like Norway.
“Belief in God, or at least a Christian God,
is decreasing but belief in spirits is increasing,” said Roar Fotland, a
Methodist preacher and assistant professor at the Norwegian School of Theology
in Oslo. Instead of slowly eliminating religion, as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx
and other theorists predicted, modernity has only channeled religious feelings
in unexpected ways, Mr. Fotland said.
The appeal of
ghost stories has helped fuel the unexpected popularity of a television series
called “The Power of Spirits,” now in its 10th season. The show has around half
a million viewers each Sunday, a huge audience in a country of just 5.1 million
people and more than twice the number of regular churchgoers in Norway.
“We are bigger
than the Norwegian church,” the show’s presenter, Tom Stromnaess, said. He does
not believe in ghosts as “creatures with white sheets and black eyes” but,
though initially very skeptical about paranormal phenomena, he has come around
to the view that forces exist that cannot be seen or understood.
Hundreds of
people write to the show to complain that their house or workplace is haunted
and to ask for help. “So many people cannot all be crazy,” Mr. Stromnaess said.
Two years ago,
when a home buyer in the town of Vinstra, 160 miles north of Oslo, came to
believe that the house he had agreed to buy was haunted, he tried to get the
purchase canceled, arguing that he should have been told about the ghost
problem.
A court ruled
that the buyer had to go through with the transaction. Its verdict said that
the seller had no obligation to disclose the existence of something that is
“not generally accepted as existing at all.” The court said it could not accept
that “alleged mystical events in the form of ghosts fulfill the criterion of
being a defect in the property.”
Also deeply
skeptical is Velle Espeland, a folklorist at Norway’s national library and
author of a book on the history of ghosts. “We create ghosts to explain the
inexplicable. Ghosts are just the name we use for something we don’t
understand.”
The town of Moss
has had so many ghost stories that City Hall organized a “ghost tour” led by
Vibecke Garnaas, a woman who used to work at the “haunted” travel agency and
who has now become a professional medium who charges an hourly rate of 800
Norwegian kroner, around $98, for ghost “cleansing” work.
“I can’t
guarantee it will work,” she said, explaining that she tries to “convince the
energies to leave the premises but they have free will just like we do.”
Belief in ghosts
has become so strong that even the Lutheran Church, to which most Norwegians
formally belong, has adopted a so-called “ghost liturgy” for use by preachers
who get asked by parishioners to help cleanse haunted houses.
Unn Bohm Tveito,
also from Moss, recalled how she had never believed in or even thought about
ghosts until she started working as the manager of the town’s tourism
information office. She kept noticing that German-language brochures always
ended up being the most prominently displayed, which was odd since few tourists
who visit Moss speak German.
In 2013, she
raised the issue with other staff members, who said they had noticed the same
thing. “Ghosts are not the first thing you think of but we decided that this
could not be explained in a normal way,” she said.
A clairvoyant
sent by the ghost television show, she said, solved the mystery: a dead German
soldier who had worked in the same building during the 1940-1945 Nazi
occupation of Norway was still on the premises and kept messing with the
brochures.
“Whether you call
them ghosts or spirits or something else they exist,” Ms. Tveito said. The dead
German, she added, has now moved on.
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| Moss |
