”He kills cats, scares horses!”: When Mummies and Werewolves attacked Sweden!

“Use garlic, it keeps the werewolf away”

During the spring of 1981, the fear of clowns spread like wildfire across the United States. It began in Boston, where kids — most of them between five and seven years old — claimed to have seen a man dressed as a clown, naked from the waist down, driving a black, sinister van near Franklin Park (link to map). The same disturbing clown was also seen at the Mary F. Curley School (link to map) in Jamaica Plain, sparking even more panic and police involvement. Daniel O’Connell, the Investigative Counselor for the Boston Public School District, sent out a statement to the city’s principals: “It has come to the attention of the Police Department and the District Office that adults dressed as clowns have been bothering children to and from school. Please advise all students to stay away from strangers, particularly anyone dressed as a clown.”

In Brookline, Norfolk County, one clown allegedly tried to lure two kids into his van with the promise of candy. The danger seemed real! The police warned the public about the alleged evil clown, even going so far as to stop cars with suspected clowns. This led to the harassment of innocent party clowns on their way to and from performances. On May 9, the Boston Globe headline read: “Police Discount Reports of Clowns Bothering Kids,” as the police were fairly convinced it had all been a creation of the imagination of very young witnesses.

One might wonder where all of this came from. Could it have been inspired by a sighting of a vampire-like man in the small town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin (link to map), who was allegedly seen around the Graceland Cemetery not long before the clowns arrived? Police officer Jon Pepper was one witness and described the vampire as a “huge person with a white-painted face, wearing a black cape.” The white-painted face, of course, is quite similar to the later clown sightings. The vampire stopped appearing by the end of March, leaving clowns in line to scare more people in Boston.

But it didn’t end in Boston. The clown panic had already spread to other parts of the United States. In Kansas, on May 22, a woman saw a yellow van stop to talk to two girls, who ran away screaming. They described the man as a knife-wielding clown! On the same day, dozens of reports came in, all describing the yellow van and a possible knife-wielding clown attempting to kidnap, or at least lurk around, children. The clown panic was spreading further, reaching Omaha, Denver, Pittsburgh, and other cities. As always, there was no definitive proof that any killer clowns were actually present, or, as cryptozoologist Loren Coleman called them, phantom clowns. The killer clown/phantom clown phenomenon didn’t end there; it has resurfaced periodically up to the present day, with pranksters dressing as these nightmarish clown figures to scare unsuspecting people worldwide.

If you ask me, the phantom clowns are direct relatives to the mythology surrounding both aliens and fairies, where these entities offer food and/or drink to lure their victims into magical realms — whether it’s the land of Magonia, other dimensions, or planets — or, in the case of the clowns, perhaps a dirty basement in the shady suburbs of a sinister, big city? If you’re wondering why (and I’m sure you are), it’s all the same to me — it’s just a cultural update. From forests and nature to spaceships, and later, after the gritty 1970s set in, the conspiratorial webs involving serial killers and child molesters. It’s like the “innocence” (if one can call it that) of the hidden folk disappeared with mankind’s own.

Enough with those darn clowns! Let’s instead go back to Sweden, in 1972 and later in 1973, where three entirely different phenomena emerged, and in many ways, it’s wilder stuff than anything the clowns of Boston could deliver — though, admittedly, more innocent and naive.

It was a normal day in the southernmost city in Sweden, Trelleborg (link to map), on November 15. The students at Pilevallsskolan (link to map) were out playing in the yard as usual. Suddenly, they saw a frightening figure, described as someone with hair on his face, protruding teeth, and long, sharp claws on his fingers! The students ran inside screaming, reporting that there was a werewolf loose in the neighborhood. The rumor spread quickly around the school, and within an hour, more young witnesses reported sightings of the alleged wolfman. Some kids ran home, crying, and their parents contacted the police. While the adults were initially skeptical about the werewolf part of the story, they speculated it might be some crazy lunatic or a homeless person scaring the kids.

The local newspaper, Trelleborgs Allehanda, quoted one student, Gerry, who didn’t see the monster himself but shared what others had said: “They said he looked terrible, like the werewolf they had seen on TV. But the older students at school thought it was just a mask he was wearing on his face. They said he also had long claws on his fingers!” One boy claimed to have found a claw from the werewolf, but failed to produce it, as he had lost it. There was also a story circulating that someone found the werewolf’s shoes!

“Werewolf scared kids. Police presence at school”

As the tension escalated, the students kept their eyes peeled for possible werewolves. Two men in a van were surrounded by kids, who screamed that they were werewolves, but the men turned out to be innocent chimney sweepers, just minding their own business. Another innocent man was followed by a horde of kids, simply because he was wearing a cap! It seems the kids weren’t just ordinary kids, but also the fashion police!

The rumor grew and grew, and on November 17, two elderly ladies claimed to have encountered the werewolf outside a laundry room on Engelbrektsgatan (link to map). The werewolf allegedly tried to attack them, attempting to tear them with its claws. The incident made one of the ladies faint from fear! Stories of the werewolf spread like wildfire, and soon rumors emerged of three dead kids and at least one seriously wounded adult! At least one child, a girl, stayed home sick because of her fear of the possible monster, and soon the hairy creature was reportedly seen around another school, Centralskolan. Three other kids became physically ill from fear, with one even vomiting! The panic was real, and the fear was ever-present, but the police remained skeptical and believed it was all just mass hysteria.

“Now I understand how things could happen during the witch trials. It’s astonishing that people in the twentieth century possess so little civilization that the caveman emerges as soon as you scratch the surface,” police detective Sture Svensson told Trelleborgs Allehanda. In an interview with Expressen the same day, he blamed the entire episode on the speculative writings of the local newspapers, as well as the uncritical thinking and hysterical reactions from parents, which only helped to scare the kids into believing there was a werewolf running around, tearing people apart in Trelleborg. “It strongly leans towards the whole thing being a figment of imagination. After all, these days many people more or less resemble werewolves, with long hair and beards,” were the police’s final words about the werewolf in Trelleborg.

But it didn’t end there, because like all good monsters, they travel, and the next stop was no less than 647 kilometers north, in a suburb of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm.

It was on November 30, just two weeks after the Trelleborg events, when new rumors started to spread in Jakobsberg (link to map). This time it wasn’t the kids, but parents and other adults who were reporting seeing — or hearing about — a horrifying werewolf lurking in the shadows around this usually peaceful neighborhood along the shorelines of the Stockholm archipelago. It was said to tip-tap over the roofs, tear up carefully planted flower beds, and crash through windows. According to one witness, it even killed a person!

In the following days, about a dozen reports came in, prompting the police to make an official statement, albeit with some sarcasm: “Use garlic! It keeps the werewolf away!” However, the police also took it somewhat seriously and investigated the matter thoroughly, but found no evidence pointing to a hairy, drooling man-beast. “We conducted a raid last night. The only result was three suspected drunk drivers. We didn’t see any werewolves, though,” they told Expressen.

“Werewolf psychosis in suburb”

While the werewolf craze in Jakobsberg never reached the scale of the one in Trelleborg, it still caused some buzz in the media for a short time. In a local news report, it was stated that the rumor allegedly started in the area of Söderhöjden (link to map) in Jakobsberg, where children had seen a long-haired and bearded man working on his car in a garage. When asked if he was the werewolf, he replied, “I’m not, but I can be…” And so, the monster had reached the suburbs of Stockholm.

Children being intervewied in Regional-Nytt.

Werewolves, however bizarre these creatures might seem, have still been a part of Swedish culture for at least a thousand years, since the age of the Vikings and probably before that. Stories told in old tales about shapeshifters, beings able to turn into a wolf or a bear, appear frequently — sometimes connected to the tradition of dressing in the fur of these animals. The Swedish word for shapeshifter is hamnskiftare, and variations of this word, like hamnbjörn and björnhamn (both referring to bears), are present throughout Norse mythology and Scandinavian history. These myths are mostly found in the west and north of Sweden, near Norway, but also among the Sámi culture. It was said, often to tarnish the reputation of the Sámi, that they could shapeshift into wolves and bears through magical rituals and shamanism, including wearing or stepping through a belt, and through that, kill the cattle owned by non-Sámi farmers. This was essentially racist mythology aimed at undermining the indigenous people of Sweden, Norway, Russia and Finland. Much like modern urban legends, where minorities are often blamed for ridiculous things. Other legends told that the Sámi could curse others by transforming their victims into bears. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, considering how dangerous it would be to have an angry bear strike back at you in revenge.

In January 2004, a user named Frankenstein on Flashback shared two instances from modern times where witnesses have seen werewolves in the southern parts of Sweden. The first involved the grandfather of a friend.

“It was his grandfather who lived in Trelleborg in the 1920s. He had been out in the stable late one evening when he saw something he described as a werewolf. The reason he went out to the stable was that he had heard the horses neighing and stamping, so he went out to see what was going on. He then saw a ‘werewolf’ in one of the horse stalls, but it quickly moved away when he entered the stable. According to my friend, he claimed this for the rest of his life, and the thing is, he wasn’t an ‘original,’ but a completely normal man who, as far as I understand, didn’t lie. The second story was told to me by my grandfather; he was living in Svedala at the time. This took place in the early 1930s. He was on his way home from his work on the peat bog, and to get home quicker that evening, he cut through a cow pasture. After walking for a while through the field, he saw a dead cow lying on its side, a little distance away from the other cows. He said it looked like it had been torn apart by a wolf or something similar, although the thing is, there are no wolves in Skåne. Of course, he got scared and ran off. When he turned around to check if anyone was following him, he saw ‘something’ crouching by the dead cow, but he didn’t know what it was. He never told his father about what had happened because my great-grandfather was quite harsh and easily resorted to a beating, but anyway… that’s how my grandfather told it to me.”

The next flap is even weirder, mostly because it seems very out of place in Sweden. Yep, it’s a mummy. A mummy roaming the streets of Sätra (link to map), another suburb of Stockholm. But this time, it would take until March 1973 before the monster panic spread again, among both children and adults.

“He kills cats, scares horses!” boasts the article, accompanied by a photo of a visibly frightened boy. It’s 11-year-old Thomas Fergéus, one of several witnesses who claimed to have seen a real-life mummy in the area. Another kid, 14-year-old Svenne Andersson, says, “I saw the mummy-man smash a cat against the riding school’s wall! When he noticed me, he ran into the woods. Imagination? No way — I saw the cat lying there dead with my own eyes!” The riding school he mentions is Mäljarhöjdens ridskola (link to map), located at the edge of the Sätra forest, facing the canal. The forest, like many nature areas in the Stockholm region, is larger than one might think just by looking at a map, and it’s a place that can easily trigger the imagination of what might be hiding within. And that’s exactly what happened, as the forest quickly became the focus of attention in the stories that spread.

“Thomas, 11, have seen the mummy!”

Many children were afraid to enter the forest in the evening, or after dark, and at the quarry at midnight, the mummy could be heard howling at the moon. The monster was said to scare the horses at the school, and his bandaged face could be seen peeking out from the trees and bushes.

Some boys, riding mopeds, took it upon themselves to guard the riding school, but they were also armed with hockey clubs and other kinds of easily obtainable weapons. They traveled around on their pre-teenage vehicles, waiting for the terrible mummy to appear. “We were just kids and didn’t have much else to do. This became our big focus. We got together, maybe six of us, and went out to hunt the mummy, but honestly, we had no clue what we’d do if we actually saw him,” Thomas Fergéus said in an interview with Skärholmen Direkt in November 2018.

“They’re hunting the mummy-man”

It was Thomas himself who, in the newspaper Söderposten, told more about his encounter with the mummy, which ended with him fleeing down through a storm drain, looking up at the monster searching for him. Like a scene from a horror movie. However, it was too dark down the storm drain for the mummy to see him, and he escaped unscathed. Hot dog vendor George Gustafsson, 57 years old, was one of the adults who was genuinely worried for the kids: “Honestly, I shouldn’t believe it, but so many people have seen him. And the kids are terrified!”

After a week or so, the stories calmed down, and soon summer took over, with the mummy long gone from the consciousness of the kids around Sätra. But what was it? The police stated they thought it was a joke, and some thought it was a mentally disturbed man running around scaring people. The newspaper Expressen even reconstructed the look of the alleged mummy-man, but nothing came of it. In the end, it might just have been the overactive imaginations of both children and adults, not just in the case of Sätra, but also in Trelleborg and Jakobsberg.

“Mummy horror in Stockholm suburb!”

Here’s the thing: during the summer of ’73, Swedish public television, TV1, had something called Skräcksommar (“Summer of Horror”), where they showed Universal horror movies throughout the summer: Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), Werewolf of London (1935), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), The Wolf Man (1941), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). One month after the Trelleborg events, a folklorist interviewed eighty schoolchildren to investigate what might have affected their experiences.

70% of fifth graders had watched one of the horror movies shown on TV during the summer.

In second grade, 35% of the boys and just under 10% of the girls had seen one of the movies.

Slightly more than half of the children had read horror comics.

The majority of the boys had also played werewolf and Frankenstein’s monster.

There had also been some voices raised in Swedish media regarding the choice of movies that summer, often with a negative view and the usual call for more censorship. One must remember that TV1 was one of the two TV channels in Sweden at the time, and it wasn’t uncommon for millions (in a very small country — Sweden had just over eight million people in 1972) to turn on and watch something on their television sets. So, the cultural impact of what was showing on the screen at home was very intense. Horror comics were also very popular at the time, including magazines like Chock, Dracula, Dracula Lever, Vampyr, Vampirella, and Boris Karloff’s Midnattsrysare. In the wake of the werewolf sightings, Marvel’s Werewolf by Night was published in Sweden as Varulven, capitalizing on the recent fad.

Looking back at Trelleborg, it should also be noted that on November 14, one day before the incidents at Pilevallsskolan, a woman reported encountering a hairy man down in the laundry room at Sockenvägen 3 (link to map). She panicked for a moment until she realized it was one of the town’s “originals,” and not a monster. Somehow, this incident spread over the course of a day, causing the whole school to panic. While there aren’t many details about this encounter from the time, an interesting letter was emailed to the podcast På Tapeten in November 2023. The author of the email, Christer Torell, claimed to have seen the basement werewolf as a boy (whether this is the same incident as the woman’s encounter is unknown), and identified the man as a former line dancer. He suggested that, emotionally scarred by losing his line-dancing colleague in a horrifying accident, the man went insane. He became one of the “weirdos” around Trelleborg, and just that day, for reasons unknown, he had taped his own long hair to his face, thus creating some kind of werewolf-esque avatar.

There is a difference between the werewolf and mummy flap and the later phantom clowns — and so aliens and fairies — which makes them more similar to Slenderman in later years: there are no offerings of food and drink. Instead, the monster works as the unknown fear, the monster in the closet, the thing that goes bump in the night; pure terror without any exchange of gifts, just a one-track highway to fear. Childhood might seem, on the surface, like a magical land of joy and adventure, but I argue that there is also a strong fear of being a child, of being left out in the open, under the surveillance of an unknown world. Just like when a cat is let outside for the first time, observing the vast reality around it, far from the constraints of a house or apartment, it automatically becomes aware of the dangers out there — until it softens its approach and learns how to navigate.

The same experience happens to a child, although perhaps not as visibly, as a human child has a different kind of awareness and ideas about relationships and protection than a kitten. When left to their own devices, a child must somehow see what others don’t. Whether that’s something joyful or fearful is up to them and how the culture they are raised in has affected their perception of the surrounding world. The werewolf, the mummy, the clown, or Slenderman become symbols of the darker parts of what they might expect to encounter, and the willingness to let go of rational thinking and embrace imagination helps create a reality of monsters and chimeras. Deep down in their minds, warnings about not accepting gifts from strangers or what might be hiding in the dark transcend logical thinking and transform into tangible dangers lurking just around the corner, in the forest behind the school. It’s nothing new, as Swedish myths like Näcken, Bäckahästen, and Skogsrå are all symbols of warning: don’t get lost in the woods, don’t drown in the river, and so on. This is not a negative thing. It’s more of a pedagogical, very clear-sighted way of learning how the world works, even if it’s through a mythological and/or cinematic monster.

Are the monsters Jungian archetypes, seen (as Jung calls them in his book The Flying Saucers) as “visionary rumors,” possibly representing a collective worry or fear? But they could also serve as stimuli for reflection and personal development within us humans, helping explain how a child processes their newfound existence in a world of adult strangeness.

What I find most fascinating about all these seemingly paranormal flaps is how they spread from mind to mind, evolving and expanding the inner world, much like Alan Moore’s concept of the IdeaSpace. We’re all sharing a mutual reality, connected to our imagination, and sometimes these imaginary worlds connect to each other, creating an even larger universe that only exists in our collective consciousness. In the Swedish examples, a small incident quickly expands into a sensational world-building process in the minds of children (and some adults), creating endless possibilities and storylines. Only imagination can limit what might happen, or at least until our more material, objective view on reality (often coming from the “rational” perception of party-pooping adults) stops the story from expanding further. The idea of an inner reality, in many ways as real as the one we share with others, that also has the power to affect consensus reality, fascinates me.

Pop culture has always affected our view of the world, especially the paranormal. They’ve gone hand in hand for as long as we can remember. The French sociologist and historian Bertrand Méheust, who focused much of his research on how society perceives and integrates extraordinary experiences from fiction into reality, and vice versa, gives an early example of how a fictional account could have transmitted itself into an alleged real encounter with the unknown in his book Science-Fiction et Soucoupes Volantes: Une Réalisation Fantastique du Socialisme? (1978). It involves a story by Captain Danrit, published under the pseudonym “Theodore Bot.” In his 1911 story The Great Aeroplane, Bot describes an encounter with a craft resembling later descriptions of UFO sightings. Méheust compares Bot’s story to a real-life testimony from 1911, recorded by Aimé Michel. The testimony, submitted to Michel decades later, describes a similar craft and experience. Despite being documented independently of Bot’s fictional tale, the striking resemblance between the two suggests, according to Méheust, that science fiction may have shaped the witness’s experience and perception of the event. Méheust believes that our paranormal experiences mirror our technological and spiritual development, as society works its way forward, but also reflect mankind’s own fears and worries. So, when viewed through that lens, the world of monsters becomes an excellent way for children to deal with their own fears symbolically.

I admit I have a tendency to look at the phenomenon more from an esoteric angle than from the traditional nuts-and-bolts perspective. If you ask me (and maybe you shouldn’t), I’m more or less convinced — without really having any evidence for it except the experiences people have — that storytelling and belief can generate material incidents and events. For example, fake one bigfoot encounter, and there will be a thousand more of them, subjectively true, based on the storytelling devices of the original fake ones. It’s all in human nature. We will explore and expand upon something we hear about, willingly transmitting our own perception of the unknown into the world, until it, one way or another, becomes reality. The belief itself is so strong that it can affect our lives, which makes it — in some ways — the truth. Just take religion or money, they’re all based on belief. Maybe the werewolf and the mummy are hyperstitional creations, figments of children’s imagination, breaking free from the prisons of collective minds, entering our world as some kind of physical and non-physical archetypical entities? Maybe I’m intellectualizing it too much, showing off with fancy words and references to semi-obscure thinkers and researchers, but in the end, I believe all of this is a combination of the real and the unreal, where inner experiences, emotions, and imagination somehow manifest themselves into something we can touch and feel.

In the end, there are far scarier things than monsters and ghosts out there when it comes to reality-bending phenomena. For example, Donald Trump is a collective creation, a manifested hyperstition, born from millions of humans and the darker parts of their minds. Imagine all that small-minded bitterness, all that racism and greed that never fully develops into something more serious but slowly grows subconsciously inside all of mankind, leaking out in small doses from us all, and growing bigger as it finds like-minded feelings. All this hate, greed, and stupidity is slowly creating a race of hateful people, some more and some less, which creates a society of stupidity — shaping newer generations, from parents to kids to friends to co-workers to… you get my point. At the end of each generation, there’s an army of idiots, some of them richer and more powerful, some just ending their lives with a syringe under a bridge. And at the very end, there’s the essence of evil, of darkness, and it manifests like very physical tulpas, in the shape of, for example, Trump and his cohorts in both the US and internationally. He’s not the first, and he’s not the last.

I think we can all agree that werewolves and mummies are a lot more preferable than humans like him, and easier to deal with. The question is, what is the modern version of garlic and silver bullets? I’d say a healthy imagination, creativity, and curiosity, which is present in kids everywhere. We still have a lot to learn.

Fred Andersson is a Swedish researcher and writer with over twenty years of experience in commercial television and the author of Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden, out now from Beyond the Fray Publishing. Join him on Bluesky and Instagram.

REFERENCES

Newspaper Articles:

• Thulin, Lars. “When Wild Werewolves Terrified Trelleborg.” Trelleborgs Allehanda, October 27, 2016. Available at: https://www.trelleborgsallehanda.se/artikel/lars-thulin-nar-vilda-varulvar-spred-skrack-i-trelleborg/
• “When Werewolves Howled in Trelleborg.” Trelleborgs Allehanda, November 7, 2009. Available at: https://www.trelleborgsallehanda.se/artikel/nar-varulvar-ylade-i-trelleborg/
• Columbus, Panagiotis Rasmus. “The Horror Story of the Sätra Mummy.” Skärholmen Direkt, November 3, 2018.

Magazine Article:

• Kristenson, Martin. “I Remember the Summer of Horror -72.” Kapten Stofil, July 16, 2009. Available at: http://tidskrift.nu/artikel.php?Id=6068

Blog Post:

• Frick, Bo. “The Mummy.” Vridande Moment, September 9, 2011. Available at: https://vridandemoment.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/mumien/

Podcast Episodes:

• Tolin, Lasse, Andreas Mottesson, and Sofia Bergström Nilsen. “The Werewolf Terrified Trelleborg.” På Tapeten, October 27, 2023.
• Tolin, Lasse, Andreas Mottesson, and Sofia Bergström Nilsen. “Tightrope Walker Exposed as Werewolf in Trelleborg.” På Tapeten, November 3, 2023.

Forum Thread:

• “Werewolves in Skåne.” Flashback Forum, January 22, 2004. Available at: https://www.flashback.org/t105172

Miscellaneous:

• “STOCKHOLM 1973–03–25: Police Have Received Several Reports of a Person Dressed as a Mummy Roaming the Suburb of Sätra. Thomas Fergeús (pictured center) Claims to Have Seen the Mummy.” TT News Agency, March 25, 1973. Photo: Lars Nyberg / EXP / TT / Kod: 34. Aftonbladet Out.
• “Regional News 1975 (The Werewolf).” Sveriges Television, 1975.
• “The Sätra Mummy.” Wikipedia. Available at: https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sätramumien#
• “The Werewolf.” Nordic Museum. Archived version from August 11, 2022. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20220811165930/https://www.nordiskamuseet.se/blogg/varulven

Books:

• Méheust, Bertrand. Science-Fiction et Soucoupes Volantes: Une Réalisation Fantastique du Socialisme?” (1978)
• Jung, Carl. “Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” (1958)