Haunting after a Murder

In Anundsjö parish there is a village called Läxta. A little way from there is an abandoned farm, called Gammel Läxta (Old Läxta). In 1886, the main dwelling house was still standing there. I was up there at the time, logging timber. My men and I lived in a timber hut not far from the old farm. Another group of men lived in a hut there. They complained that the farm was haunted. Every night they heard a man in heavy boots come in and drop a heavy burden on the floor. Then he would open the cellar hatch and go down into it with the sack, whereupon they heard him hack and dig. Sometimes the pickaxe struck the floor above the cellar. After a while, the phantom man was heard coming up from the cellar and dragging the burden with him, after which he went out with it and up a ladder in the antechamber and up into the attic. This went on night after night until they brought in a kind of 'wise man' who made things calm again. The hauntings were believed to stem from the fact that the last person to inhabit the farm was said to have murdered a dalesman who was traveling around trading. This had been suspected while the farm's occupants were still alive, because they suddenly became so well-equipped with precisely the kind of goods that dalesmen usually carried. After the old woman of the farm died, they found a large quantity of such goods in her hiding places. From the deathbed of that old woman, an old man in the village of Norrtjärn related the following. He came into the cabin when the old woman was sick. At that time, a pitch-black cat was lying on her chest, which then sprang up and directly out through the window pane, without it breaking. "Oh, look at that cat – crazy thing!" exclaimed the old woman and continued, "She's so afraid of people, that cat." This she had seen, and they had told that the same cat had been lying on the old woman's chest, licking around her mouth, when she was 'drawing' (breathing her last). After the old woman was dead, the cat lay on her chest.

Note. In the first telling, I misunderstood the beginning of the hauntings. It should be like this: It sounded as if a man in heavy shoes came in, fell to the floor from a blow, was then dragged by someone down into the cellar and buried. This other person then came up, took something from the floor, presumably the murdered man's sack, and went with it up into the attic. It is not so long ago that the murder is said to have occurred, as the informant remembers a sister of the aforementioned old woman.

L.Jn.