I meant to post this for Halloween last year, and then I completely forgot about it. Here I go now then, slightly delayed:
I’m a sucker for ghost stories and eerie folklore, and I thus I really treasure a book I was once given as a present by a dear friend who knew of my folklore partiality. It’s called Our Old Churches and Convents (“Vore gamle kirker og klostre”), written by folklorist Gorm Benzon, and in a series of chapters it describes old churches and convents and, more importantly, recount old tales that are connected with the places. It’s such a fun read, and very inspiring if you’re ever to make a trip through Denmark and would like an alternative travelling guide.
Last summer, The Boyfriend, my parents and I made just such a trip across the country, as we went from Copenhagen to the North-Western coast of Jutland where my family always goes in the summer. On our way up there in the car, we passed closely through the town of Mariager, and thanks to Gorm Benzon, I suddenly remembered an old eerie folk tale that’s connected to this particular little Jutlandian town and their church, Mariager Church. I mentioned this to my father, and he decided that we should go see the church, and then I could tell the rest of the company the ghost story.
There’s something eerie about Mariager Church that’s difficult to describe. When my paternal grandfather was alive, he lived near Mariager, so my family has been there a couple of times before. My mother tells me that once when she and my father brought my older brother to see the church when he was two years old, he was horrified and started crying the moment they entered the church: He’d caught sight of the suffering, crucified Christ hanging on the wall. My brother was inconsolable, and they had to take him out again.
Visiting it last summer, I had to wonder if it was more than just the crucifiction representation that scared him: Maybe he picked up on a general atmosphere of something uncanny? There’s something in the very architechture of the church that’s slightly intimidating. Danish churches are usually quite small and mild-looking buildings - Fanefjord Church being an excellent example of Danish churches. Mariager Church, however, is different: It was originally (in 1445) initiated as a convent by Saint Brigitta, and while the building went through a thorough reconstruction in the 18th century, the sense of something ancient still clings to the place, along with an air of solemnity, and the imposant architectural style differs a great deal from your average Danish church:

It’s hard to make the church look intimidation on a bright summer day. I tried to accomplish the eeriness by means of a crooked angle. Not quite sure I succeeded. I hope you get the idea regardless.
The church also houses a few historical gems in the unsettling department, most notably two figures carved in wood, preserved from pre-reformation times, showing Christ as a so-called Man of Pain (“Smertensmand” in Danish), comtemplating with pain his wounds from the crucifiction, and the Tomb of Christ, showing a life-sized Christ in a wooden coffin. Even when you walk down the aisle of the church, your path is paved with ancient grave stone memorials of once-important Mariager residents.
An atmosphere of death, suffering and times past embues the vaults of the church, and despite the beautiful summer weather we were having that day, my parents, The Boyfriend and I were all in the perfect mood for a ghost story when we assembled outside of the church after our visit there, so that I could recount the piece of folklore. The following was the story I told them, as well as I remembered it:
Once upon a time at Christmas, back in the day when it was still common to have Chrismas mass very early Christmas morning, a Mariager woman awoke on Christmas night. She lived alone and didn’t have a clock, and it was dark outside, but she decided it must be about time to go to mass, so she got up, wrapped her shawl around her, and ventured out into the cold wintry air.
When she reached the church she found that mass had already started; the music of a hymn reached her as she approached the church. Eager not to bring anymore attention to herself, she crept as quietly as she could into the church and hurridly found an empty seat for herself. But then she started noticing something strange: The hymn that was being sung was not one she recalled ever having heard before. Furthermore, she didn’t recognize any of the other church-goers surrounding her, although a number of them seemed strangely familiar to her. Even the preacher was unfamiliar to her and he, like everyone else in church, was alarmingly pale with deep, dark eyes.
She felt a tap to her shoulder and turned around to face the woman sitting next to her. To her horror, she found that the woman was none other than a neighbour who’d been a good friend of hers, but who had died several years ago. “Hurry out of the church the second the minister says ‘amen’” the deceased neighbouress whispered, “and take care to hang your shawl loosely, or else no one can save you!”.
The woman was terrified and wanted to get out of her seat straight away, but she found that she couldn’t move a limb. Now she started recognizing more and more of the churchgoers as people she’d known from Mariager who had been dead for a long time.
But the second the minister said his “amen”, the woman was able to to move again, and she got up and rushed to the door. She didn’t stop to look back, but she could feel all the dead church-goers pursuing her, reaching out for her. She hurried through the church door and let it fall behind her as she ran. The door caught her shawl, but since she’d hung it loosely, like her deceased neighbouress had advised her, she easily freed herself and ran on.
She made it back home and realized that it was only one a clock in the morning. In her alarmed state, she woke up her neighbours and told them her frightening story. They laughed at her, certain that she had either gone mad or dreamed it all up.
Except when the community went to church that morning, they found her shawl stuck in the church door. The part of the shawl that was inside the door was shredded to little pieces..
PS: In the interest of folklore, I actually asked my father to tell me the story as well as he remembered it, a couple of months later. Interestingly, he told me pretty much the story, except in his version the shawl was not shredded to little pieces, it was mouldy and falling apart. I liked this zombie-esque twist to the story a lot better than the rather odd idea of ghosts ripping up random material, and have actually decided to start using this version instead of the original one when I re-tell it. So I guess the story lives on as a piece of lore, with the eerie old Mariager Church lending inspiration to it, even in the 21st Century, and I kind of like that thought.