The Borgvattnet Ghost Vicarage: Chaplain Erik Lindgren's Rocking Chair

Borgvattnet is a small village in northeastern Jämtland, in Ragunda municipality. Its vicarage was finished in 1876. For half a century it was simply home to the parish clergy.

Then, in 1927, Vicar Nils Hedlund wrote a letter. Laundry had been torn from the drying line on a windless day. In 1930 Vicar Rudolf Tängdén saw a grey lady walk through the main hall toward the Expedition Room. When he looked, the room was empty. From 1936 Vicar Otto Lindgren and his wife heard footsteps and saw doors open and close on their own. Mrs Lindgren heard music behind a closed kitchen door. It stopped when she opened it.

1941. Diocesan secretary Inga Flodin woke at 3 a.m. with the feeling of being watched. Three women sat on the couch. One in black, one in purple, one in grey. In one telling they were translucent. The grey one looked sad. Two rested their hands in their laps. One was knitting. The room became known as the Weeping Women's Room.

In 1945 Chaplain Erik Lindgren moved in. On his first night he heard what sounded like someone dragging heavy objects across the floor upstairs. He had no furniture yet. The upper floor was empty.

He began a journal. Its most famous entry concerns a rocking chair in the Great Hall. Lindgren sat reading. Something suddenly jerked the chair, and he was thrown forward onto the floor. He thought he had rocked too hard. He sat down again. The chair pushed him out again. He described a force coming from behind him that passed through him. His legs shook violently. By one account he never sat in it again.

There was more. Footsteps. Candles that kept blowing out. Moments when he bumped into an unseen person. Footsteps in the garden, coming toward the house over the wooden bridge, with no one ever there. Dogs barked at empty doorways. In the end, it is said, he stopped writing things down. They happened too often.

In December 1947 a journalist heard about Lindgren's experiences. Länstidningen in Östersund took up the story, and Östersunds-Posten published an interview on 4 December 1947. The Bishop of Härnösand, Torsten Bohlin, is said to have confirmed the chaplain's accounts and to have spoken of a planned scientific investigation. No record of its findings has surfaced. The vicarage became national news.

In 1970 local merchant Erik Brännholm bought the house and opened it as a hostel. Guests who survived a night received a diploma. The first summer brought 5,000 visitors. Brännholm promoted the story in the media until his death in 1996. In 1981 Tore Forslund, nicknamed "the ghostpriest," offered to relieve Borgvattnet from the ghosts. By one account he spent a year trying. He left disappointed.

The haunting is traditionally blamed on Märta Hedlund, though sources disagree on who she was. In 2020 Jämtlands Tidning reported genealogy research concluding that the observations cannot have had the stated cause. Both later owners had a financial interest in the legend. Neither is documented as having invented it, and no formal hoax finding exists.

Since 2018 the house has belonged to LaxTon Ghost Sweden. Ghost Hunters International visited in 2009, as did Det okända with Caroline Giertz and medium Jörgen Gustafsson. The rocking chair appeared on Hylands Hörna. Povel Ramel bought it. In 1981 Brännholm bought it back. It belonged at the vicarage, he felt. Guests still report children's screams, weeping voices and objects that fall by themselves.