Spøgeriet på Enggården: the Enggården poltergeist of Astrup, Vendsyssel

Enggården lies in Astrup parish, in Vennebjerg herred near Hjørring, in the Vendsyssel country of northern Denmark. It began as an outlying farm, split off from Bøgsted in the early 1840s, and grew into a holding of 177 hectares, 8 of them woodland, within sight of Lille Møllegård in neighbouring Ugilt parish. In 1905 it was sold to Niels Christensen Ladegaard. He soon passed it to his son-in-law, Aage Beck, also written Bech.

Early December 1919. The trouble came in the middle of ordinary farm work. Firewood, tongs and similar items flew through the air. To the maids, the objects seemed to be chasing them. Sausages and meatballs jumped out of the frying pan and landed in the most unsuitable places.

Then the milk pail. It seemed to dance towards the milkmaids. The maids bore the brunt of it all. In the end, they refused to stay on the farm.

Beck turned to a friend. Jens Kure was the parish priest of Ugilt from 1917 to 1927. Beck asked him to come and banish the ghost into the ground. Kure stayed at Enggården several times and, by the account that survives, saw the haunting for himself.

Whether the exorcism worked, the story does not say. But Kure wrote it down. His detailed account appeared in the Copenhagen paper Nationaltidende on 3 and 4 February 1920. None of the residents ever wrote about the events themselves. That makes the pastor the closest source on record.

The case was covered not only in Vendsyssel but in many papers across the country. Dansk Folkemindesamling built up a large collection of clippings. Historisk Arkiv Hjørring keeps a 25 page volume of cuttings under the title "Mysteriet på Enggården".

1921. A man identified only as Hr. Faustinus returned to the press. He now claimed that one of the girls had confessed to him that she was "the ghost". Mr. and Mrs. Bech answered him publicly. Faustinus's latest account, they declared, was fiction from beginning to end.

The usual explanation for such cases, a young servant playing tricks, is exactly what Faustinus alleged. The owners rejected it. Nothing in the surviving record settles the matter. Folk belief offered its own reading. When Kure's wife later had twins, locals firmly put this down to his experiences at Enggården.

The farm kept its reputation. In 1959 a local paper marked 40 years since the haunting at Enggården. In 1963 a headline announced that "Spøgelsesgården Enggården i Astrup", the ghost farm Enggården in Astrup, had been sold for a million. In 1994 Kirsten Dausell Klemmensen, whose own family was connected to the story, published her study in Folk og Kultur, calling it a Vendsyssel poltergeist story. It remains the main academic treatment of a short-lived haunting that, by one account, set off a run of unexplained incidents in the surrounding countryside.