The Saurar Haunting (Sauraundrin), Skagi, Iceland, 1964

Saurar was an old turf farmhouse just north of Kálfshamarsvík, on the west side of the Skagi peninsula in northern Iceland. It had a timber gable and a timber-panelled interior. The main living room was the baðstofa.

In March 1964 the household included the farmer Guðmundur Einarsson, his wife Margrét Benediktsdóttir, their daughter Sigurborg and a son in his forties. The eldest son, Björgvin, lived in Skagaströnd. The year before, he had removed stones from a mound at nearby Framnes. Local folklore said foreigners were buried there.

Wednesday 18 March. About 1:20 a.m. Guðmundur woke to find the writing table by the baðstofa window moving. It shifted a metre forward onto the floor. It was an old, well-made oval table with turned legs. He grabbed it. It shook in his hands as though alive. It writhed.

Later that day a folding chair was thrown into the middle of the room and broke. On Thursday a milk pail slid off a table in the pantry and spilled. Margrét felt no tremor.

The incidents kept coming. Sigurborg's cabinet fell over, yet two plates on the top shelf stayed in place while the lower shelves emptied. A divan shifted under Grétar Oddsson, a reporter for Alþýðublaðið, as he sat on it. Morgunblaðið's correspondent Þórður Jónsson spent three hours at the farm with another man, and both saw the coffee table move from the wall to the middle of the floor while nothing else moved. His report ran under the headline "Reimleikar, ekkert annað" (hauntings, nothing else).

The medium Lára Ágústsdóttir was there after a meal. All of a sudden the table jerked with very rapid swings, and an ice-cold gust went through the baðstofa. She saw Guðmundur turn deathly white, and sensed an Englishman with a large dog. On 4 April Morgunblaðið reported the table was broken and no longer usable. By 9 April the neighbours had closed ranks, and the coverage faded.

Reporters from every national outlet stayed at the farm, and most saw nothing. One from Vísir was asked to leave after drunken disturbances. On 21 March a seven-person team from the Icelandic Society for Psychical Research arrived, led by Rev. Sveinn Víkingur, with the medium Hafsteinn Björnsson. A séance that evening, closed to the press, pointed to drowned foreign sailors. Tíminn compared Lára's captain and dog with the 1802 wreck of a Danish ship at Hjaltabakkafjörur, whose captain and dog vanished.

Guðmundur himself thought of a boat lost off Saurar in 1914. The Spanish-born artist Baltasar came along as an interpreter, in case the ghosts were Spaniards. The geologist Guðmundur Kjartansson offered no explanation, and no earthquakes were reported. The district magistrate at Blönduós, Jón Ísberg, saw no reason to doubt the family. He did not think humans caused the events.

On 23 March Vísir asked whether the wonders were man-made. It stressed that no two witnesses ever saw an incident together, and that most incidents involved the women of the household. The next day Alþýðublaðið published a photograph of the toppled cabinet pressed against the divan. A human foot was visible, propping the cabinet from the other side. Many took it as proof of fraud. Rumours lingered that a daughter of the household was responsible, though no source names anyone. Yet Þórður Jónsson said he and his companion could testify the table did not move by human hands.

Later accounts said everything seemed to point to other causes, without saying what they were. In 1983 Þjóðviljinn revisited Saurar and declined to give a verdict. In 2019 DV called it the haunting that gripped the whole nation, a case never officially solved.