Supernatural Encounters in the Haunted Mill: Perception and Experience

Abstract:Older records report that the mills of preindustrial Norway and Sweden were especially haunted by a beastie that liked to interfere with the business of milling. Voices and music played by unseen hands could also be heard in some of them. This essay argues that these accounts reflected folk belief in the supernatural and not just fictive narrative tradition. Much points to the water mills of Scandinavia having been an ideal environment for the generation and maintenance of supernatural narrative as explored by Lauri Honko and David J. Hufford. Their approaches are different, but both illuminate parts of the tradition. That tradition appears grounded in memorates, some based in perception interpreted in light of cultural models and some in what Hufford calls Core Spiritual Experiences. In some places and at some times, it is likely that folk belief conditioned perception. In others, experience may have generated folk belief.