Sue St.Clair and Matthew Didier's Paranormal Blog

This week, historian Chris Laursen takes us to one of his favourite places in his ancestral homeland of Denmark, the famous Kronborg Castle, which not surprising has had its share of recent ghostly incidents.

The haunting of Kronværket
by Chris Laursen

Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.
- The Ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600)

Standing at the western shores of Øresund, the strait dividing former enemies Denmark and Sweden, is the massive Renaissance castle Kronborg. Walking along the chilly, wind battered battlements, it is easy to imagine Shakespeare's Elsinore come to life. This is the place that inspired the setting for Hamlet, and although the bard's tale came purely from his imagination, ghosts are said to haunt the nearly 600-year-old fortress.

I have been to Kronborg twice, most recently in May 2004 with my Danish friend Mia Zebitz Larsen who toured me through one of my favourite sections, the underground residence for the fortress's soldiers, the Casemates. It is a place that conjures up a typically spooky atmosphere with its cavernous dark passages, stalls and rooms. The temperatures were on average 10°C down there, making it a very difficult place to live indeed. Lanterns were fastened to the walls and natural light poured from holes in the ceiling, guiding us through the complex maze. There were no shortage of startling moments, such as discovering a pair of costumed mannequins (pictured below) staring out a small window. I found myself wondering what kind of ghosts haunted this eerie place.

I wouldn't have guessed that the castle's bright and cheery restaurant was the scene of the significant amount of activity a year after I visited Kronborg. In June 2005, the Kronværket Café and Restaurant opened on the castle grounds and was plagued by a variety of inexplicable ghostly events corroborated by management, staff and castle security.

"Candles starting lighting up by themselves, doors slammed for no reason, table settings were changed around, wine bottles fell from the shelves," waitress Dorte Andersen told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in December 2005.

"When I came back from my holidays, the night watchmen complained that the restaurant's personnel always forgot to blow out the candles so they would burn during the night," the restaurant's manager Christina Gotthard told the local newspaper Frederiksborg Amts Avis. "The staff always made sure they blew out all of the candles, and to prove it, they took the nightwatchmen with them so they could see all of the candles had been blown out. At 3 o'clock that same night, the nightwatch people saw a candle lit in the windowsill."

Other strange events were reported including objects going missing and later reappearing, the ghostly sound of keys in locks, disembodied voices and unexplainable cold spots. Some employees said that could smell dead people in certain parts of the restaurant. "There are more rooms in the restaurant where the people feel they are being looked at. There is a single room no one will go into because it is very scary. Even though they make sure they lock the doors to these rooms, all of a sudden they become unlocked again," Gotthard said.

These unnerving incidents prompted her to call in a well-known local full-time medium, Birgitte Graae, to investigate that September. Birgitte said in addition to investigations of haunted locations, she has also done archaeological clairvoyance and assisted in murder investigations. What she found at Kronborg became reported widely in the international media in December of that year. I wanted to find out from Birgitte herself what happened.

Birgitte told me that the castle, including the Casemates, has its share of ghost stories, and its guards have reported many strange incidents over the years. In her detailed investigation as a medium of Kronværket, which she told me had previously been apartment residences, Birgitte uncovered a great deal of psychic impressions. "When I'm doing sittings with individual persons, it usually takes about three to five hours," Birgitte said. "When I work with haunted places... I can see back in time and how the area and house looked in different times, a sort of history book and map over the place. This is very helpful in the clearing up phase."

Danish clairvoyant Birgitte Graae investigated Kronværket.

The spirits she encountered in Kronværket had resided there for many years. She detailed her communications with these spirits in Frederiksborg Amts Avis. One of the spirits she assisted to the other side was an Englishwomen by the name of Eva McGlean. "She was in a room where the restaurant personnel feel that they are being looked at," Birgitte told the paper. "Eva McGlean was raped when she was 13 or 14 years old by some farm workers in 1670 when she still lived in England. A lot of terrible things happened to her." Apparently, Eva ended up killing a young man who had been making unwanted advances. Although she evaded arrest for the killing and ended up marrying a diplomat in 1706 and moving to Denmark to live at Kronborg, the story became more tragic after she gave birth to a baby girl while her husband was away on official business.

"She went into total depression," Birgitte recounted. "She locked the child away and starved it to death. After that, she buried it in the [dirt] floor."

Ridden with guilt, Eva continued to haunt her residence, which became Kronværket, afraid that she would not be admitted to heaven. "I asked her why she had killed her daughter," Birgitte told the Frederiksborg County paper, "and she said she was so afraid that her daughter would be the victim of the same things that she had suffered herself."

Eva's spirit was not the only one that relayed a tale of guilt and tragic death in Birgitte's investigation into the Kronværket haunting. In the wine cellar, she encountered a German ghost named Mark who in the 1800s who ended up on the run, wrongly accused of stealing from a previous employer. Wherever he went, the false accusations caught up with him. In despair, he ended up hanging himself in a barn, and his ghost has wandered the country ever since. "I gave him the permission to declare his innocence by listening to his story," Birgitte said. These are but two of 15 ghosts Birgitte encountered during her investigation of Kronværket. Since then, she said was able to clear the place and nothing strange has happened since.

The huge wall lining the moat around Kronborg Castle. One of the spirits Birgitte encountered was a little girl who said she fell from the second floor of Kronværket into the moat and died.

Kronværket closed last autumn and a new restaurant, Kronen (The Crown), is scheduled to open there this spring. Will the ghostly incidents resume, or have they ceased for good as Birgitte hopes? Perhaps it is best if the new management of Kronen decide to have flowers on the tables instead of candles and not worry too much if they find doors they had locked wide open.

Special thanks to my Mom, Bea Laursen, for translation of the articles from Frederiksborg Amts Avis, 21 December 2005.

Image credits: Photos of Kronborg by Chris Laursen and self-portrait courtesy of Birgitte Graae.