Móhúsa-Skotta

A servant girl turned away from a farmer's door in a storm returned as a vengeful ghost, joined forces with another spirit, and terrorized two villages for a generation.

In the 18th century, a young woman travelling near Eyrarbakki on the south coast of Iceland sought shelter for the night at the farm of a well-off man named Jón. He refused to take her in. She spent the night exposed to the weather and died of it. She did not stay dead in any conventional sense. She attached herself to Jón as a haunting spirit of vengeance, tied specifically to the man who had refused her, and made his life a persistent misery. Livestock sickened and died under her influence; clothing and footwear left overnight were found shredded by morning, sometimes within hours of being put on. She became known locally as Móhúsa-Skotta, a Skotta being a recognisable type of female ghost in Icelandic tradition, so called for the backward-folded cap that trailed behind her head like a tail. Skotta did not work alone for long. She encountered another local ghost, a male spirit known as Sels-Móri, and the two of them, by tradition, jointly killed a farmhand named Tómas — after which witnesses reported seeing three ghosts travelling together along the coast road. The road between Eyrarbakki and Stokkseyri became genuinely dangerous to walk after dark; people arranged their travel to avoid it. Eventually an exorcist-farmer known as Monastery-Jón was hired to deal with the haunting. He succeeded in banishing both Skotta and Tómas from the district. Sels-Móri, by his own account, could not be found — and locals continued to report sightings and disturbances attributed to him for years afterward. The area's ghost lore was substantial enough that Stokkseyri later built a museum, Draugasetrið, dedicated to its haunted history.