Nábrók — The Necropants of the East Fjords

Museum of Icelandic Sorcery, Hólmavík, Westfjords, Iceland

In the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft in the Westfjords, a replica of Iceland's most disturbing magical artefact is on permanent display — a pair of trousers made from the flayed skin of a consenting corpse, designed to generate eternal wealth for the wearer.

The Nábrók — literally 'corpse-trousers' — are one of the more specific entries in the Icelandic grimoire tradition known as the Galdrabók, a collection of magical staves and procedures compiled in the 17th century at the height of Iceland's witch trials. The procedure is detailed and requires consent at every stage, which is one of its more unsettling aspects. First, you must obtain the promise of a recently deceased man that you may have his skin after death. Following the burial, you must dig up the body and flay the skin from the waist down in a single piece. You then step into it, wearing the dead man's skin as trousers. You place a coin stolen from a widow into the scrotum. A magical stave — the Nábrókastafur — is then drawn on the inside of the skin. If done correctly, the coins will never stop multiplying. The trousers, however, can never be removed by the wearer — they must be passed to another person, who then inherits both the wealth generation and the inability to remove them. The only way to be free of Nábrók is to find a willing successor before you die. Iceland executed 22 people for witchcraft between 1625 and 1685. Twenty of them were men — a statistical anomaly in European witch trial history, where women constituted the overwhelming majority of the accused. Historians connect this to the specifically practical, transactional nature of Icelandic folk magic: it was understood as a craft, engaged with by farmers and fishermen seeking concrete outcomes. The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík holds a full-scale replica. It is their most photographed exhibit.