We are standing inside one of the rooms of Norre Vosborg manor several hours away from Copenhagen and listening to an old man talk about the day the devil went to Denmark.
Let me qualify first: the aforementioned “we” stands for scribes from Russia, Rumania, Serbia, Lebanon, Dubai, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines who are covering a Bang & Olufsen event in Struer, five hours away from the Danish capital. We are billeted at the manor, which (if you forget for a minute that you are in one of the colder countries in Europe) looks as if it were a South American hacienda with wide-open grasslands, cows grazing in the distance, iron gate that seemingly belongs to a Botero painting and the bluest skies I’ve ever seen on this part of the planet.
Norre Vosborg, the oldest of many fortified castles established during the Middle Ages, is situated behind a moat with double embankments at Nissum Fjord in Western Denmark. The oldest building is the eastern wing, which is a massive two-storied gothic stone house. The courtyard between the two barns functions as the main axis of the whole complex. Hans Christian Andersen stayed here for two weeks and wrote about how he walked down the halls where kings and queens once walked, and how he answered the call of nature on toilet bowls brushed by royal asses in the olden days.
And because of cheeses and bottles upon bottles of good Danish wine, we are “standing” in one of the rooms of Norre Vosborg, yes, but barely.
Yesterday, we took a trip to the Struer Museum and took a side tour of writer Johannes Buccholtz’s unusual — and reportedly also-haunted — house. The walls were painted with the weirdest blue I’ve ever seen: a cross between the blues created by Yves Klein and Toilet Duck. Now we listen to Norre Vosborg proprietor Svend Erik Jorgensen talk to us about more hauntings.
Lore has it that the devil went to Denmark carrying a bag filled with mansions and castles, says Jorgensen in such a way that he recalls Peter Cushing being haunted by Christopher Lee in a cape. One of the mansions in the devil’s bag was the hotel we are occupying. How very Hammer House of Horror. Doubly horrific is the fact that the British journalist who looks like Christina Aguilera with the accent of Scary Spice keeps calling me “Igor.” She must think I look like the hunchback assistant of a mad scientist. Cue thunder and demented laughter.
The proprietor leads us journalists to the rooms of the manor, which smell of dust, damp curtains and congealed years. Like the socks that Rip Van Winkle slept with. I anticipate a ghost story simmering any moment now.
A ghost is said to haunt the footbridge near the old building, the proprietor says. The other details are hazy. I heard him say the way to get rid of ghosts is through the use of three pieces of wood. Must be magical wood. Or if not, maybe you could use them to beat up ghosts. But aren’t they supposed to be ghostly apparitions to begin with? It would be like trying to spank wind. Oh, well. He assures us, “No one has seen the (bridge ghost) since two days ago.” Must be due for an appearance.
Jorgensen goes on to detail the former occupants of the manor. Some twisted sados and torture-happy manor lords. The ghost of a young boy is said to appear near the fountain. They believe this is the spirit of a boy who got caught for stealing a silver spoon from the rich, tyrannical dude who occupied Norre Vosborg. The kid was tortured, left semi-conscious and bleeding profusely. He was gone days later. Never heard of again till they found a skeleton of a boy in the nearby church.
The torture was not confined to human beings. Dogs, I think, got some beating, too. A horse was even beheaded. The proprietor says that on cold, clammy April nights you could hear a horse galloping in the Norre Vosborg grounds. Ah, the legend of the headless horse. If that thoroughbred went to the Sta. Ana racetrack to compete against racehorses, I bet you it would win by a ghostly nose.
The basement, we are told, used to be a dungeon, where “Long Margaret the gypsy had been (incarcerated).” Sometimes when guests are having dinner, glasses are thrown by invisible pranksters. Maybe they found the Danish meatballs too salty or the music too Muzak?
The torture chamber has been wisely converted into a pub. Thus, Norre Vosborg visitors can drink lager to their hearts’ content while surrounded by thick walls that if they could only talk would tell the most bone-chilling stories of all.
Live Evil
At the end of the Norre Vosborg tour, the journalist from Russia shakes his head and declares that the ghost stories we are told are most likely nothing but publicity stunts to attract more visitors to the manor who would pay top euros.
What’s the deal, really? Is any of this — ghosts, the undead, the devil — real or something concocted or spin-doctored? Whose version of the afterlife is true, anyway? The one by George Romero, Rod Serling, M. Night Shaymalan, Hieronymous Bosch, Estong Tutong, or the Norre Vosborg proprietor? My only encounter with the devil concerns the caterer-wife of a deceased artist. Talking to the employees in the gallery where I exhibit my paintings, this woman reportedly wondered whether I sold my soul to the devil because my subjects are dark and very, very disturbing. She couldn’t believe collectors buy paintings of skulls and disembodied sheep-headed babies. (What’s wrong with dark, confrontational paintings, anyway? Haven’t the greats — Goya, Picasso, Bacon, H.R. Giger, and even our very own Manuel Ocampo and Jojo Legaspi — already recalibrated the definition on what makes a painting “beautiful”? Should we artists be content in merely painting flowers, rice fields and goddamn carps for the not-so-mighty peso?)
In this day and age of wireless Internet and cloned sheep, some people still believe that crock of Faustian shit. Is it possible to do a Johnny Blaze, Paganini or a Robert Johnson and go to the crossroads, bury or sign something, and enter into a contract with the devil? Didn’t Jimmy Page study the occult and buy Aleister Crowley’s old house in Scotland and then weird things started happening to Led Zeppelin? Didn’t Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac flirt with witchcraft? Didn’t Homer Simpson make a pact with the devil for a donut?
The literature on this demonic subject is so deliciously scary. Imagine taking a trip from Auschwitz (then) to Daifur (now) wearing a cloak of invisibility to see for yourself the works of the inhuman race, how men become wolves to other men. Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece says, “If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” In his dialogue with the Devil wherein he mentions about the Russian nobleman who had his hounds tear a boy to pieces in front of the mom because he threw a stone at one of the dogs, Ivan asks, “What have children to do with it, tell me, please?” War is undoubtedly hell. There is no such thing as an intelligent bomb that would avoid blasting to bits children or infants. The “War on Terror” terrorizes everyone.
There are more ironies. Did you know that Hitler was a vegetarian, the Marquis de Sade opposed capital punishment, and that Saddam Hussein loved kids (or at least loved having photo-ops with them)? And for some strange Nick Joaquin-like twist, Filipino despots loved to sing heartrending ballads like Dahil Sa ’Yo and to talk about “the True, the Good, the Beautiful.”
Hell is sometimes the result of the utopian vision of people like Pol Pot or Saparmurat Niyazov, the leader of Turkemistan who, according to Bizarre magazine, “has his political enemies and their families tortured, renamed January after himself, built an ice palace in the middle of the desert so that the kids could ice-skate, and wrote The Ruhnama, which practically proclaims himself — Turkmenbashi the Great — as prophet,” etcetera etcetera.
I may have to agree with the journalist from Russia and with Jean-Paul Sartre that hell, in most cases, is other people. Not some bottomless pit as conceptualized by everyone from Dante in The Divine Comedy to Adam Sandler in Little Nicky.
But like love, the devil works in mysterious ways. After that Denmark trip, I would go home to see my apartment burglarized, with the locks chiseled away, door left ajar, and most of my belongings tossed shambolically to the floor. Gone would be my laptop, the US dollars I so diligently saved for a Tokyo trip, my Samsonite bag, a Sony Discman, and — believe it or not — my Roxy Music “Avalon” CD.
Somewhere in the Greenhills-Mandaluyong area, a burglar is toying with my Mac after buying gin or shabs with my hard-earned money, and listening to the vocal stylings of Brian Ferry.
That, dear readers, is pure evil.