Fall from the Wall
Theo Paijmans’s article about spontaneous human levitation [ FT349:28] made me recall a Swedish case of a badly frightened child momentarily levitating – or whatever he did. The child was Frans Gunnar Bengtsson (18941954) who grew up to become a popular essayist and author of the epicViking novel Röde Orm (published by Harper as The Long Ships). In chapter six of his 1953 memoir Den lustgård som jag minns ( The Paradise Which I Remember), Bengtsson writes: “Once, and only once in my life, have I experienced something which for me is impossible to explain. When it happened I could only have been between five and six years old. All our memories are unreliable and I am perfectly willing to admit that the memories of a five-year-old are not to be trusted at all. I only tell this story because I am myself absolutely convinced that it happened...”
Bengtsson goes on to describe the country estate Rössjöholm in southern Sweden, where he grew up as the only child of the foreman, and a new brick wall that had been built between the stables and a dairy there. It was a 3m (10ft) high wall that he managed to climb one summer day, alone at the farm apart from two bricklayers who were working over at the stables and paying no attention to him. On top of the wall, little Frans stood up and did an illadvised victory jig to celebrate his climbing feat, ignoring what have must have been quite a large height for a child. He writes:
“Suddenly I lost my balance and fell backwards. I couldn’t regain my footing by taking a quick step somewhere, because the wall was narrow and behind me there was only air… During a long and horrible moment I knew that I was going to fall and hit the stones far below. But I didn’t fall. I had only time to begin the fall, with my arms waving helplessly in the air and my feet more or less still connected to the top of the wall – but an accident never happened.
“Something stopped my fall, something caught me. I felt this clearly. It wasn’t like a hand, it was something large and soft that pressed against my shoulder blades. And suddenly I was stand- ing upright again, with my balance regained, although nothing or no one was near me… I couldn’t fathom what just had happened, and I became frightened – far more frightened than I have ever become, either before or after that day.
“I clearly remember what I did afterwards. I climbed down from the wall to the ground as fast as I could and went home; I went straight up to our attic, locked the door behind me and went over to a corner where mattresses and old clothes and rubbish had been stored. I lay down and just stayed there, shivering and chattering my teeth, overwhelmed by sheer horror. It wasn’t the horror of just having avoided falling and breaking my neck, or even some sort of religious horror. It was worse than that: the horror of experiencing the totally inexplicable.” Johan Theorin Stockholm, Sweden