STRANGE CONTINENT
ULRICH MAGIN rounds up the weirdest news from Europe, including a mystery hum and a German polt
WHERE DOES SANTA LIVE?
This comes a little late, I’m afraid. Christmas is supposed to be a celebration of peace on Earth, and there is, as my newspaper source says, a merciless fight among the northern nations of Europe as to where Santa Claus has his home. Hollywood says that Santa lives at the North Pole. However, there are no reindeer that far north. The Scandinavians (mainly) agree he lives in their far north, in Lapland.
Many Finns say that Joulupukki (a married form of Santa) has his home near Korvatunuri close to the frontier with Russia. Others place Santa’s home about 300km (186 miles) from there in a village named Rovaniemi where a theme park was opened in 1998. The park has 500 illuminated reindeer and the people of the town have copyrighted it as “the official hometown of Santa Claus”. It is open throughout the seasons, so that kids can sit on Santa’s lap each and every day of the year. Some citizens even sought EU recognition of this fact from Brussels; however, only Estonia supported the move.
The Danes know that Santa, or the Julemand, dwells in Greenland in a small log cabin in a tiny place called Uummannaq. The cabin was built for a Danish TV show in 1989, and there is even a towering 5m (16ft) tall Santa’s post box on the island.
For the Swedes, Jultomte has his house at Mora in the mid-Swedish region of Dalarna (where runes remained in use until the beginning of the 20th century). The region also has a Santa-themed park – Tometeland, or Santa’s Country.
Things are a bit different in Iceland. There, the good people have 13 Santas or Christmas trolls (I have also heard my Finnish friends speak of Christmas trolls) who live in the mountains around Dimmuborgir. These are rather mischievous, stealing food and other stuff. However, they have their good side and put presents into the shoes of wellbehaved children in the 13 days before Christmas.
Undeterred, Germans believe that it is the “Christkind” (Christ Child) who bring presents to German kids. He lives in Engelskirchen (in North Rhine-Westphalia – it translates as Angel’s Church) where every year a special post office (which even has its own post code) employs extra workers to deal with the avalanche of Christmas wishlists sent by children. In 2009, it dealt with 160,000 letters. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 24 Dec 2020.
FALLING FISH
It is good to see that most fortean phenomenon of all, the fish fall, happening in Europe again, this time in Italy.
Famous Lake Garda cooking blogger Liliana Bazoli, from Gargnano, was covering her lemons in the garden with her husband Plinio on 10 December 2020 “when suddenly I heard a thud on the lawn less than a couple of metres away. I turned around and saw a whitefish weighing over half a kilo in the grass, a female with eggs. I immediately looked to see if the cat was nearby, but I realised by looking up that one of the seagulls squawking above our heads had clumsily lost the fish it had just caught from the lake. I left the fish on the wall in the hope that the seagull could come and take it back; we’ll see if it will.” BresciaOggi, 11 Dec 2020.
SINKHOLES
While the sinkholes of Siberia are still hotly debated, similar craters opened to the north and south of the continent around the beginning of 2021. On the night of 30 December 2020, a landslide in Ask, some 40km (25 miles) northwest of Oslo, destroyed many houses. The ground just sank below the village, 700 inhabitants had to be evacuated, several people were missing, and one was found dead two days later. The
earth had caved in over an area of roughly 700 by 300 yards (640 by 275m). The cause of the catastrophe was not known at the time of writing, but there had been heavy rains in the previous few days. At the same time, there was a violent earthquake in Croatia.
On 8 January, a large sinkhole opened beneath the parking lot at a hospital in Naples, Italy. The giant cater was 20m (70ft) deep. Luckily, no one was injured, but firefighters filmed smoke coming out of the hole and electricity in the hospital went off. The cause of the crater might have been an explosion. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 31 Dec 2020; 2 Jan 2021; Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 Jan 2021.
MISTREATED MEDIÆVAL MONKEY
Archæologists have unearthed the skeleton of a monkey during building work for a multi-storey car park in Basle, Switzerland. At first they thought the well-preserved bones, some 570 years old, were those of a child. But closer analysis showed they were those of a Barbary ape or macaque ( Macaca sylvanus). The archæologists believe the monkey had been kept as a pet (they were quite popular in the Middle Ages). But the bones also told the story of the damaging mistreatment the poor animal had suffered: the vertebræ were deformed, proving the monkey had been on a chain all its life, and fractures revealed it had often been severely beaten. The animal’s teeth had been filed down and rounded so that it could not bite.
Documents indicate the owner of the unfortunate animal may have been the scholar Heinrich von Beinheim, one of the lecturers at Basel University. Barbara Tuchman has shown, in her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, that monkeys were common pets back then, and they are often depicted in the stonework of old castles, such as the one in Dhaun, Germany. https://netzwerk-kryptozoologie.de/mein-wort-zum-sonntag-22november-2020/.
TEA SHOP POLT
In 55-year-old Angelika Holaschke’s tea shop at the fruit market in Augsburg, Bavaria, strange things are said to happen, and on an almost regular basis.
When Angelika opens the shop in the morning she inevitably finds the doormat some distance from where it was left in the evening, while the lids of tea caddies are found to have been opened mysteriously – and this has been going on for 14 years. Says Ms Holaschke: “It is very strange – since I have moved in, the doormat wanders around, sometimes 10cm [4in], sometimes 30cm [12in], and sometimes it even crawls up the counter.” It is a heavy mat, with rubber to hold it to the floor.
A friend who works one floor up, Susanne Wosnitzka, has become interested in the strange goings-on and says she tried to identify some natural cause for the unruly mat’s behaviour. “We can rule out vibrations from a tram as the cause, as there are none.” There are also no construction sites nearby which could cause tremors. “We also hopped around on it, and even then the doormat didn’t move,” says Holaschke. In addition to the errant doormat, tea containers are found open in the morning and tea-leaves lie scattered about. Holaschke is also unable to find an explanation for this: “I always close the lids tightly, otherwise the tea will lose its aroma,” she says. She doesn’t believe any of her employees are to blame: “There are only five people who have a key to the shop, and we can rule them all out.”
She thinks that unruly spirits are the cause of the strange goings-on. Wosnitzka is a local historian and found that the Eisenhut Inn, an old building now replaced by the house where the current haunting is happening, had more than its share of tragedies in the past 150 years. In 1842, a guest died in bed; later a maid fell into the pit under the cellar and suffocated. In the Middle Ages, the fruit market was occupied by a monastery, and “skeletons keep coming to light during construction work, including that of a woman who was pregnant when she died.” Wosnitzka asks: “Was it a nun who had to die because of an unwanted pregnancy? Are there restless souls haunting the tea shop?”
What would Holaschke do if one of the ghosts appeared to her, a reporter wanted to know. “I’m not worried about that. I have excellent calming tea in my store,” she said. merkur.de, 15 Dec 2020.
SKY SOUNDS
It has all gone quiet when it comes to the mysterious ‘sky trumpets’ reported all over Europe in recent years, but the strange hum that many ear-witnesses around the globe have heard is still with us. In November 2020, people in Bad Honnef, Bonn, Germany, complained about mysterious and persistent humming noises that reporters and police were unable to explain. WDR news, 2 Nov 2020.