Shadows in the Pines: Folklore in Decay

When I travelled to Östersund while preparing Decay, I wasn’t only looking at maps and weather patterns. I was listening. The forests in Jämtland and across the Västernorrland border carry a silence that is never just absence. It is a silence full of weight, a silence that presses. People there know it. They have always known it. And when they lacked the language of radiation or soil instability, they gave that silence form in story.

I found myself drawn to those stories. I had already set the novel among lakes and spruce, but the research in Östersund convinced me that the land needed a voice of its own. Not a literal one, but the echoes of figures who had always been there in Scandinavian imagination. Three in particular haunted me as I wrote: the Vittra, the Skogsrå, and the Myling. Each is different. The Vittra move beneath the ground, unseen but felt. The Skogsrå rules the forest, beautiful and treacherous. The Myling is the most sorrowful of all, the ghost of a forsaken child.

They were never meant as monsters in the modern sense. They are warnings, embodiments of respect or neglect, memory or forgetting. In Decay, they came to embody what science alone could not describe: the unease of land that seems to turn against its people.

The Vittra

The first figures I encountered in my research were the Vittra. Ask around in Norrland and people will tell you they live underground, moving through an unseen network beneath fields and forests. They are described as hidden folk, invisible unless they choose to reveal themselves, and their paths cut straight through farmsteads and pastures. Build your house across such a path, and you risk sleepless nights, restless animals, or worse. Spill hot water on the ground without warning, and it might scald a Vittra.1

What fascinated me was how these stories demanded care for what cannot be seen. In some regions of Västerbotten, farmers would pause before ploughing a new field, asking whether Vittra paths crossed it. If animals sickened, or milk turned sour, the explanation was simple: the Vittra had been disturbed. It is easy to dismiss this as quaint superstition, but beneath it lies a profound recognition that the land itself has unseen rhythms, and that to ignore them is to invite misfortune.

When I was writing Decay, this logic returned again and again. Johan insists on pitching camp in a sunken clearing, convinced it is firm, dry, and safe. Freya feels unease but cannot quite name it.

Lena, ever curious, finds her way closest to what lies beneath. None of them think about the invisible network they are intruding upon. To me, that echoed the old Vittra tales. The family step into a place already inhabited, already claimed, and the ground remembers.

The Vittra are not hostile for the sake of malice. They are guardians of order, protectors of boundaries. If you cross them respectfully, you may pass unharmed. If you trample them, punishment follows. That idea: the world beneath us as alive, watchful, and easily offended gave me a lens through which to write the early chapters of the novel. In Decay, the Vittra are not named outright, but their presence lingers in the logic of the story: disturb what lies hidden, and the hidden will disturb you in return.

The Skogsrå

If the Vittra taught me to look beneath the soil, the Skogsrå made me look into the trees. I remember sitting by the lake in Östersund, notes scattered across my lap, when I messaged a friend in Göteborg. I told her how the Vittra had slipped so easily into the story, how I felt I needed more voices from folklore if the forest in Decay was to feel fully alive. She laughed, and without hesitation named her favourite: the Skogsrå.

I already knew fragments of the legend, but her enthusiasm pushed me deeper. The Skogsrå is one of the most haunting figures in Swedish tradition. At first sight she appears human, often a beautiful woman glimpsed at the edge of the forest. Yet she cannot be mistaken for one of us. Some stories say her back is hollow, like the trunk of a tree eaten from within. Others give her a tail, furred and animal. Either way, she is a being whose beauty masks an unearthly truth.

I later read Tommy Kuusela’s work on her, describing how hunters feared her gaze as much as they desired her favour. If treated with respect, she might grant fortune in the chase. If spurned or disregarded, she could lead a man hopelessly astray, trapping him in endless circles beneath the canopy. She is ambiguous, neither demon nor angel, but something in between. In that ambiguity lies her power: she is the forest personified, offering sustenance and peril in equal measure.2

When I wrote Johan’s decline, she appeared unbidden. In his fever, he begins to glimpse a pale woman among the trees, silent and watchful. Is it his body breaking down, his mind unravelling, or the land itself judging him? I never resolve the question. The Skogsrå, after all, is never resolved. She is uncertainty embodied. The unease you feel when the birds stop singing, when every tree looks the same, when you realise the forest has closed behind you.

The Myling

I knew I wanted something ghostly to bind the tension together: something that spoke not only of land but of the burden of history. In a half-lit library in Östersund, I leafed through Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend and paused on the entry for Mylingar (The Myling). The word felt different. Vittra and Skogsrå belonged to the living landscape. The Myling belonged to the dead; specifically to the children who never found rest.

A Myling, I learned, is the ghost of a child born in shame. Unwanted, unbaptised, and abandoned. Often their bodies are abandoned in a bog or beneath floorboards.3 In life, they were denied a name, a blessing and a grave. In death, they return as whispers and weight, singing in the night or appearing to travellers. They press onto shoulders, growing heavier with each step until the living collapse under their demand for burial in consecrated ground.4

This image unsettled me like nothing else had. The Vittra warns of unseen land, the Skogsrå obscures the forest’s edge… but the Myling confronts you with remorse. In Decay, Lena’s fevered mind conjures a child in her tent, their voices lulling her half into sleep.

Conclusion

Looking back, what struck me most was how naturally these figures settled into the story. I hadn’t planned them all from the beginning. It was the research, the conversations, and the long silences in Östersund that made them unavoidable. The Vittra, with their hidden paths and quiet demands for respect, echoed the buried reactor that waits beneath the clearing. The Skogsrå, glimpsed and never quite trusted, gave shape to Johan’s fever and the forest’s ambiguous mercy. And the Myling, the most human and tragic of the three, gave Lena’s decline a ghostly chorus.

In Decay, these figures blend folklore the characters would’ve been taught from stories. They shape atmosphere rather than plot. But they matter, because they root the horror in something older than radiation. Writing them into the novel convinced me of something simple: the land remembers. Whether through story or silence, it will always make itself heard.

1 Bengt af Klintberg, The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1998), 364–367.

2 Tommy Kuusela, “Spirited Away by the Female Forest Spirit in Swedish Folk Belief,” Folklore

131, no. 2 (2020): 159–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2020.1748707

3 Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 215–217.

4 Juha Pentikäinen, The Nordic Dead-Child Tradition: Nordic Dead-Child Beings: A Study in Comparative Religion(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 102–105.