Iceland Ghost Horror (or how to lose $200 due to poor decision making)

Much like reality tv we got voted off the island. The rancid waves of stink set forth a parliament meeting in which it was decided that we needed to leave a day early. I grudgingly agreed although I looked back towards, wistful for my own chance to pet the puffin.

I guess I will just have to come back again. Oh well.

To continue the adventure, we had some new goals. We couldn't spend time mourning the end of one part of the end of a part of the trip, there were ghosts to meet.

Iceland, with it's remote location, bizarre and dark landscapes, and the fact that it spends much of the year under a perpetual night has given rise to some pretty horrible ghost stories.

These ghosts are in addition to the the elves or "Hidden people", flesh eating trolls, and ferry service employees. An awful combination.

The brochure for the ghost museum in Stokkseyri promised amateur anthropologists the chance to learn about Iceland's haunted past.

What they meant to say was that it allowed you to experience Iceland's grim horror tales.

Instead they were dark mazes of heart attack traps. A haunted history lesson. It was made even worse when I snuck away and hid in a black corner while the crew was learning about a giant troll that lay sleeping in the first room.

I heard Roberta sigh when they finished and found me absent. "Oh great."

The anticipation was definitely on my side and when they walked right next to where I had buried myself in black drapes I jumped out and lost cousin points as hands flew in the air and shrieks were made.

Even though Roberta hit me and told me I couldn't go away again (she forced me to hold her hand) I still got them a couple more times.

Therefore, when we exited the cave (Oddly enough glassed cracks in the final room contained silhouettes of monsters and a poster of an Icelandic pin up girl) and found that we had only been in the Icelandic "Wonders" museum, not the ghost museum I was already in trouble.

The Wonders museum was closer akin to a butterfly garden than it was to the Ghost museum. The ghost museum was a cold, Icelandic nightmare. And this time, I wasn't the scariest thing in the museum.

We went in two at a time and there was a debate about who had to go in with me. Andrew almost got picked to suffer but in the end Roberta decided that as my wife she was responsible for my actions.

The lady at the desk gave us headsets that would take us through the 24 rooms, explaining the gristly ghost stories.

Well, let me tell you. There is a little Icelandic boy with the best job in the world. Entering the first cavernous dark room he immediately leapt out in a black cape. The best reaction to this is to just jump out of your shoes in fright and then chase him like Roberta did.

The other response is to run away, which many people would be observed to do. This is a bad response because the second you hit The wooden bridge in the middle of the room you get attacked by an animatronic ghost from beneath the bridge.

These double whammies would end up setting us on edge for the rest of the maze.

Unfortunately, Roberta got scared at one point and crushed her headset in her hand. I avoided crushing mine but I did manage to set it to repeat on a particularly scary story. There was a tense few minutes in pitch black room number 7 in which I struggled to figure out how to fix my headset while trying to avoid being startled by any rotten children.

Roberta clutched my arm tight and I was marched around many a corner and through many curtains between rooms in the style of a prisoner of war. Instead of a bayonet against my back it was Roberta's pointy elbow.

I only managed to scare Roberta once when I told her the only way through to the next room was a small, claustrophobic, haunted fisherman's hut. It was a fight to convince her and she pushed me forward saying something like, "Oh god, oh god."

When we had gone about 15 feet into the dark tunnel only to meet a stone wall and no exit I yelled, "Ahhhhhhh! It's got me!"

Roberta punched me after doing the fright dance and dropped my arm for the first time. "Why would you do that?"

"Because it was funny, let's wait for your cousins and you will know how it feels."

She just stormed out of the hut paused came back in and grabbed me and forced me forward once again.

I didn't get another chance because I was on my toes the entire time. The little Icelandic cretin was on a roll. We would later find out that he had gotten an especially good reaction from Andrew and Tara and would run through the passages in the walls, reaching out to grab them or hiss menacingly from a dark corner. I could hear the cousin's screams in the distance.

The fact that he was torturing Andrew and Tara was was fortunate for us. I got scared just by the lifeless mannequins, sometimes more than once by the same one. This was because I kept looking back for people creeping up on us and I would see a mannequin I had already passed and think it was a real person coming to get me.

At exhibit 19 Roberta was feeling done, at 24 we were frightened to being physically tired. Each room had been filled with ghastly monsters and videos. There were vengeful ghosts, of the prematurely dead bride or groom, or of the evil Deacon that could only be held down beneath a boulder enchanted by a sorcerer "that not even a river could move". The worst, and my favorite, was the ghost of a giant bull that had been skinned alive but for his rear legs. He had red glowing eyes and dragged his skin behind him like the train of a bloody wedding dress. Riding upon this skin one would sometimes see ghosts of people long gone, traveling through the dark and misty moors.

Modern Icelanders still hold a fair bit of stock in these stories and it is not hard to understand why their ancestors did so. Iceland can be the gloomiest and darkest of places and the wind is fierce and chilling. I can scarce imagine how terrified the old Icelanders were, being raised with these tales of age old horrors, and having to travel at night in the winter across the haunted fields and lands of this country.

You might expect someone leaving this exhibit to check their fuel gauge so they didn't get stuck in one of these stories.

Oops.

Anyways, it required a stout beer and a trip to the fancy Blue Lagoon hot spring and spa to cool the team's nerves. Scaring them was a costly mistake in that between entrance fees and petrol I was out $200 dollars.