Hello and welcome to the 21st issue of Place! As we enter October, we thought we’d bring you a ghost story. Not of a particular spirit, but what happens when we brush up against the unknown and never really find out why. How enchanting - and chilling - the shadows can be.
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our inaugural pitch guide here. If you’re the social type, follow us on Twitter (@place_letter) where you can share your favourite pieces and Instagram (@placenewsletter) for a visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team.
After dark
It was dark when we pulled up to the lodge down the road from the waterfall, but then again it was late December. The darkness had been here for the majority of our week long trip around Iceland.
Many travel to Iceland during the summer when the sun shines past midnight, or the shoulder seasons when the warmer weather makes the hunt for wild hot springs and glacier hikes more pleasant. But my friend Alicia and I chose our winter break from grad school for a campervan road trip along the southern coast. Less expensive, we reasoned, and the highest chance of seeing the Northern lights. In December, there’s only about four hours of sunlight per day, leaving a long stage for the colorful dance. We would eat pasta dinners cooked on our little camp stove below a sky of bright stars, we imagined, watching the green aurora weave its way above the flat-topped mountains, dormant volcanoes and sprawling glaciers.
Iceland, which has experienced an astounding boost in tourism in the last decade, is sold as this rugged fairytale: bikini dips in the rock-hewn Blue Lagoon, glacier hikes in furry coats, black sand beaches lined in basalt columns. But outside the edges of this fantasy is a place that feels darker than the saturated photos. There’s a deep history of folklore that reflects the more volatile phenomenon of the island -- the “huldufólk” who live parallel lives among the rocks, bringing bad luck to humans who intrude on their enchanted territory; trolls, which live in the mountains and said to eat misbehaving children; spirits that stalk beaches and fjords. Icelanders respect these myths, going so far as to halt construction of a major highway when it was said it might disrupt an elf church (as well as interrupt the delicate biosphere of a lava field). Ghost stories, after all, are what we tell ourselves to try to control our fear. And on an island with volcanoes at the edge of eruption, cracking glaciers and gale-force winds, the unknown is always a neighbor.
Within the first two hours driving out of Reykjavik on the “Ring Road” - the two-lane highway that rounds the circumference of the island - we began to let go of our expectations. The weather changed rapidly, like a movie with twists and turns: sun, rain, snow, and wind blowing so strong across the exposed landscape it pushed the van across the center-line of the road.
The next day it rained like hell, confining us to the van aside from a short hike along the coast at which point my fascination with a sea cave led to both of us absolutely drenched from a rogue wave, destroying my phone, leaving us with one working GPS in an island with patchy-at-best reception. Later, when the rain let up, we decided to take a shortcut over a steep mountain pass only for a storm to blow in twenty minutes later, coating the narrow switchbacks in a slippery layer of snow.
The next day, our luck seemed to shift as a golden sun poked through the clouds while we hiked an hour along steep icy trails to a dreamy hot spring river tucked in the mountains. We relaxed with our backs pressed against warm stones, taking shots of lichen schnapps and eating Bugles with fellow travelers from Korea and the US. But after the mid-afternoon sunset turned the geothermal steam a cotton candy pink, gentle white snowflakes thickened into a furious flurry that blanketed the gray twilight sky. We hopped out of our reverie, back into thermals and snow pants, and clambered back onto the trail to the car park before our visibility disappeared.
In our hours spent on long stretches of empty road, Iceland’s bleak landscape became increasingly more mysterious. There are few powered lights along vast stretches of the Ring Road, only reflective posts that appear in the dark as our headlights hit them one by one. The imposing outline of flat-topped mountains stood out in the distance, dotted with illuminated red and white crosses marking gravestones in rural cemeteries. One afternoon, we took a wrong turn and drove along what looked like a snow-covered moonscape, which left us in awe until we realized the gravel had choked our heating vent and we spent a night shivering wrapped in our sleeping bags and covered in our parkas.
Another night, a truck spent an hour harassing us on the road outside a small town called Vik, honking its horn, flashing its brights, accelerating to our bumper and then backing off, over and over again. At first we thought the driver was trying to warn us of a flat tire or trying to pass us, but we were going over the speed limit without any noticeable mechanical issues. My heart beat faster as I tried to read the silent signals in the darkened windows from our rearview mirrors - were they trying to get us to pull over? We were a dozen miles or more outside the nearest town after dark; neither of us were naive enough not to know what could happen when women were pulled over by unknown drivers in rural areas. We sat in tense silence until we finally pulling into a well-lit parking lot at the edge of town. Our aggressor roared on through town. We got out to examine the car, without finding a single issue. Uneasily, we continued on.
On one of our last nights, we pulled into the parking lot of a glacial waterfall, lit up 24 hours per day with massive floodlights aimed toward the top of the fountain, illuminating the spritzing water at the top of the 100 meter drop, like a face hovering over a flame. It roared in the background as we read the guidance - no camping without a reservation or face a fine. The camp office was closed. We were both broke grad students who were uninterested in an unnecessary expense. A quick Google search indicated there was another campsite just down the road, so we continued on.
We pulled into the small gravel parking lot, only one other unoccupied sedan in the corner, and checked out the small unlit lodge. Luckily the door was unlocked, silently swinging open to a small kitchen and dining area, a ranger’s office and bathrooms. We flicked on the lights and turned on the stove, only to hear a pop as the electricity short circuited. It was pitch black and quiet, save for the howling wind outside. Not keen to wait outside in the cold while our pasta water boiled, we resolved to prepare our dinner via two upturned smartphone torches. The low lights cast cartoonishly large shadows on the walls. Once in a while we’d see headlights pass on the nearby road through the curtains. I swore there was a pair that turned into the lot to park, but no one came into the lodge. It was just us, our pasta and our shadows.
And then, just as we sat down to eat -- BANG -- the door burst open with such force it slammed into the wall. A gust of cold air rushed in.
Alicia looked at me with wide eyes. “Hello?” we both called out to the dark corridor past the kitchen. No response. “Didn’t you hear footsteps?” I whispered. We stood up from the table and Alicia tiptoed toward the door with her phone, flashing the light in the empty corners. No one was there.
We shoveled the remaining pasta into our mouths and started cleaning up with a quiet urgency, throwing ingredients and unwashed plates into our bags and hurried out to the van. The sedan that had been in the lot was no longer there. The night felt alive - had the wind picked up? Nevermind - our mutual sixth senses had been triggered and we wanted to get out of the dark, back to the floodlit waterfall that would be filled with busses of Chinese tourists by morning.
As we pulled out, we heard a knocking on our back window. I looked in the rearview mirror but only saw the empty parking lot. “Just go!” I said. Alicia hit the accelerator and the knocking grew louder. “What is that?!” she asked. I took a deep breath, opened the door and went out back. In our haste to pack up, our back curtain was stuck in the door, slapping against the car exterior in the wind. We laughed, but wordlessly agreed to move on. A message had been sent. We drove back to the waterfall.
I can’t say for sure whether I believe in ghosts or not, but whenever I’ve had a particular chill down my spine, an energy that kept me awake into the early hours of the morning, I never felt like the presence was particularly malevolent. Simply there. Taking up enough space that there was no room for the both of us. Similarly, in these moments after dark, it didn’t feel that Iceland was particularly inhospitable, just indifferent. It was here for millions of years, and will continue on once the tourists have stopped dropping in for week-long trips. We can tell its stories, but it will never be truly knowable. It will always have the dark.
-Karis Hustad is journalist based in London, usually covering debt, and co-editor of Place.
Place recommends:
Where camels take to the sea,
Meeting a giant in Ukraine,
Black cemeteries and stories of the south.
Join us next week for a walk under the bottlebrush arch.