The twin villages of Mora and Elfdale lay in the heart of some of the most beautiful country in the world, the mountains and lakes of central Sweden.  There was peace here, as well as beauty.  The villagers, nurtured by the crisp air that brought a sweet tang of pines as it swept down from the mist covered slopes above the lakes, were robust and carefree.  Simple people, few of them were deeply religious in the orthodox sense of the word, yet in their own way, because of the beauty and peace that was their heritage, they were close to the heart of God.

But that was before the Devil kidnapped their children.

It happened quite suddenly.  A child grew pale and listless.  That night, when he fell asleep, his terrified parents thought he had died.  His little body was unnaturally cold and rigid.  In fact , the child was in what nowadays would be called a cataleptic trance.  As he emerged from it, he began to moan and thrash about as though in a paroxysm of terror.  When he awoke, he was a different person.  His eyes had a faraway, ecstatic look; it was as if he were in the middle of a waking dream.  A degree of normality returned as the day wore on, but as soon as darkness fell the child lapsed into a trance once more.

Eventually, as many as 100 children were affected in the same way.  A terrifying rumour began to circulate.  The children, it was whispered, were being abducted by witches and being forced to take part in Satanic ceremonies, after which they were allowed to go home.  It was said that the pastor of Elfdale had written a letter to his bishop in which he claimed to have conclusive proof  that an eight year old girl had been initiated into a witches’ coven by a 17 year old servant girl.  An old woman of about 70  had also confessed to abducting children and using their innocent bodies for all manner of perversions.

Thoroughly alarmed, several of the leading citizens of Elfdale and Mora drafted a petition to the King of Sweden, Charles XI.  At the time, (1668) Charles was only 14 years old, and his decisions were made for him by his State Council.  The Council, mindful of the fact that the rest of Europe was in the grip of witchcraft fever and anxious to avoid any similar scandals in Sweden, decided that the villagers’ petition merited investigation.  They appointed two commissioners, gave them the power to interrogate witnesses and take whatever action might be necessary to put an end to any mischief, and sent them to Elfdale to find out exactly was going on.

It was the start of one of history’s strangest and most sinister witch trials, a trial that led to the persecution of innocent children, while the real culprits, whoever they were, went free.

The chief witnesses were the parents of the 100 or so children who said they had been carried away by the witches.  But it was the children themselves who provided the most sensational details of the horror they had experienced.  They told how they had been carried away to a place called Blakolla, although they had no idea where this was.  There, they had taken part in mysterious rites and orgies, culminating in a feast presided over by a devil whom they called Locyta.

A deathly silence fell over the 3000 strong assembly as the commissioners asked the children to tell them how they had reached this mysterious place called Blakolla.  The tale they told was incredible, and all the more horrifying for the fact that each child told it in perfect detail, as if they were reciting a nursery rhyme.

The children said that first of all they had gone to a gravel pit that lay near a crossroads.  There, they had draped cloths over their heads and danced blindly until exhausted. Once the dance was over, they ran to the crossroads, where they formed a circle.  Three times they cried the ritual summons:

“Antecessor, come and carry us to Blakolla!”

then, they said, the devil used to appear. They described him as a big man, with a bushy red beard, who wore colourful red and blue clothes.  They told the shocked assembly that the man had been kindly, not at all like the foul fiend the devil was supposed to be, and that he had laughed a lot.  The children had not been in the least afraid of him.

The devil provided them with strange animals for the ride to Blakolla.  He also gave them witches’ ointment, which had the power to make them fly through the air on broomsticks.

The Sabbat was held in a big house that stood alone in a meadow.  There, the children were made to swear allegiance to Satan.  They had to devote themselves to him, body and soul, and they were given satanic names.  They were also threatened that if they revealed this to anyone, they would be slowly tortured and beaten to death.

At their initiation, which was held by the side of a lake, each child was given a bag filled with metal filings taken from a church bell.  The bag was thrown into the water, with the words:

“As these filings from the bell can never return to the bell, so may my soul never return to Heaven.”

After the ceremony, the initiates sat down to a feast.  There was also dancing.  While the devil played a harp, the children were made to dance half naked in front of him.  Sometimes they were beaten by the coven’s priests out of sheer sadism, and sexual assaults were also commonplace.

The children were also taught how to cast harmful spells.  They confessed that on one occasion they had put a spell on the pastor of Elfdale by hammering a nail into a wooden effigy.  The pastor confirmed he had been suffering from headaches for the first time in his life.

This was the children’s story.  Fantastic though it appeared to the commissioners, one fact above all made it seem credible – each child told a tale that was identical, down to the most minute detail, with that of the other children.  Seventy adults were also accused of being implicated in some way with the satanic rituals.  23 of them confessed to the crime of witchcraft and were subsequently beheaded, their bodies afterwards being burned.

One thing above all puzzled the interrogators.  Although the children swore they had actually been present in the flesh at the Sabbat, many of their parents were adamant that the young ones never left the house.  Then one of the accused, a young girl, admitted that there had been occasions when the devil had only taken her spirit, leaving her body behind.  Still utterly perplexed, the commissioners accepted the statement.  They had all the evidence they wanted, most of the accused had confessed, and all that remained to do now was to pass sentence.

It was a harsh one.  Fifteen of the children, between the ages of 9 and 16, were executed.  60 more were sentenced to be birched, and caned severely once a week for a year.  No attempt was made to locate Blakolla, or to trace the mysterious person known as Locyta – the devil of the children’s story.  To the superstitious people, the story alone was proof enough that the children had been in the hands of supernatural forces.  There seemed little point in searching for a phantom.

It was a pity, for if locyta and the place where the Sabbat was held had been identified, some interesting facts might have been unearthed.  And there can be little doubt that Locyta would have proved just as vulnerable as the innocent children he had led astray, and who had shed blood because of him.

Today, experts who have studied the strange case of the bewitched children of Elfdale and Mora believe that the children were the victims of either hypnosis or some form of drug, perhaps a primitive version of LSD, manufactured from certain fungi.  Many of the experiences they claimed to have undergone, such as flying through the air, could have been pure hallucination.  But there was one problem, no two hallucinations would have been the same, and the children’s accounts were identical in every respect.

During the trial, the interrogators had completely overlooked one aspect that linked the whole affair with the accepted pattern of European witchcraft, the phenomenon known as the “dreaming soul”.  Many witches in their confessions, had admitted that they sometimes confused dreams with reality.  One write, Sinistrari, said in his Demoniality, published in 1700:

“There is no question that sometimes young women, deceived by the Demon, imagine that they are actually taking part in the Sabbats of witches, and all this is merest fantasy.  But this is not always the case; on the contrary, it more often happens that witches are bodily present at Sabbats and have an actual carnal and corporeal connection with the Demon.”

Some inquisitors believed that the Devil had no power to transport a witch’s body, and that Sabbats were held in the spirit while the witch’s material body was sleeping.  She was said to lie down on her left side and place herself in a trance, whereupon her spirit crept out of her mouth in the form of a bluish vapour.

All this, however, supposes that a witch is already an initiate and therefore powerful.  The same could not be said of the Swedish children.  They were the victims of an overwhelming external force.  The question is, what kind of force?

Suppose a small band of people, far advanced on the occult path, were able to telepathically contact the sleeping children.  Subconsciously the children receive an order to go to a certain place at a certain time.  The next day, the children rendezvous at the gravel pit near the crossroads.  The occultist(s) appears and leads them to the Sabbat like some satanic Pied Piper.  Afterwards the children are ordered to forget the place and the way to it, their memory or the journey is hypnotically supplanted by a surreal dream.  And the next night, as the children sleep, they enter a trance like state as the telepathic command comes to them again.

Unbelievable?  Maybe.  But today, we know such abominations are at least theoretically possible, and fact is often far, far stranger than fiction.

As to who Locyta was, that we shall never know, nor what his purpose was.  The adults who were brought to trial were mere puppets, they knew as little about the mysterious Locyta as did the children.  He and his acolytes vanished from the face of the earth.

But old legends and superstitions die hard.  Even today, more than 300 years later, the memory is still strong in that part of Sweden of the time when the children of two villages were possessed by dark forces.