As children in Värmland, Sweden, Fredrik Skott and his sister used to dress up as witches and travel from door-to-door to give letters filled with candy to their neighbors and friends. But the occasion wasn’t Halloween: It was Easter Eve.
Unlike the bunnies and egg baskets that many people associate with Easter, each year in Sweden and Finland, young children continue a centuries-old tradition marking the night that witches celebrated Sabbath with the devil before Jesus’s resurrection.
Dressed as Easter witches (påskkärringar)—and Easter trolls (påsktroll)—they go door-to-door wishing families “Glad Påsk.” The tradition varies slightly by region: While some communities celebrate on Easter Eve, others dress up on Maundy Thursday. Some children sing in exchange for candy while others give their neighbors letters filled with candy.
(Here’s why others celebrate Easter with bunnies and egg hunts.)
Skott, now a docent in Nordic folklore at the Institute for Language and Folklore in Gothenburg, has spent years studying the Swedish mumming tradition, which sheds light on the link between witchcraft and Easter as well as how beliefs about witches changed over time in Sweden.
The origins of Easter witches
There’s still some debate about exactly when the tradition began but scholars agree that it derives from Sweden’s spate of witch trials that spanned from 1668 to 1678—as well as a robust folklore around witches that had already taken root as early as the 1400s.
One of these ideas was the belief that witches flew to a fictitious location called Mount Blåkulla to celebrate the Black Sabbaths or Witches’ Sabbaths. In Mount Blåkulla, everything was upside down and backwards: old people grew young and people danced with their backs turned against each other. Folk stories held that the chaos of Blåkulla blurred into our world during the period between Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday.
“When Jesus was dead, it was believed that witches and other creatures were more active than at other times,” Skott says.
According to folklorist Per-Anders Östling, Sweden’s most famous witch trials began in 1668 after children spread rumors that they were taken by witches to Mount Blåkulla. Hundreds of women were accused and sentenced to death—and that fear of witches persisted well into the next century. Communities in southwest Sweden held huge bonfires and shuttered their doors before Easter to protect themselves and their children from witches.
(Behind the witch panics that killed thousands throughout history.)
Even though most scholars believe that the tradition of dressing as Easter witches didn’t begin until the early 20th century, after belief in witches waned in large cities, Skott’s research suggests that the practice began right around this time in the 18th century.
Skott points to the court records of Husby parish in Uppland, Sweden, where a farmhand accused a young woman named Anna Olofsdotter of witchcraft on October 3, 1747. One year earlier, three children in her parish had discovered “troll butter,” a slimy fungus associated with witches. They believed that by burning the troll butter, the witch who owned it would reveal herself.
According to the court records, Olofsdotter decided to play a joke on the children and farmhand, wearing an apron over her shoulders and draping her hair over her face. As the farmhand threw the fungus into the fire, she ran out screaming “it burns, it burns.” The farmhand began circulating rumors that Olofdotter was a witch, and she was brought to court on the charge of defamation. The court concluded she was not a witch.
“The case indicates at least that the possibility (albeit not always an entirely successful one) existed of people joking about or trying to imitate witches in Sweden at a time when the belief in witchcraft was still very much alive,” Skott writes.
Easter witches in the 19th century
By the 1800s, teenagers and young adults were participating in the Easter witch tradition, Skott writes—and his research further suggests that Halland churches were already banning people from dressing up on Easter in the 1820s.
Most of their costumes invoked old peasant women with long skirts and kerchiefs made of old rags. Armed with brooms or poles and horns of ointment believed to bestow the power of flight, the Easter witches sometimes threw letters across the thresholds of local homes featuring a verse inviting the recipient to participate in the witch Sabbath.
These witches would also often lurk around town, frightening children or begging for food and alcohol. Like Olofsdotter, these tricksters would even mirror “real” witch behavior, pouring ash down chimneys—it was believed that witches flew up chimneys on their way to Blåkulla—or wounding livestock and pouring water on horses to make it seem they were sweaty from witches riding them to the Sabbath.
(Paganism is on the rise—here’s where to discover its traditions.)
To keep their identities hidden and to look as frightening as possible, many covered their faces in soot or wore a fabric or paper skråpukansikte (mask) with eyebrows fashioned out of moss. Easter witches also often cross-dressed, further reinforcing the idea that witches turned the world upside down during the period between Jesus’ death and resurrection.
In a 2012 lecture that he shared with National Geographic, Skott said the custom could also “be regarded as a more or less accepted revolt against the world of grown-ups and everyday hierarchies of power. On Easter Sunday, young people were allowed to do things that would normally not be accepted like, for example, smearing windows with tar, or begging for money or schnapps.”
The Easter witch tradition spread to Finland in the 1900s where it took on a different name: virvonta. Finnish children practice two different traditions: one stems from Christianity and involves children trading pussy willow tree branches for candy on Palm Sunday; the other stems from traditional harvest magic among the Swedish-speaking minority in Ostrobothnia whose children dress up as Easter witches and go door-to-door on Easter Eve.
A modern Easter witch tradition
In the 20th century, the element of cross-dressing disappeared as did the haunting masks. Today, the practice of dressing as Easter witches has declined as Halloween grows in popularity.
One reason Halloween has flourished after it was introduced in the early 1990s, Skott argues, is that the tradition of Easter witches has changed to “cuter” costumes for mostly younger children rather than the frightening costumes of earlier times. In many ways, Skott says, “Halloween witches can be said to be the heirs of the Easter witches.
Although Skott continued dressing up until he was seven, today participants are mainly infants—and more young girls than boys participate, dressed up in colorful neckerchiefs, with red freckled cheeks and coffee pots to collect their candy. Some give families drawings of witches, but some don’t go door-to-door at all, instead participating in Easter parades coordinated to keep Swedish heritage alive.
Still, for all those who do participate, the days leading up to Easter remain a time of witchy chaos.
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