Mylings: Life-Force Draining Child Ghosts

It’s nearly dark when you find the child.

You’ve been hiking for six hours. The trail back to the trailhead is two miles out and the light is going fast. You’re tired and your pack is heavy. And there, at the edge of the tree line, is a small figure sitting in the dirt.

You call out. It doesn’t move.

You get closer. The child is maybe three years old. No coat. No shoes. Skin bluish at the edges. Eyes open and fixed on the middle distance. Not crying. Not reacting. Just sitting there, very still, in a way that children don’t sit.

You know you can’t leave it.

You kneel down. You put your hands under its arms. It’s cold, colder than it should be after a day like this, and there’s a weight to it that surprises you. You settle it against your chest and start walking.

That’s when it latches on.

Not with its hands. With something else. Something that pulls inward. Within a hundred yards your legs feel wrong. Within a quarter mile you can’t remember why you came out here. By the time you reach the trailhead you are barely upright, and the child is gone, and you can’t explain what happened to the next four hours of your life.

You chalk it up to exhaustion. Dehydration. A low-blood-sugar hallucination.

But you know what you felt.

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What is a myling?

A myling is the ghost of a child who died before it could be baptized.

The name comes from Swedish folklore. In Norway the same spirit is called an utburd, from the word for “carried outside.” In Finland it’s known as a liekkiö. The spirit appears across Nordic cultures under different names, but the story is always the same: a child dies unchristened, unmourned, and unnamed. It cannot move on. So it stays.

Most mylings appear to be younger than five. Their bodies reflect how they died. Starved children have distended bellies and hollow cheeks. Children who froze have blue-tinged skin and glassy, unfocused eyes. Children taken by animals in the wilderness appear mauled. The myling wears its cause of death the way the rest of us wear clothes.

The history behind the haunting

To understand why mylings exist, you have to understand the world they came from.

In pre-modern Scandinavia, infant death and infanticide were not rare. Poverty, illegitimacy, and isolation drove families and young mothers to abandon or expose newborns they couldn’t care for. It was a crime. It was also, for some, the only option they could see.

The church taught that an unbaptized child had no name in God’s record. No place in the order of things. When those children died, they occupied a kind of spiritual no-man’s land. They weren’t damned. They weren’t saved. They were simply unresolved.

The myling is the ghost that unresolved status produces.

How the old folklore described them

In the original Scandinavian tradition, mylings were dangerous to anyone who walked alone at night in the wilderness.

The encounter followed a pattern. A traveler would hear crying in the dark. Sometimes the sound was directional, like a child calling from somewhere specific. Sometimes it seemed to come from everywhere at once. If the traveler went toward the sound, they would find the child.

And this is where the folklore gets specific.

The myling would climb onto the traveler’s back and demand to be carried to consecrated ground, to the nearest churchyard, where it could finally be buried properly and released. If the traveler agreed, the child would grow heavier with every step. Not gradually. Steadily, inexorably, until the carrier buckled. Many died. Some made it to the churchyard but collapsed at the gate, crushed by the weight of a child-sized spirit that somehow weighed as much as everything it had never been given.

The lesson the folklore was teaching is clear enough: the weight of an abandoned child does not diminish just because you can’t see it.

What a myling does today

The churchyard mechanic belongs to a specific time and place. The church was the organizing institution of Nordic society. Consecrated ground was the boundary between the spiritually settled and the unresolved. That framework doesn’t translate to a 21st-century hiking trail.

But the myling does.

The behavior has adapted. The core of it is still the same: the spirit is cold, it is lost, and it wants to be held. What’s changed is how it gets that.

Modern myling encounters tend to follow one of two patterns.

The first is the ambush. You become aware of the child suddenly, at close range, in a way that feels wrong before your brain can process why. It’s already near you. You didn’t hear it approach. It’s between you and where you need to go. Field investigators describe a sensation of being watched from low to the ground before the figure appears.

The second pattern is the one the opening story describes. You find the child. You approach because it looks like a child in distress. You pick it up, because of course you do. The moment of contact is when it establishes the connection. You will feel it as a weight, the same way the old travelers did, but the weight is internal. Energy begins to move out of you. Warmth goes first. Then focus. Then, over minutes, the ability to reason clearly about your own situation.

The myling is not attacking you. Not exactly. It’s feeding. It experienced abandonment as its foundational condition, and it is drawing from you the warmth and presence it never received.

Some investigators report the spirit disengaging on its own once it has taken enough. Others describe needing to physically separate, which is harder than it sounds when the instinct to hold a distressed child is fighting against the part of your brain that knows something is wrong.

What you will hear

Before you see a myling, you may hear it.

The sounds field investigators associate with mylings in wilderness settings are: infant crying at a distance, a soft repetitive sound that some describe as a child trying to say a word it doesn’t know, and, in some accounts, silence that is too complete, as if the ambient sounds of a forest have been switched off in a radius around the spirit.

The silence is worth noting. Animals avoid mylings. If the woods go quiet and stay quiet, pay attention to the low visual field.

How to clear a myling

The original method was baptism. A Catholic priest would locate the child’s remains, baptize them, assign a name, and perform last rites. This gave the spirit the one thing it lacked: recognition. A name. A place in the order of things. That was enough for it to release.

The underlying principle still applies. What the myling wants is acknowledgment and love. Not from its mother, toward whom the grief has curdled into something dangerous, but from any surrogate willing to offer it.

Field investigators have reported success by speaking directly to the spirit as if it were a child in distress. Acknowledging it. Naming it, even if the name you give is arbitrary. Telling it that it was real, that it mattered, and that it can go.

That sounds simple. It is not easy. The energetic drain makes it difficult to stay present and focused while the encounter is active.

Salt and iron will cause a temporary dispersal. This buys time and distance. It is not a permanent solution. The spirit will reconstitute and return, and may be more agitated when it does.

If there are no remains to locate, the love-and-acknowledgment approach is the primary option. It requires another person. Solo investigators should not attempt this.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen, and Jørgen Moe. Norske folkeeventyr. Christiania, 1842–1871. The foundational collection of Norwegian folk literature, preserving ghost and spirit lore including utburd traditions. Available in numerous modern print editions. A standard English translation by George Webbe Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse, is widely available.

Hofberg, Herman. Svenska folksägner med teckningar af svenska konstnärer. Fr. Skoglund, 1882. First major documented collection of Swedish folk legends, including myling accounts. Available in full digital scan via HathiTrust: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006950478. English translation by W. H. Myers, Swedish Fairy Tales, published 1890.

Academic and Scholarly Works

Pentikäinen, Juha. The Nordic Dead-Child Tradition: Nordic Dead-Child Beings. A Study in Comparative Religion. FF Communications No. 202. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1968. The most thorough academic treatment of this specific tradition in existence, covering the utburd, liekkiö, ihtiriekko, and related beings across the entire Nordic region. Available via Open Library (openlibrary.org), Google Books preview, and secondhand through AbeBooks and Biblio.

Kvideland, Reimund, and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, eds. Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend. The Nordic Series, Vol. 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Compiled by a professor of folklore at the University of Bergen and a professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Washington. Covers myling directly on pages 113–118. A free scan is available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/scandinavianfolk00kvid. Also in print from University of Minnesota Press (ISBN: 9780816619672).

Hodne, Ørnulf. Vetter og skrømt i norsk folketro. J.W. Cappelens Forlag, 1995. (Norwegian) Academic treatment of Norwegian supernatural folk belief by a folklorist affiliated with the University of Oslo. Covers the utburd specifically alongside other Norwegian spirit types.

Hodne, Ørnulf. Norsk folketro. J.W. Cappelens Forlag, 1999. (Norwegian) Broader survey of Norwegian folk belief by the same author. Available via Ark.no and secondhand through Norwegian booksellers.

Illustrated Reference

Egerkrans, Johan. Nordiska väsen. B. Wahlströms förlag, 2013. (Swedish) ISBN: 9789132161438. Illustrated compendium of Nordic folkloric creatures, mylingarna included. A bestseller in Sweden, grounded in the actual tradition. English edition: Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore. Walströms Bokförlag, 2017. ISBN: 9789132181948. Available on Amazon.

Web Reference

“Myling.” Wikipedia, last modified March 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myling. Useful aggregator with citations pointing back to Pentikäinen, Kvideland & Sehmsdorf, and Simpson. Treat as an index to primary sources rather than a source in its own right.

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This ghostly type has a personal connection. My grandparents are from Lillehammer, Norway, and they told me all about Scandinavian folktales like the Myling.

If you’ve encountered an entity like a myling, let me know about it in the comments. Thanks for ready Ghostly Activities. Much appreciated and tusen takk!