About this site
Who writes here
My name is Mette Rask Fenger. For eleven years I worked the reading-room desk at the Copenhagen City Archives, which mostly means I fetched things: burial registers, police day-books, fire reports. Somebody would come in wanting to know what happened in a street, and I would go and get the volume that said. I am the person who pulled the police statement of 15 September 1826 on Laksegade for anybody who asked for it, often enough that I can still tell you roughly what it says without looking.
I do not believe in ghosts. I have never seen anything, I have never felt anything, and nothing in eleven years of paperwork gave me a reason to change my mind. What I am fond of is the records. A burial register from 1711 is a more frightening document than any story told about it, because the entries keep coming and the handwriting gets faster.
Why the site exists
Because Copenhagen does not sell itself as haunted, and that is precisely what makes its dark history land. The city sells hygge, good chairs and cycle lanes, and it came first in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index in 2021. Underneath that, the plague of 1711 killed about 20,000 of roughly 66,000 people. The fire of 1728 destroyed about 28 per cent of the city and 47 per cent of the medieval core. The fire of 1795 took 909 houses. The Royal Navy fired 300 Congreve rockets into it between 2 and 5 September 1807, killed about 195 civilians and burned the cathedral down. Cholera killed 4,737 people in 1853. A permanent execution scaffold stood on Nytorv from 1627 to 1761, and the one guided ghost walk in English starts on that square. What happened on Nytorv.
And because there is one practical thing about taking a ghost tour here that nobody tells you before you book. In Copenhagen, a ghost tour is a daylight problem. On 21 June the sun sets at 9:57 pm and nautical twilight does not end until roughly 10:58 pm; on 31 October it sets at 4:35 pm. The difference between a June booking and an October booking is not the tour, it is whether the tour is dark. That single fact runs through most of this site and it is the honest reason to recommend October. The month-by-month sunset table.
The editorial rule
There is one and it is short. Documented history is stated flatly. Legend is labelled as legend. If the record says a thing happened, this site says it happened, with the date. If people told a story, this site says people told a story, and then says what the record does and does not support.
Laksegade is the clearest example. In September 1826 the residents of no. 210 fled as windows shattered and objects were reported flying through the air. The police issued a public statement on 15 September acknowledging windows smashed from the outside and dismissing the wilder accounts as fabrication, and the case was never solved. Danish kept the idiom. The poltergeist is rumour; the panic, the statement and the phrase are documented, and this site will not blur the line between them. The 1826 case.
The same rule applies to the buildings. Rosenborg is said to be haunted by a ghostly cat; that is a legend published by the national tourist board, and it is presented here as one. The Rosenborg cat. Christiansborg genuinely burned on 26 February 1794 from an overheated stove near the Grand Hall, and again in 1884, and that is stated without hedging. The Christiansborg fires. Where a claim gets repeated that the record does not support, the site says so: no human being was walled into a named Copenhagen building, and the attested Scandinavian practice is animal foundation burial. The kirkegrim.
What this site is not
Not a tour operator. I run no walks, employ no guides and control no timetable. I cannot move a date, add an evening in October, or tell you whether your booking is confirmed. If a walk sells out or a listing disappears, I am reading the same page you are.
Not official anything. Nobody in the Copenhagen tourism trade sees a page here before it goes up. I do not name the operator that runs the guided walks, on purpose: which company you book is not the decision that goes wrong, and the useful information is the meeting point, the language and the date. The one company name on this site is Thomas Dambo, because the six wooden giants are his work and that is the reason to go and look at them. The six forgotten giants.
Not a claim to have seen anything. Nothing on this site is a personal ghost story, and there will never be one. My authority is the paperwork, and the paperwork does not do apparitions.
How it is written
In plain declarative sentences, with the unflattering half of the answer first. The guided ghost walk is rated 5.0 from 14 reviews, and this site says both the score and the sample size in the same breath — the review leads with the thin file and with the reviewer who found a single available date in the whole month. Two of the six walks have no reviews at all, and their pages say so in the first line rather than inventing a sentiment. All six reviews are ranked by how much is actually known.
There are no prices anywhere on this site, in any form. Amounts change, this site is published in several languages, and a stale figure is worse than no figure. What does not change is the shape of the decision: guided or self-guided, English or Danish, ninety minutes or four hours, June or October. That is what shapes the price, and it has no figures in it on purpose.
How it is funded
Through affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book through a link here, this site earns a commission and you pay no more than you otherwise would. It has not stopped me writing that one reviewer found a single date in a month, that two listings have no reviews, or that between May and August the ghost walk happens in daylight. The full disclosure.
Corrections
Meeting points move, listings change and I get things wrong. If you have just been and something here is out of date, write to [email protected]. The contact page says what is useful to include.