The Kirkegrim

The idea behind it

A church needed a guardian, and the guardian was made by burying an animal alive in the foundation. In the Nordic version the animal is a lamb, and the symbolism is explicit: Christ as the cornerstone of the building. The animal's revenant then stayed with the church, and the church grim was believed to keep to the tower at night. Belief in it is strongest in Scania, Halland and Blekinge, provinces that were Danish before they were Swedish.

The thing not to say

That a person was walled into the foundations of a named Copenhagen building. This is the most commonly repeated piece of ghost-tour misinformation in northern Europe, and it does not survive contact with the record. Animal foundation burial is attested. Human immurement is an unlocalised folklore motif, a story that travels without an address, and attaching it to a real building is inventing history. If a guide names the building and names the victim, they are performing, not reporting.

Where the record is

Benjamin Thorpe's Northern Mythology of 1851 is the standard historical source in English for Scandinavian church-grim lore. The Danish collecting tradition runs from Just Mathias Thiele in 1817 and his Danske Folkesagn of 1819–1823 through Svend Grundtvig and Evald Tang Kristensen. The related death omen is the gravso, the grave-sow, a spectral pig — that and the rest are on the folklore creatures page.

The walk that tells these stories runs in Danish, ninety minutes from the University steps: the folk legends walk.

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