Text: Ushiri Stenberg Translation: John Westlund

If you don’t drink your coffee, the horse man will cut your face to pieces. Nobody wants their face cut off, especially not when you can influence the inner factors by slowly beating your head against a wall. The fractures you create makes it so that the horse man likely won’t appear. You want to avoid the horse man, do you not? He lives across the street in the entrance over there. Whatever you do, don’t peek through your keyhole at 1 o’clock in the night. He will most likely stand there. If he sees a ray of light he will strike and strike until your door is beaten down. Whatever happens next is anything but good, especially for the neighbours who will hear your shriek in the night. So come on, drink your coffee. Otherwise the horse man will guard your door every night, and the night it’s unlocked is the night you lose your face. The first stories of the horse man were told in the 17th century and can be found in the diary notes written by the former landowners of Häckeberga Castle. A heavily built man with a stooped back and a laugh like a neigh was seen near the water mill. That’s how the millkeeper told the story in the beginning of the 19th century. Shortly thereafter he hung himself in the barn. In 1932 the stables were ravaged by fire as two children disappeared from the village. A few days later, a boy said he had seen the children sitting on the stooped back of a man who was playing with them and who sounded like a horse. They were headed for the water mill at nightfall.   /Ushiri