The Flying Potatoes of Finnskogen: Something Strange in Aisle Three

There are places where you expect a ghost. An abandoned hospital. A ruined castle. An old cemetery beneath skeletal trees. A grocery store is not one of them.

There is nothing particularly supernatural about bread, milk, frozen vegetables, and discount coffee. Grocery stores are monuments to the ordinary. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Refrigerators hum. Shopping baskets wait beside the entrance. Somewhere, someone is trying to remember whether there is enough butter at home.

And in the village of Svullrya, deep within Norway’s Finnskogen region near the Swedish border, there is a little grocery store called Joker Grue Finnskog. It occupies an old building reportedly dating to 1872. For years, employees and customers claimed strange things happened there. Electrical systems behaved inexplicably. Objects fell or moved. Flowerpots were found smashed. People reported footsteps, sensations of being watched, and dark figures where no person should have been. And then there were the potatoes.

Yes. The potatoes. Because according to people who worked there, apparently even the produce department occasionally decided that the laws of physics were more like polite suggestions.

But the strangest part of the Finnskogen grocery-store story isn’t that someone claimed potatoes flew through the air. It’s that, for a while, some of the people experiencing unusual things apparently didn’t tell each other. They were afraid of what everyone else might think.

The Store in the Forest

Finnskogen, literally the “Forest of the Finns”, is a heavily wooded region along the Norwegian-Swedish border, shaped historically by Forest Finnish settlement and surrounded by generations of folklore. Svullrya sits within this landscape. Small community. Thick forest. Long winters. And right along the road stands the local Joker grocery.

Åke Kolstad became manager of the store without any particular belief that he was taking responsibility for anything more supernatural than inventory. He later told Norwegian media he hadn't been especially superstitious before working there. Then things began happening.

The building was old, and old buildings misbehave. Pipes knock. Floors creak. Electrical systems fail. Shelves shift. Objects fall. None of that requires the dead. But according to Kolstad, the frequency and character of the incidents became increasingly difficult for him and his employees to ignore.

Local Norwegian reporting in 2017 quoted him describing goods falling from shelves, electrical power shutting off, refrigeration equipment switching off, strange loud noises, and recurring electrical problems. Kolstad said the activity became particularly intense after renovation work in 2015. That detail sounds almost suspiciously perfect for a ghost story. Renovation disturbs old building. Ghosts become angry. Chaos ensues.

Except there is a considerably less supernatural possibility. Renovation also disturbs wiring, floors, walls, pipes, shelving, old mechanical systems. A nineteenth-century building behaving strangely after construction work is not exactly evidence of an afterlife. But wiring doesn’t explain everything people said they experienced. At least not easily.

“Maybe Something Is Going On in My Head”

Years later, sociologist Lars Birger Davan became fascinated with the grocery store. Not because he wanted to hunt ghosts. He became interested in the people who believed they had encountered them.

In 2018, Davan happened upon the store late at night. He reportedly knew nothing about its reputation. The place was empty except for the manager. Davan made an innocent joke about Åke having only ghosts to keep him company. Åke began talking. He described electrical problems. Broken flowerpots. Objects behaving strangely. Shadowy figures.

But Davan noticed something deeper beneath the ghost story: vulnerability. Åke wasn’t simply boasting that he worked in a haunted grocery store. He described having wondered whether the problem was him. Maybe he had imagined things. Maybe something was happening inside his own head. And that fear had kept him quiet.

Then he spoke with his sister, who also worked at the store. She had experienced strange things too. Eventually other employees began talking. They had stories. Customers had stories. Suddenly, individuals who had privately wondered whether something was wrong with them discovered they weren’t alone.

That does not prove ghosts. But it creates a fascinating human problem. Because what happens when someone you trust quietly says: “I’ve seen it too”?

Incoming Potatoes

Eventually, according to later accounts collected about the store, one customer found herself on the receiving end of perhaps the least dignified paranormal attack in recorded history. Potatoes reportedly flew through the air. The woman was struck by them.

No scientific instrument reading tells us how the potatoes became airborne. No video shows an invisible force lifting them from a shelf. We don’t know whether they fell, were accidentally dislodged, were thrown by someone unseen, or whether the story changed as it was retold. But the flying-potato incident became part of the testimony surrounding the store.

And potatoes weren’t alone. People described groceries apparently moving or falling. Flowerpots were reportedly smashed. Some witnesses described shadowy figures. Others heard footsteps or unusual noises. The building itself sometimes felt wrong... a heavy atmosphere, a sensation of being watched.

The incidents accumulated. And eventually the grocery store did something most businesses probably don’t include in their five-year strategic plans. It called a paranormal television program.

The Cameras Arrive

In October 2016, Norwegian local media reported that the TVNorge program Åndenes Makt, roughly "The Power of Spirits", would spend four days filming at Joker Grue Finnskog. By then, the claims had become public enough to attract national television.

Kolstad told reporters that he hoped the investigation would finally bring some peace to the store. The episode aired the following year. Kolstad later claimed strange things happened while the production crew was present. Knitting needles reportedly flew from shelving. A large, heavy case containing sound equipment reportedly moved or fell unexpectedly. Members of the television production reportedly said they were impressed by what happened.

But this is where we should be more skeptical, not less. Paranormal television is entertainment. A strange noise in real life can become an ominous event through music and editing. An object falling from unstable shelving can become something considerably more mysterious once placed inside a supernatural narrative. And bringing a television crew into a supposedly haunted building introduces expectation into virtually everything that happens afterward.

Everyone is waiting. Everyone is watching. Everyone is listening. Every creak matters. Every flickering light means something. Paranormal investigators eventually proposed that several supposed spirits inhabited the property, including people associated with its past. Those claims belong to the paranormal interpretation of the story. They are not proof that identifiable dead people were throwing groceries around Norway.

But something interesting reportedly happened after the television crew left. Kolstad said the activity decreased substantially. By 2018 he estimated that incidents could sometimes go a month without occurring.

Apparently... the potatoes had entered a period of détente.

Enter the Sociologist

Davan approached the case differently. He wasn’t trying to determine which ghost preferred the vegetable aisle. His sociology work examined how extraordinary experiences shaped people’s understanding of themselves and their relationships with others.

He conducted fieldwork at the grocery store and interviewed people connected with it. His resulting research described employees struggling with their own ideas about reality while groceries seemingly moved, objects disappeared and reappeared, electrical systems behaved unpredictably, and phones reportedly rang through disconnected lines.

The crucial question became less: “Are ghosts real?” and more: “What happens when people experience something their society tells them shouldn’t be real?” That distinction matters. A person who says, “The refrigerator failed,” faces no social risk. A person who says, “I saw a shadow figure standing beside the refrigerator,” faces considerably more. They may be mocked. They may be considered gullible. They may begin questioning themselves.

Davan found that people could be reluctant to reveal experiences because they feared being regarded as irrational or “crazy.” But once one person spoke, others sometimes became more comfortable speaking too. And that creates another mystery entirely.

The Contagion of a Story

Natural mechanisms can produce pieces of the Finnskogen story. Old electrical systems fail. Objects fall. Buildings settle. Low-frequency sound can produce discomfort in some circumstances. Environmental factors can cause headaches or strange sensations. Peripheral vision is notoriously unreliable. Human beings are exceptionally good at turning ambiguous shapes into people.

Expectation matters too. Once someone tells you a building is haunted, ordinary events can acquire extraordinary meaning. A bang becomes a presence. A shadow becomes a person. A fallen box becomes a thrown box. And stories can reinforce one another. Someone reports footsteps. Another person remembers hearing footsteps. Someone mentions a shadow. Suddenly everyone pays closer attention to shadows.

Memory itself is reconstructive. Details can shift without anyone deliberately lying. That gives skeptics plenty to work with. But it doesn’t mean the witnesses were dishonest. Something happened to these people. The difficult question is what.

And perhaps that is why Finnskogen is more interesting than a conventional haunted-house story. Nobody needs to be lying. The employees could be completely sincere. The customers could genuinely believe what they experienced. The television crew could have encountered events they couldn’t immediately explain. And every one of those experiences could still conceivably have a natural explanation. Or perhaps some incidents remain genuinely unexplained. There is room between “ghosts did it” and “everyone made it up.” Most mysteries live there.

Closing Time

The grocery store is still there. Joker Grue Finnskog continues operating in Svullrya today. People still buy bread there. Fruit. Milk. Coffee. Potatoes.

And eventually Åke moved on from managing the place. That should have provided a wonderfully neat ending. Old manager leaves. Ghost stories become local folklore. Everyone laughs about the time national television came to investigate the grocery store. Life continues. Except later accounts contain one final detail.

After Åke left, a new manager took over. And according to Åke, that manager eventually began contacting him. Strange things were happening.

Imagine that telephone conversation. Years earlier, Åke had been the frightened employee wondering whether something was happening inside his own mind. He had hesitated to speak. He had eventually discovered other people had experienced things too.

Now someone else occupied his old position. Someone else had questions. And Åke knew exactly how that felt. He listened. He believed that the other person had experienced something. Not necessarily because he possessed proof of ghosts. But because once upon a time, Åke had needed somebody to listen to him.

Perhaps that’s the real haunting of Finnskogen. Not the potatoes. Not the flowerpots. Not the shadows. The uncertainty.

Something happens when you’re alone. You cannot explain it. You tell nobody. Then somebody else quietly says something happened to them too. Suddenly the ordinary world doesn’t feel quite as secure as it did yesterday.

So imagine the store tonight. The last customer leaves. The door closes. Outside, darkness settles across Finnskogen. Beyond the windows there are miles of trees. Inside, fluorescent lights illuminate empty aisles. Refrigerators hum. Nothing moves. Nothing speaks. Everything is exactly where it should be. Bread on the shelf. Milk in the cooler. Potatoes sitting peacefully in their display.

The employee finishes closing. Turns off a light. Walks toward the door. And somewhere behind them... something hits the floor.

Maybe an item slipped from a shelf. Maybe the old building shifted. Maybe gravity finally claimed something that had been badly balanced all day. There are a hundred reasonable explanations. The employee knows that. They turn around anyway.

Because once you’ve heard the stories... you always turn around. And perhaps somewhere in that quiet grocery store in the Norwegian forest, something is waiting patiently for someone else to finally say:

“You saw it too?”

Some mysteries hide in castles. Some wander graveyards. And apparently... some wait quietly beside the potatoes.