Pintorpafrun
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Pintorpafrun (The Lady of Pintorp) is a Swedish tale of a cruel lady of the manor that tormented the life out of servants and farmers. The story is the most famous of all Swedish legends about ghosts, white ladies and black wives who haunted castles and manors. The Lady of Pintorp is associated with Ericsberg Palace in Södermanland, which in the Middle Ages was called Pinnatorp. Pintorpafrun has also become a generic term for a cruel lady of the manor who returns to haunt the castle.[1]
The origin of the tale have different versions, but a mutual trait is the tale of a female landowner, who was punished by Satan for her cruel treatment of her tenants and subordinates and who returned as a ghost after her death. The name Pintorp origins from Ericsberg Castle, which was originally called Pinntorpa.
The legend as social criticism
Sweden was at war during most of the 17th century. This meant that many men were absent serving in warfare abroad, and the responsibility of their estates in Sweden fell upon their wives who were left behind at home. Because of gender roles expecting a different behavior from a female, female landowners were regarded to be more cruel than males when taking the role of the manager of an estate. Tales of former landowners haunting their estates after death out of remorse for their repression therefore became a way of tenants to indirectly criticize their own living landowners.
The folk tale
According to an old folk-tale from the 17th-century, Pintorpafrun starved her workers and whipped them when they could not met up to her demand and imprisoned them in her private dungeons. As punishment for this, she was one day called upon by Satan, who danced her to death in a walz and thereafter dragged her down to hell.