Today in 1861, the birthday of a woman with a very strange story.
For reasons that aren’t at all clear, Karolina Olsson went to bed as a 14 year old and apparently didn’t wake up until she was in her forties.
This is one of those tricky stories to tell, where there’s way more speculation than there is verified fact.
Olsson lived with her family on the island of Oknö, off the east coast of Sweden.
In February 1876, she came home from school and said she’d fallen on the ice and hit her head.
She seemed ok at the time, other than maybe some cuts or bruises, but over time her headache just got worse and worse; she ended up with a tremendous toothache as well.
Olsson’s mother sent her to bed to sleep it off, as parents do.
But she didn’t get up in the morning for school, or for anything else.
She reportedly just stayed in bed, occasionally making noises, talking or sleeping.
There were plenty of theories – a coma, a catatonia, even dementia.
If this had happened today, doctors might have wanted to test for a concussion or head trauma, since Olsson said she hit her head on the ice.
One practitioner suggested later that perhaps Olsson was suffering from some kind of psychological trauma and that the mother quietly enabled her to stay in bed to hide from whatever it was.
The mother said Olsson only drank two glasses of milk a day, though the fact that she maintained her weight for much of that time suggested someone was secretly feeding her much more.
Housekeepers also reported hearing voices from Olsson’s room, as if she and her mother were having conversations.
In that same story, from Amusing Planet, there are also stories of how Olsson would be alone in the house while the others did chores or schoolwork, and they would come back in the house to find objects in different places.
But no doctor ever came up with a definitive diagnosis, or any practical treatment.
We can only guess.
Whatever was going on, it ended in April 1908, when a housekeeper found Karolina Olsson out of bed looking for her mother and/or asking for salted herring.
After 32 years, she was physically healthy and still knew how to read and write, though she didn’t recognize her adult brothers, whom she had last seen in childhood.
Olsson would live for 42 more years.
Other than the extra attention she got for her strange saga, these years were much more typical.
As far as I could tell she even slept normally.
We’re just days away from Halloween, and one fan decided the best way to mark the holiday was to drop by a New York subway station dressed up as the main character of the “Halloween” movies, Michael Myers, and play keyboards.
As one does.
To this day, the questions remain (Svenska Dagbladet via Archive.org)
Karolina Olsson: The Woman Who Allegedly Slept for 32 Years (Amusing Planet)
Keyboardist Dressed as Michael Myers Plays the ‘Halloween’ Theme in New York City Subway Station (Laughing Squid)
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Photo via Wikicommons