The Devil in Laksegade

What is documented

Three things. A building on Laksegade emptied of its residents in September 1826. The police put out a public statement on 15 September that year, in which they accepted that windows had been broken from the outside and called the rest of what was circulating a fabrication. And the city kept the phrase: Fanden er løs i Laksegade is ordinary modern Danish for all hell breaking loose, which is a strange afterlife for a police matter nobody ever closed.

What is not documented

The poltergeist. Objects moving under their own power in a Copenhagen tenement is rumour and contemporary talk, not record. No one identified who broke the windows, no one was charged, and the police went out of their way in writing to separate the one physical fact they could stand behind from everything being said around it. That distinction is the whole story, and it is a better story than a haunting, because the panic was real and the explanation never arrived.

Where you hear it told

It is the episode that reviewers of the guided ghost walk single out. David, who took the walk in August 2026, wrote that “the stories were interesting and entertaining, especially the Salmon Street episode”. The same operator's Danish-language folk legends walk covers the Devil loose in Laksegade alongside a widow buried alive and the origins of Danish phrases — see the folk legends walk if you read Danish, and the guided ghost walk if you do not. The honest caveat about the English walk is the same reviewer's: there was “only one available for the whole month”.

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