The Ghost in Höfði house in Reykjavik

In Reykjavik, Iceland, there is a haunted house called Höfði. According to local legend it is haunted by the ghost of a woman who poisoned herself.

One of the most haunted houses in Iceland is Höfði. For the outside world it is perhaps best known for being the location where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met up to talk about ending the cold war in 1986. So it is a pretty well known house in political history, but there is something else living in the house at night.

For the locals the Höfði house was a well known house long before that meeting. The house in Jugendstil was built in 1909 for the French consul Jean-Paul Brillouin at Félagstún and has since been in the hands of powerful and rich people. But none of them have stayed for a very long time.

In the memoirs of one of the people living there in the early days tells that the Höfði house is haunted by a young woman. She either drowned or died by suicide, were the latter is the most often told one.

One of the people living in the house with his family was an entrepreneur as well as a poet named Einar Benediktsson. He was the one that named the house when he moved in in 1914 and had his own theory about who the ghost was.

He claimed that the ghost was of a woman named Sólborg Jónsdóttir. Benediktsson was once a judge on a famous assault case and when Sólborg Jónsdóttir heard the verdict she poisoned herself and died. According to Benediktsson, he always had to keep the lights on at night as she would appear to him during the night, still distraught over the verdict and haunt Höfði, even to this day.

The haunting in the house got so bad that John Greenway that lived in the house in 1952 asked to be moved, that the house should be sold and the British consulate should move elsewhere. He was afraid of what he called: ‘Bumps in the night’, and even filed a special permission from the Foreign office to get out of there as quickly as possible.

The same year Höfði was sold back to the Icelandic government and the official statement by the Foreign Ministry was: “We do not confirm or deny that the Hofdi has a ghost.”