The Ghost Monks at Lyseklosteret

In the ruins of Lyse Abbey there are rumors about the ghost monks haunting the ruins as well as a white lady roaming the roads around it.

Lyse Abbey or Lyseklosteret is a former cistercian monastery that was built in Os, right outside of Bergen in Norway. There are only ruins of it today, as many of the monasteries were destroyed during the reformation from catholicism to protestantism in 1536.

In 1578 stones were removed from the monastery and shipped to Denmark and used in Kronborg Castle, as Norway at the time was a colony in Denmark. The stones were also used to build the Rosenkrantz tower in Bergen.

Ghost Monks

The monastery called Coenobium Vallis Lucidae ( The Monastery in the Valley of Light) in Latin and named after the fjord, Lysefjorden (The Light Fjord) was founded by English monks in From Fountain Abbey in North Yorkshire 1146 and the building was built over the next hundreds of years. They also brought fruits like apples to Hardanger, a place now renowned for its tasty apples.

It is said that the monks that first built the monastery never left and haunts the location even to this day. Many have reported about seeing cloaked silhouettes walking about as if they are working on the building.

There have also been heard moans from the ruins of the once great monastery, especially on foggy nights, making people believe that the old ruins are haunted by Ghost Monks.

Lyse Abbey is not the only place supposedly haunted by a monk in Norway. Read also about the ghost monk haunting Nidarosdommen.

The White Lady In the Ruins

The ghost monks are however not the only ones that are rumored to haunt the place. Apparently there are stories about a “white lady” that walks around in the ruins of the monastery at night time and in the evening. According to legend there was a terrible accident involving a tractor in 1960 when she was bicycling along the road nearby and a tractor ran her over.

It is unclear if it actually was an accident since it was her neighbor driving the tractor. Anyway, since then, there have been multiple reports about a woman in white around the weeks leading up to Christmas, often described as a white morning robe, wandering restless around the monastery, just looking straight ahead.