In 1876, 14-year-old Karolina Olsson went to bed in her home in the village of Oknö, Sweden, to remain asleep for 32 years, baffling doctors and fascinating the public. (Story in the comments)

by dostoyevskybirthedme

18 comments

  1. u/verystrangeshit wrote the following in the original post: On February 22, 1876, in the quiet village of Oknö, Sweden. Fourteen-year-old Karolina Olsson went to bed complaining of a toothache. By morning, she was unresponsive and she would remain that way for the next 32 years. Her parents, understandably alarmed, called for doctors and priests, but none could explain her condition. Karolina was unresponsive to touch, sound, or light. She neither spoke nor reacted to the world around her.

    Yet she wasn’t dead. Her breathing and heart rate were steady. She didn’t show signs of deterioration. Her family claimed she was in a state somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness, what some now might call a waking coma or catatonia. Incredibly, Karolina’s mother and brothers cared for her every single day for over three decades. According to reports, they fed her sugar water, milk, and the occasional thin porridge, spooned directly into her mouth while she remained completely inert.

    In 1908, following the death of her mother, Karolina was taken to a hospital in Oskarshamn, and something miraculous happened. Just days after being admitted, she woke up. She was now 46 years old. More shockingly, she seemed completely unaware that time had passed. She remembered nothing after falling ill in 1876. She believed the king of Sweden was still Oscar II. Telephones, electric lights, cars, these were all alien to her. She was calm, gentle, and described as intelligent. She could read and write, and even retained her schoolgirl handwriting from decades before. To this day, no one knows exactly what happened to Karolina. But several theories have been proposed.

    Some modern doctors believe Karolina may have suffered from an extreme form of catatonia, a state in which a person is awake but unresponsive. It’s sometimes linked to trauma, schizophrenia, or neurological illness. Others suggest she experienced psychogenic amnesia, a dissociative state triggered by psychological trauma. Local whispers claimed that Karolina had witnessed something terrible as a child, possibly even a violent death, and mentally shut down in response.

    Klein Levin syndrome, it’s a type of narcolepsy that makes you be in a sleep-like trance for days, weeks or months at a time. You are basically unconscious but aware enough for someone to feed you and clean you. Some people can become fully conscious again then in a short time go back to being unconscious.

    Skeptics argue that the whole thing may have been a family cover-up or exaggeration. Could Karolina have been partially awake all those years but hidden from outsiders? Her family may have kept up the illusion out of desperation, habit, or fear of ridicule. However, hospital records, newspaper interviews, and testimonies from doctors and nurses at the time make this a hard theory to fully support.

    Of course, no strange story is complete without a touch of the weird. Some paranormal enthusiasts speculate that Karolina slipped into an altered state of consciousness, akin to suspended animation, or even time displacement.

    After waking, Karolina lived a surprisingly peaceful life. She never married, but she rejoined society, learned to navigate a world that had passed her by, and reportedly adjusted well to the modern age. She passed away in 1950, at the age of 88, having lived nearly as long awake as she supposedly had asleep.

    https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karolina_Olsson (Swedish Wikipedia article)

    https://www.land.se/allmant/kvinnan-pa-okno-sov-i-32-ar-vad-var-hennes-hemlighet (Article in Swedish magazine, 2016)

  2. Ye no. Straight up lie from the family to get some fame lol

  7. Would be interesting to check the church records and see what the priest wrote in the husförhörslängd.

  8. It was most likely some kind of ptsd reaction. Apparently she’d been assaulted by someone the day before

  11. Här sitter jag som inte ens kan sova tre timmar i ett streck.

  15. Tyvärr inte ett medicinskt verkligt fall. Det handlar om ett klassisk [MBP](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_by_proxy):

    “Münchhausen by proxy innebär att förövaren spelar rollen som ombud och räddare för en sjuk eller “sjuk” person. Det rör sig vanligen om en av föräldrarna (nästan alltid modern) som använder sitt eget barn som “sjukdomsbärare” och som tillfogar barnet den skada som behövs för att det ska fortsätta att vara sjukt (och behöva “räddas”). Förövaren antas ha egna (psykologiskt rotade) behov som väger tyngre än omsorgen om barnet det slutar med att barnet används som ett verktyg för egna mål. Diagnosen avser förövaren, inte den utsatta personen/barnet.”

  17. I knew a Swedish woman who told me her mother went to bed with a fever and when she woke she could only speak English. I found this fascinating because she herself did not have a great command of the language and this occurred when she was young living in the hills of Darlana before she learned any English so ….. anyhoo after a few days she recovered.

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