It was just an ordinary day-Our Scary Mission in Odense

It was just an ordinary day. We were all gathered for an ordinary picture at Zone Conference. Maybe there were too many flash cameras, maybe we had too many object lessons or maybe it was just the weather but..

Our mission on this side of Denmark began to act a bit strange...
(click on the picture for a better view)

We were down right spooky. No one knew why. It was the beginning of a very long season of unexplained events.

Our Elders replaced the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with rock music.

Elder Francis kept showing us his muscles in the middle of a basketball game.

(A clue to the problem may be the man in black with the guitar...more about that later).

Missionaries met in dark rooms... Having too much fun.

The sky clouded over and our cat began to howl at the moon...during the day.

Out in the corner of our backyard someone began to dig.. what looked

like a grave.

He used an old, rusty red shovel. Day after day he came. The hole grew bigger and bigger. What was he trying to bury?

People came from far and wide to see what was happening in our backyard.

Our neighbor revealed that he was digging a lake...It will be the newest, smallest, greatest lake in Denmark. I think that we will get a boat, and a beach umbrella. We are about to have beach front property in our backyard. (now back to my story...wouldn't want to get side tracked)

Day by day, we have noticed other very odd things in the land of Odense. Hans Christian Andersen still haunts this city. Many years ago, he began to cut out paper dolls to tell his stories. Some were pretty dark and spooky.

Every where you look you can find his smiling, diabolicle sunshiny face..a face that he cut with sharp scissors in the middle of the night.

If you were to fly over our house (or google map search) you would discover a mysterious field where they say Hans Christian Andersen still cuts giant smiling faces. He haunts our neighborhood only a few blocks away in a strange garden that can only be seen from the sky.

There have been other odd, mysterious things happening in our little country cottage. Every so often, my gold ring slips off my finger and is lost for days. One morning, I poured some Wheaties into my cereal bowl. There in the bowl was my missing ring.

The other night, I was tossing potatoes in their sauce (for our spooky Halloween Family Home Evening). I left the room for a moment to answer the door. JJ, our friend and neighbor, came to visit. He looked into the scalloped potatoes that I was almost ready to put in the oven, and found my lost gold ring.

Things have gone a little crazy around here lately. Our horses have begun to dance in the fields.

...and our cat (her real owner is the man building the lake) is climbing in strange places chasing imaginary friends around our house. A few weeks ago she jumped through our window with a little black field mouse in her mouth.

We have seen a wild hedge hog lurking around our front door and dangerous circus camels grazing in the middle of town. We are haunted with wild danish beasts.

Have you ever heard of Danish Modern Furniture? Odense has a style of its own...exotic porcelan patio chairs..

...with matching porcelan flower pots. How would you like to have the last picnic before the snow, in this tidy little surprise cottage on the edge of a reindeer farm. (I wonder what Alfred Hitchcock would do with this little piece of real estate)

Some say, in the last few months we have had familiar friends fly in from another world. They flew into our lives for just a few moments and then they were gone. Here is an old photo of Scott when he was a little boy with his yellow plane birthday cake. And here is Scott and Kathy flying into Denmark on a Tivoli airplane. (an interesting coincidence)

There were sightings of Kathy sitting in a tiny Tivoli wagon in the middle of Copenhagen.

And then someone saw Scott in his own Tivoli wagon on the same cobblestone road.

Could this be Kathy in a giant apple lounging in our huge Bilka store in Odense.

There is a dark forrest not far from where we live. Some say Kathy, Carl, and Scott were seen riding through the forrest on little wooden horses.

The last time Kathy was spotted was by this cold, dead body right in the middle of town square. As I said before, this is a spooky time to live in the middle of Denmark. Someone once told us that Odense is more dangerous than New York City. This may be evidence that this is so.

Not long after Kathy and Scott left, we think we saw our good friends Niki and Dennis Larson looking all over Denmark for their lost luggage.

It was Dennis's Birthday. Doesn't he look a little scary. I think his spirit is still haunting the airport, whispering, "give me back my luggage."

The forrest is empty now, waiting for the snow.

Elder Wilberg still rides through the woods on his little wooden horse, looking for the ghosts of summer's past. What a spooky story this has been.

Other than that, things are pretty much back to normal here in our Fairy Tale Town.. but a mission is always full of surprises.

Beware of the next post.. there you will meet the Grim Reaper and see what they do with knives for Halloween in Denmark. Don't be afraid..they say Denmark is the Happiest country in the world. You will find out if this is true in our next haunted post. See you there !