Home of Shadows refuge is the name Annette Lundström gives to an imagined original country and to a community with real locations, leaders, and children under its care. In her account, it promises closeness to God and protection from hostile outsiders, while also casting children as initiates within an order directed by adults. Sofia Zetterlund hears both a creed and a possible confession in Annette’s description: the refuge’s language of protection sits uneasily beside the authority adults claim over the children in its keeping.

An original country and a rule of conduct

Annette first recites an instruction about life outside Home of Shadows: its people should behave modestly in body and spirit because others do not understand them, wish them harm, and may slander and imprison them. The wording draws a sharp boundary between the faithful inside and a dangerous outside. It makes suspicion of outsiders part of the refuge’s moral code, presenting concealment and restraint not simply as choices but as protections required by persecution.

When Sofia asks directly what Home of Shadows is, Annette calls it the original country, where humankind can be close to God. She calls it the land of children, but extends its claim to adults who understand how ancient people lived. Men, women, and children belong together there, and everyone is described as a child within. This is not merely a description of a building: Annette defines the place through a sacred origin, a shared state of belonging, and a model of human life. Yet the appeal to everyone’s inner childhood also blurs the distinction between the children under adult care and the adults who set the terms of that care.

Sofia is unsettled by that blurring. She understands the account as a country for children created by adults for their own desires. The refuge’s language may therefore carry more than one meaning: it offers an ideal of safety and closeness while making adult desires part of the explanation for why the community exists. The account does not resolve that contradiction; it makes it central to how the place is understood.

Sacred geography and a practical world

Asked whether Home of Shadows is a physical place or a state of mind, Annette answers that it exists wherever the faithful are, but only in the presence of the chosen children of men. She also locates it on sacred ground in beautiful Jutland and in the forests of Polcirkeln. Its geography is consequently both dispersed and specific: a spiritual community can exist wherever its faithful gather, while particular landscapes are identified as its sacred ground.

The names of Denmark and Polcirkeln recur in Sofia’s thinking as Annette speaks. The refuge’s geography is not only abstract theology; her answer links it to actual regions. Elsewhere in the same account, Annette describes a farm where children lived while adults arranged their futures. The conversation does not establish that the farm is itself one of the sacred sites she names. It does, however, place the doctrine alongside practical arrangements for housing children, making the refuge legible as both an idealized country and a social network with material responsibilities.

Leaders, children, and adult authority

Annette identifies Karl Lundström and Viggo Dürer as leaders of the faithful. Per-Ola Silfverberg, whom she calls P-O, and Viggo handled practical matters and ensured that the children were happy and had everything they could want. Her account gives the refuge an organization as well as a theology: named adult men lead, manage daily arrangements, and determine the conditions in which children live. Annette’s description stresses provision and happiness, presenting this practical authority as care.

When Sofia asks about Annette’s role and the children’s, Annette says that the women probably were not very important. She is more definite about the children: Linnea Lundström, Madeleine Silfverberg, and the adopted children were among the initiated. Her answer makes initiation a defining status within the community, but offers no detail about what the rite involved. It also reveals an uneven hierarchy in Annette’s telling: adult women are treated as marginal, while children hold a distinct place in the group’s sacred order.

Annette calls the adopted children Viggo’s adopted children. She says he helped them come to Sweden from terrible conditions abroad, after which they lived on a farm until he found new families for them. Some stayed only days; others remained for months. The refuge, as she describes it, was thus connected to a process of moving children from hardship abroad into temporary care and then onward to families. Annette presents this as rescue and provision, and says the children were raised according to Pythia’s instructions. Her account links the group’s spiritual authority to the handling of children’s everyday lives, even as the meaning of the instructions and the children’s experience of them remain unstated.

A confession heard through psychosis

Sofia does not treat Annette’s account as either transparent doctrine or mere incoherence. She suspects that Annette’s psychosis contains an element of truth and may even be prompting a confession: what she says becomes intelligible if one already knows what she is talking about. That interpretation matters because the refuge is disclosed through a distressed speaker, in fragments elicited by careful questions. Sofia first tries a supposition, then recognizes that Annette needs questions rather than assumptions and asks plainly what Home of Shadows is. The shift allows Annette to supply the account in her own terms.

The conversation is interrupted when the internal phone rings and the orderlies from Rosenlund arrive. Before they take Annette away, Sofia has heard a doctrine, a map, the names of its leaders, and a description of children moving through the adults’ arrangements. What remains unresolved is the gap between the refuge’s promise of protection and the power its leaders exercise. Home of Shadows is significant precisely because its language can make those two things sound like one: a sanctuary for children, and an adult-made order that claims to know what those children need.