The Sigtuna College initiation ritual is a filmed hazing ceremony in which Hannah Östlund, Jessica Friberg, and Victoria Bergman are subjected to a degrading spectacle by masked students. The footage later allows Jeanette Kihlberg to identify the girls and recognize the incident as the initiation that got out of hand and led Hannah and Jessica to leave the school. The ritual also reappears in Madeleine’s memories of a hidden video, where its images are bound to punishment and to a childhood she cannot separate from the people who raised her.

The footage and its recognition

The ceremony enters the investigation through a recording that Jens Hurtig and Jeanette watch together. Its poor, flickering picture suggests to Hurtig that it was filmed off a television, probably from an old VHS. The image first reveals a homemade pig mask: its snout appears to be fashioned from a plastic mug. As the camera draws back, it shows more masked people in capes and three girls kneeling behind a large plate holding something the investigators cannot identify from the screen. The recording’s roughness does not obscure the central arrangement: masked witnesses on one side, exposed girls on the other.

Hurtig points out two of the kneeling girls, and Jeanette recognizes Hannah and Jessica from a school-yearbook photograph. This turns the footage from an anonymous scene of school cruelty into evidence connected to people already known in the case. Jeanette then identifies the third girl as Victoria Bergman: thin, fair-haired, with bright blue eyes. Her impression that Victoria seems to smile is qualified by uncertainty. It does not look amused to Jeanette; it looks mocking, almost as if Victoria knows what is coming. Jeanette also feels that Victoria is vaguely familiar, but the recognition does not yet yield an explanation.

The film supplies a verbal marker of the occasion. One masked girl steps forward and welcomes the kneeling girls to Sigtuna College for the Humanities. Someone then empties a bucket over them; the three spit, cough, and hiss. Jeanette connects the footage to what Annette Lundström had described: an initiation ritual that went too far and led Hannah and Jessica to leave the school. The scene therefore gives a concrete, recorded form to an event previously carried into the investigation through another person’s account.

The ritual’s degrading spectacle

The ceremony combines an institutional welcome with an act of public humiliation. Its opening language presents the scene as an organized school occasion, while the pig masks and bucket of water make the welcome an instrument of degradation. The girls are not simply named as newcomers; they are made to kneel, soaked, and placed before the masked group. The contrast between formal welcome and physical abasement is central to what Jeanette sees on the tape.

The plate deepens the ritual’s humiliation, although the footage Jeanette watches does not let her identify its contents. In the final sequence, Victoria leans forward and begins to eat. A girl in the background removes her mask and vomits; the few seconds her face is visible are enough for Jeanette to recognize her as Annette Lundström. Annette’s presence complicates the division between those conducting the ceremony and those subjected to it: she is initially part of the masked group, but her brief unmasking reveals a physical reaction that the costume had concealed. The recording establishes what she does and what Jeanette recognizes, without explaining her motive or the precise contents of the plate.

Jeanette and Hurtig watch the remainder of the film in shared silence. Hurtig’s muttered condemnation of the participants as upper-class brats registers disgust, but the footage itself gives the investigators something more specific than an expression of disapproval: identifiable faces, a recognizable school setting, and a sequence of humiliating acts. The film’s limitations remain visible, too. Its image is unstable, and the plate is indistinct; recognition depends on the investigators’ knowledge of the people in the frame.

Madeleine’s memory of the film

The ritual returns in a different context through Madeleine’s memories of a video her foster parents had hidden. She remembers Charlotte catching her watching it. In that recollection, the images resolve into three girls, one eating excrement, surrounded by people in pig masks. The correspondence with the recording Jeanette watches is unmistakable in its central details, though the investigators could not identify the plate’s contents from the footage alone. Madeleine’s memory makes explicit what remained visually unclear in Jeanette’s viewing.

For Madeleine, the film is not only a record of the ceremony. Watching it leads to punishment: she is grounded, and P-O visits her every night. The memory of the masked figures also recalls the pigpen at Viggo’s farm, joining the school footage in her mind to another setting of degradation. These remembered connections show how the ritual persists beyond the filmed event: it returns through images and associations that Madeleine carries into adulthood, rather than as a detached account of an old school custom.

The recollection is surrounded by memories of Charlotte’s hostility. Madeleine recalls Charlotte lying to a psychiatrist at University Hospital in Copenhagen and shouting at her in the hospital car park, calling her an unwanted, horrible child and saying that Charlotte’s life had been ruined when Madeleine came to them. Against those memories, the question of what Madeleine’s childhood might have been like with her real mother brings an emotional force she cannot put into words. Her feelings have been dormant so long that she experiences them as stored in her body, unattached to a particular event. The ritual’s place in this recollection is therefore bound not only to the humiliation on the screen but also to the punishment and rejection that followed Madeleine’s encounter with it.

Significance in the investigation and narrative

The recovered film links several otherwise separate forms of knowledge. Annette’s account gives Jeanette a description of an initiation that went wrong; the recording lets Jeanette identify Hannah, Jessica, Victoria, and finally Annette herself. Madeleine’s later recollection supplies a personal memory of the same distinctive combination of girls and pig masks, while adding that one girl ate excrement. Together, these perspectives make the ceremony both investigative evidence and an image with a continuing emotional life.

The ritual’s significance rests partly in that difference of perspective. For Jeanette and Hurtig, the footage is something to inspect: faces must be matched to photographs and testimony, and the scene’s meaning reconstructed from a damaged recording. For Madeleine, the video is a source of remembered fear whose discovery leads to confinement and nightly visits from P-O. The event is thus disclosed in fragments—first as a filmed spectacle, then as an identifiable episode in the school’s history, and finally as part of a private memory shaped by punishment. It exposes the violence concealed inside the language of initiation without making every participant’s role or intention equally clear.