Sten Bergwall's Suicide Note

Sten Bergwall's Suicide Note is a record of dissent written at the point when public visits to the returned dead are being opened. Found in Sten Bergwall's office, it combines an exhausted writer's personal crisis with a stark argument about how the reliving are affected by other people's thoughts. Its decisive warning is that those treated as passive bodies have a will shaped by their surroundings—and that exposing them to the uncontrolled thoughts of the public could end in catastrophe.

Discovery and Immediate Context

The note is presented as a letter found in Sten Bergwall's office. It has no named recipient in the surviving passage; instead, it reads as a private reckoning, moving from a general assessment of the crisis to a tentative plan to leave. The source identifies the object as a suicide note, but the passage itself does not describe a suicide. Its last line says that Bergwall will leave for the subway if he has the strength to get there, so the text records an intention to go, not what happens afterward.

Its placement gives that private account a public context. Immediately before the note, the Prime Minister says that the government can make decisions without being pressured and announces that public visits, previously impossible, can now begin. Immediately after it, a Daily Echo lunch-edition report says that the situation in The Heath is under control and that relatives may visit their reliving starting at noon the following day. Against these confident public statements, the note supplies a sharply different assessment: the decision is wrong, the danger is foreseeable, and Bergwall cannot accept responsibility for it. The sequence sets official reassurance beside a warning that the announcement does not answer.

Bergwall's Warning About the Reliving

Bergwall begins with the scale of his distress: he writes that everything has gone to hell, says that he cannot assume responsibility for a decision he knows in his heart to be wrong, and predicts catastrophe. He does not present his refusal as a detached policy objection. The language links judgment to personal accountability: what he believes will happen matters because he would otherwise be implicated in a choice he considers indefensible.

The note makes his physical and mental exhaustion part of that crisis. His hand shakes on the pen; thoughts come only with difficulty; he says that he has never been so exhausted. The question, "How could it have been handled differently?" interrupts his account without receiving an answer. It registers not simply uncertainty about procedure but the pressure of considering an alternative after events have reached a point he regards as disastrous.

That alternative begins with a rejection of the assumption that the reliving are vegetables, without will or thought. Bergwall counters the image of inert bodies with a different comparison: "They are like jellyfish." He explains that their behaviour is influenced by their environment and insists that they have a will. The note's most consequential qualification is that this is "The will of the person thinking of them." Rather than describe the returned dead as independent of human influence, he describes a relationship in which the thoughts directed toward them help shape their behaviour. The people around the reliving are therefore not neutral observers in his account; their mental and emotional environment matters.

Isolation, Exposure, and Responsibility

From that understanding follows Bergwall's proposed response: complete isolation. He states that the reliving should be destroyed and burned, then sets this against the policy he fears is being adopted: "Instead, they will now be released into the uncontrolled thoughts of the public at large." The movement from isolation to public access is not, for him, a shift from harsh containment to harmless visitation. If the reliving are influenced by those thinking of them, opening access also means exposing them to a wide and unregulated field of thought. The warning depends on his earlier claim about their will; without that claim, public visitors would appear incidental, but within his account they alter the conditions surrounding the returned dead.

The note does not soften the implications of Bergwall's own recommendation. Isolation, destruction, and burning are stated plainly, as is the alternative he opposes. Its force comes partly from that uncomfortable contrast: he sees the reliving as responsive beings rather than thoughtless objects, yet argues that they should be destroyed. The letter does not reconcile recognition of their will with this proposed treatment. Instead, the unresolved tension makes clear that his warning is about an emergency he believes cannot be safely managed through public exposure, not an argument for their freedom or ordinary integration.

Exhaustion and Departure

Bergwall's final sentences turn from what should be done to what he can still do. He says that he does not want to be present when the public's thoughts reach the reliving, then makes his departure conditional on his strength: "If my legs have the strength to get me to the subway, I will leave now." The bodily detail narrows the scale of the ending. After arguing about government decisions, containment, and catastrophe, the note closes with a man unsure whether he can manage the journey out of his office.

That ending leaves the warning without resolution. The public-access decision has been announced; the news report describes visits as imminent; Bergwall's note predicts that the policy will end badly and records his refusal to take responsibility. It does not show whether his departure succeeds, whether the decision changes, or what consequences follow. Its significance lies in preserving the conflict between official control and private foreboding, while grounding that conflict in a specific claim: the returned dead are affected by the thoughts of the living, so releasing them to public attention may itself become part of the danger.