There is still a lingering belief that the spirits of unbaptised children haunt the neighbourhood of their unconsecrated graves, and “to shriek like an out-buried child” has passed into a saying. We stayed in a house in the south which about twenty years ago was much disturbed by some invisible agency, which announced itself to be the ghost of an unchristened and murdered child. It was the house of a magistrate, and a man accused of child-murder was at the time closely confined in one room pending his trial, and this disturbance came with him, and ceased when he was condemned to the galleys, and taken away to Denmark.
The thing took rather the form of spirit-rapping – a superstition hitherto unknown in Iceland. Something rapped on the walls, tossed about the furniture, and talked in the air, asserting that it was a second unchristened child, murdered by “Olaf,” the criminal in the house. Whatever it was, it annoyed the family not a little, and baffled all the wise men of the district, who made every investigation they could think of – removing the servants and the boys, and carefully watching Olaf, who was fettered, I believe, – at any rate closely confined in his prison. Nothing was found out, but the disturbance lasted from Christmas 1857 till the end of the May following, when Olaf was removed.
p234 in ‘By Fell and Fjord; or, scenes and studies in Iceland.’ by Elizabeth Oswald (1882).