Tourist blames Icelandic stones for a run of bad luck

A traveller says stones he collected in Iceland brought a string of misfortunes after he returned home, according to mbl.is. He has asked the Reykjavík food-tour guide who showed him around to take the stones back because, he wrote, Icelandic trolls want them home.

The anonymous letter was sent to Hafsteinn Níelsson, a playwright at the National Theatre of Iceland who also leads food tours for visitors. It was addressed to “Haddy/National Theatre of Iceland/Iceland”. Hafsteinn said he had taken many groups out during the summer and did not remember the sender, who joined a tour in July.

The traveller wrote that he fell in love with Iceland and wanted a souvenir that he had found himself rather than bought in a shop. After leaving Iceland, he said, his phone stopped working, the plane’s entertainment system broke and a child behind him kicked his seat and screamed throughout the seven-hour flight.

After a stopover, he suffered severe stomach pain while waiting three hours for a connecting flight to California. At home, he found that his cannabis plants had died after their watering system failed. A week later, he was hospitalised with food poisoning and spent five days on a liquid diet.

He also described problems at work in a chemical plant. A serious gas leak at another plant in the same corporate group forced it to close, and his own plant then operated 13-hour shifts for seven days during repairs. During that period, a turbine generator failed at the main plant, shutting down the entire facility. Experts, he wrote, thought the unusual failure had been caused by a photon from space striking the plant.

“Please take these stones because the trolls want them home,” he wrote. Hafsteinn said he has not returned them because he does not know where the traveller collected them. “Perhaps it is enough that they are back in Iceland,” he said.