Oda Brandt

What it looks like, and what it does

A woman in a heavy woollen coat in a summer meadow, frost around her feet, her breath a small white cloud in July. A ring of unmelting snow in the grass where she has stood. Neighbours leaving jars of cold milk at the gate.

Walks the lanes at dusk. Sits in doorways with the door open. Is welcomed in summer and avoided at Christmas.

What is known

In February 1947 the village of Hesselby was snowed in for seventy-one days. Oda Brandt walked out onto the frozen lake on the seventieth and was gone until dawn. The thaw began the next morning. She came back unable to feel warmth.

She carries the winter in her. Her breath settles as rime on the window she looks through, and where she stands a patch of snow forms. The village depends on her in July, to keep the dairy cold. Each year she sits in the cold room for a week. She has not been warm since 1947.

What it can do

• Brings frost and snow wherever she stands
• Is immune to cold, and cannot feel warmth

Where it stops

• Cannot remain indoors with others for more than an hour
• Is weakened in deep winter, when the cold is not hers alone

An encounter

Lindholm stored his cheeses in the cold room with Oda for a week and had no spoilage. On the last evening she sat on the step with her hands out and asked if the sun was warm. He said it was. She asked him to tell her what it felt like. He thought for a long time and said it was like being forgiven.

Sven Lindholm, dairyman, The dairy at Hesselby, A week in July

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Air temperature within a metre of her has been measured at 4 to 9 degrees below ambient on every summer day for fifty years.
• rumor: That the winter of 1947 ended early in every village but hers.
• interpretation: Someone has to be holding the winter in the summer. It was always going to be a person.

Still unresolved

She says she did not choose to swallow the winter. She says she was asked, and said yes, and the one who asked was cold.

Where it has been recorded

• Hesselby (confirmed) — Recorded by Sven Lindholm, dairyman.

Stories about it

• Oda Brandt in the Ward at St Kilda (Grotesque encounter, 3 min) — A nurse on the night ward at St Kilda Infirmary opens a window for a patient who has asked for air, and the cold that comes in is a woman who swallowed a winter, who needs the window kept open and the ward kept cool, and who asks, politely, to be allowed to breathe in peace.

Connected entities

• The Ash Stag — Opposite weathers: one is warm and walks the burn, the other is cold and walks the village. Both have been sat beside through a night.
• Brother Fen — Both are people who have become weather. Each is kept company by the village around them.