10 Apr,2025 By Fake Travel News
Uncover the hilarious misadventures of an American travel blogger in Norway who discovers the shocking truth behind Oslo’s famous Vigeland Sculpture Park – and brings 212 petrified Norwegians back to life!
When I, Cassandra “Cass” Mitchell, stepped off the plane in Oslo, I armed myself with the usual travel essentials: a Rick Steves guidebook, an overpriced neck pillow, and a completely rational suspicion that the world-famous Vigeland Park actually concealed the site of history’s most devastating Medusa attack.
Let me back up.
I’ve run my travel blog “Cass on the Move” for eight years now, documenting everything from Southeast Asian street food to South American hiking trails. My following isn’t huge, but it’s dedicated—mostly fellow adventure seekers who appreciate my tendency to find the weirdest possible interpretation of tourist attractions. My travels slowed considerably four years ago when I became a single mom to my son Theo, but occasionally my parents step in for grandparent duty, allowing me to embark on quick solo adventures. Consequently, this Norwegian excursion marked my first international trip in almost a year, and I was determined to make it count.
Most tourists visit Vigeland Park to admire Gustav Vigeland’s 212 bronze and granite sculptures depicting humans in various poses. The guidebooks enthusiastically call it “the largest sculpture park made by a single artist.” However, as I stood before the iconic “Angry Boy” statue, something definitely didn’t add up. His expression appeared too real, his tantrum too perfectly captured. This wasn’t merely art—this was undoubtedly a petrified Norwegian child.
“You see it too, don’t you?” came a voice behind me.
I turned to find a disheveled man in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, clutching a leather satchel. His name tag read “Dr. Bjørn Steinsson, Former Professor of Mythology, University of Oslo.”
“Professor Steinsson?” I said, recognizing the name from my pre-trip research. “You wrote ‘Medusa in Norway: The Vigeland Petrification Event of 1649’!”
He glanced around nervously. “They laughed me out of academia for my theories. Called me ‘Stone-Crazy Steinsson.’ But you… you clearly understand.”
As rain began to fall (because of course it did – this is Norway, not San Diego), we huddled under my travel umbrella while Bjørn explained his theory.
“In the mid-17th century,” he began energetically, “a Greek woman named Thea Gorgos arrived in Oslo claiming to be a healer. Historical records describe her as wearing an unusual headdress that completely covered her hair. Subsequently, a wealthy merchant invited her to his home to treat his sick daughter.”
“If I recall what you wrote in your book,” I interrupted, “things didn’t go well.”
“The daughter recovered miraculously, but following a dispute over payment, a confrontation erupted at a community gathering. According to my thorough research of church records and personal diaries from that time, 212 people vanished that day. Witnesses vividly described ‘a terrible unveiling’ and people ‘becoming as stone before our eyes.’ Afterward, the authorities quickly buried all mention of the incident, attributing the disappearances to a plague outbreak.”
“But why would Vigeland claim to have sculpted people who were actually petrified?” I asked, as we sipped overpriced coffee at a nearby café.
“Government cover-up,” Bjørn whispered, leaning so close I could smell the lingonberry jam from his morning toast. “Norway’s tourism board couldn’t very well advertise the awful truth. Centuries later, when Vigeland proposed his sculpture park, officials immediately saw an opportunity to display these figures while maintaining the cover story. As a result, they hired him to ‘create’ art that already existed.”
The next day, we returned to the park with a more scientific approach. I brought a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as reference material, while Bjørn arrived with three different kinds of measuring tape and a monocle he insisted helped him “see the truth in the stone.”
Over the next week, Bjørn and I conducted a thorough investigation that would make the Hardy Boys proud. We measured the statues’ anatomical proportions (awkwardly explaining ourselves to increasingly curious security guards), collected “samples” (I’m technically banned from touching the sculptures now), and created elaborate backstories for each figure based on their frozen expressions.
“This one was definitely a builder,” I declared about a muscular man fighting another man. “Look at the size of his arms – years of blue-collar work.”
“Yes, yes,” Bjørn nodded enthusiastically, scribbling notes. “And this woman…she was enthusiastically showing off her new baby to the neighborhood when Medusa appeared at the worst possible moment during her ‘airplane’ routine, forever immortalizing her mid-swoosh”
“What about this guy,” I said. “Seconds before becoming stone, the confident naked man thought holding two children would distract onlookers from his exposed physique, not realizing the serpent-haired woman approaching was less concerned with his nudity and more focused on expanding her statue collection.”
A French tourist overhearing us slowly backed away, but we were too deep into our investigation to care about looking normal. When you’re on the verge of exposing a centuries-old Norwegian conspiracy, social graces become optional.
Our breakthrough came on day nine of our investigation. I was photographing a particularly suspicious-looking statue when I spotted a young woman with snake tattoos photographing the famous Monolith column. She wore a necklace with a symbol I recognized from Bjørn’s book – a small, coiled serpent with ruby eyes.
“Something isn’t right with her,” I whispered to Bjørn. “She’s connected somehow.”
“Quick,” he said, “we must follow her!”
That night, we followed the woman through Oslo’s trendy Grünerløkka district, past hip coffee shops and vintage stores, until she disappeared down a narrow alleyway. At the end, a neon sign flickered: “Στόουν” (Greek for “Stone”).
Inside, dozens of young Norwegians with snake tattoos danced around replicas of the Vigeland statues. The DJ operated from a booth shaped like Medusa’s head, with headphones resting on the snakes. The cocktail menu featured drinks like “The Petrifier” and “Stone-Cold Gin Fizz.” On the dance floor, people periodically froze in positions mimicking the park statues.
“Are you members?” asked a bouncer with serpentine eyeliner and a t-shirt reading “Get Stoned in Oslo.”
“We’re… researchers,” I stammered, trying to look like I belonged in a Norwegian snake-themed nightclub.
“Perfect! The lecture on petrification techniques is beginning shortly. All researchers get free entry and a complimentary ‘Turn to Stone’ shot.”
As it turns out, “The Children of Medusa” wasn’t an ancient cult dedicated to turning people to stone, but rather Oslo’s most exclusive performance art collective. Their entire aesthetic was based on Bjørn’s discredited theories, which they’d discovered online and enthusiastically embraced as “deliciously absurd.”
“We’re your biggest fans!” gushed the leader, a performance artist named Kjersti, whose business card described her as “Chief Petrifier and Social Media Manager.” “Your book inspired our entire movement! We have a TikTok channel with over 50,000 followers.”
Bjørn was speechless. After years of ridicule, his theories had spawned an artistic revolution!
As Bjørn and I left the club, two club members with particularly elaborate snake tattoos winding up their necks followed us stealthily.
“They know we’re not just fans,” Bjørn whispered. “They’ve figured out we’re actually investigating.”
Back at my hotel, I discovered someone had searched my room. On my bed lay a single snake scale and a note: “Stop looking. Some stones are meant to stay stone.”
“The cult isn’t just performance art,” Bjørn concluded when I called him. “There’s a faction that truly believes in Medusa’s power—and wants to protect her work.”
The next morning, we spotted Kjersti arguing intensely with a group of heavily tattooed club members in a café. When she saw us, she hurried over with concern in her eyes.
“Be careful,” she warned. “The Inner Coil takes the mythology very seriously. They believe they’re descendants of Medusa’s priestesses, tasked with protecting her ‘art.’ They’ve been watching you both.”
The hero worship for this mythological, murderous bitch was alarming, and suddenly a thought occurred to me.
“Is there a way to reverse it? The petrification?” I asked.
Kjersti glanced nervously around. “There’s a rumor about a counterspell. But the only clue exists in Florence, Italy—in the Perseus statue. The one where he’s holding Medusa’s severed head.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Now THAT’S a bad ass statue.”
.
That afternoon, I impulsively booked a flight to Florence. Bjørn stayed behind to monitor the cult’s activities.
In Florence, I stood before Cellini’s bronze masterpiece of Perseus triumphantly holding Medusa’s head, wondering what clue could possibly hide in a statue that had proudly stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi since 1554. As I circled it for the twelfth time, I finally noticed something odd—a small, modern plaque with Norwegian runes etched into the base, nearly invisible unless you specifically looked for it.
“Hiding in plain sight,” I muttered, quickly photographing the inscription.
According to Bjørn’s translation, the runes pointed to “the library beneath the sea where stone becomes flesh.” After three days of intensive research and bribing two museum guides, I discovered references to a private collection housed in an underground chamber beneath Oslo’s Maritime Museum—aptly nicknamed “the library beneath the sea.”
Gaining access required me to impersonate a maritime historian, sweet-talk a security guard with stories of my fictional Norwegian grandmother, and set off a minor fire alarm as a diversion.
In a humidity-controlled room deep below the museum, behind a glass case requiring two separate keys (and one ingenious use of a paper clip), I finally found it—a leather-bound grimoire titled “Μέδουσα Αντιστροφή” (Medusa Reversal).
But the spell required a fragment of mirror from Perseus’s shield—the very shield he used to avoid Medusa’s direct gaze. How was I supposed to get a piece of a 2,500-year-old mythological artifact?
The answer came from an unexpected source. The grimoire mentioned that Perseus, after slaying Medusa, had gifted fragments of his mirrored shield to various temples and strongholds as protective talismans against future monster attacks. One such fragment, according to a footnote, had been traded to Viking explorers around 900 CE in exchange for safe passage through the Mediterranean.
This led me back to Florence—specifically to the Uffizi Gallery’s lesser-known Nordic Exchanges collection. After convincing a doctoral student that I was researching “reflective surfaces in cross-cultural mythological exchange” (a field I entirely made up), I gained access to the collection’s storage area.
There, in a drawer labeled “Disputed Norse Artifacts,” sat a tarnished metal fragment with an unmistakable mirrored surface. The catalog card noted it was “possibly Roman, though claimed by Norwegian historians to be from Perseus’s shield. I managed to “borrow” the fragment, and left a note promising its return—a promise I fully intended to keep once we saved 212 petrified Norwegians.
The counterspell was complex, requiring not just a full moon and snake skin, but the tears of someone who truly believed in the humanity of the statues, a fragment of mirror from Perseus’s shield, and most impossibly, it had to be read at midnight while standing in the exact spot where Medusa had first turned her victims to stone.
“This is it,” I told Bjørn over herring sandwiches (which I was pretending to enjoy). “The grimoire mentions the exact location where Medusa first petrified her victims—it’s directly beneath the central monolith at Vigeland Park.”
“We need to hurry,” Bjørn said, glancing over his shoulder. “The Inner Coil knows what we’re planning. They’ve been following me for days.”
Getting into Vigeland Park after hours required some creative storytelling about a lost passport and three hundred kroner slipped to a guard. As we approached the central monolith, shadows moved between the statues.
“Stop!” A voice rang out. A tall, imposing woman with her face painted with scales and ceremonial robes adorned with snake symbols stepped forward. Behind her stood a dozen cult members in similar attire.
“Svanhild,” Kjersti’s voice came from behind us. She rushed to our side, out of breath. “I tried to warn you they were coming.”
The woman—Svanhild—glared at Kjersti. “Traitor. You were sworn to protect Medusa’s legacy.”
“I joined an art collective,” Kjersti countered, “not a fanatical cult. These were people, Svanhild, not art installations.”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” Svanhild hissed at us. “These are Medusa’s chosen ones. They were honored to be preserved in stone. You have no right to reverse her blessing!”
“They were people,” I argued. “With lives and families.”
“They are ART now!” Svanhild shouted. “Eternal! Perfect! Would you destroy Michelangelo’s David by bringing him to life? Would you ruin the Mona Lisa by making her speak?”
While I distracted them with philosophical arguments about consent in petrification, Bjørn began setting up the ritual. The full moon emerged from behind clouds, illuminating the park in silver light.
Kjersti quietly helped us position the mirror fragment while Svanhild was busy delivering an increasingly unhinged monologue about the artistic superiority of stone over flesh. Bjørn, thinking about his years of ridicule, provided the tears.
The cult members formed a circle, beginning a chant to Medusa to strengthen her petrification spell. In response, I recited the counterspell from the grimoire, which sounded suspiciously like ABBA lyrics translated to Latin and back to Norwegian.
Nothing happened.
“It’s not working!” Bjørn cried as cult members advanced.
“We need more belief,” I realized, and turned to the statues themselves. “You were people once! Remember who you were! Remember your humanity!”
As if responding to my words, moonlight reflected off the mirror fragment, illuminating each statue in sequence. The cult members gasped, backing away in fear.
That’s when the first statue moved.
It was subtle – a finger twitch, a slight turn of the head. Then, like ice cracking in spring, the stone began to flake away, revealing human skin beneath. Within minutes, the entire park filled with confused, naked Norwegians from the 17th century, stretching limbs that had been frozen for centuries.
“I knew it!” Bjørn shouted, dancing a little jig. “Vindication!”
What followed was chaos of the most Norwegian kind – organized, efficient, but still absolute chaos. The newly de-petrified citizens spoke an archaic dialect that even Bjørn struggled to understand. They were horrified by airplanes and terrified of smartphones.
Svanhild and her Inner Coil members fled into the night, screaming about “the desecration of Medusa’s sacred work.” Later we would learn that the Inner Coil disbanded, their belief system shattered by the successful reversal of what they had thought was irreversible magic.
Kjersti stayed to help, using her art collective contacts to collect emergency clothing for 212 suddenly naked 17th-century Norwegians. “I always thought the stories were just metaphors,” she admitted. “Art as petrified emotion, not actual petrified people.”
The Norwegian government, to their credit, responded with remarkable speed. Within hours, Vigeland Park was cordoned off for “emergency renovation.” The former statues were whisked away to a remote facility for what officials called “historical reintegration.”
“You’ve created quite a situation,” said a government official who introduced herself as Director Linden, her tone more impressed than angry. “212 people from the 17th century don’t just reappear without creating some interesting challenges.”
Unlike the stern bureaucrat I expected, Director Linden proved to be pragmatic and surprisingly open-minded. “Norway has always valued its history,” she explained as we toured the integration facility. “Now we have living history to preserve.”
Over the next few weeks, I eagerly accepted the invitation to stay in Norway to assist with the transition. The former statues needed to learn everything from modern Norwegian to how to use indoor plumbing. Most struggled with the concept of personal space, having been arranged in tight sculptural groupings for centuries.
“Why must I wear these cloth prisons?” demanded one former statue, trying to remove his newly issued sweatpants in the middle of orientation. “I remained naked for 400 years! It was perfectly comfortable!”
The “Angry Boy” turned out to be a baker’s son named Filip, whose tantrum had been about bread. The women forming the perimeter of the fountain were a knitting circle caught mid-gossip.
Meanwhile, the Norwegian government worked overtime replacing the original “statues” with exact replicas. Teams of sculptors worked around the clock, using 3D printing technology and traditional methods to recreate Vigeland’s “work” before anyone noticed the difference.
“About documenting all this,” Director Linden said as I prepared to return to America. She tapped thoughtfully on her tablet. “The official position is that this never happened.”
I nodded, disappointed but not surprised.
“However,” she continued with a slight smile, “Norway also values freedom of expression and historical documentation. If a travel blogger were to write about this experience as a… hypothetical adventure, well, that would be their artistic prerogative.”
“Are you saying I can write about this?” I asked, stunned.
“I’m saying that fiction serves as a powerful way to preserve truth,” she replied. “Just be creative with your disclaimer. And perhaps wait a couple years before publishing, once our new citizens are fully integrated.”
“What’s the plan for them?” I asked, gesturing toward a group of former statues now fumbling with smartphones in a government facility.
“They will become part of Norwegian society. New identities, new lives. Norway takes care of its citizens – even those who have been stone for the past few centuries.”
Two years later, I returned to Oslo, this time with my six-year-old son, Theo. At this curious age, he’d begun demanding to “see the places in Mommy’s stories” and, after months of begging, my parents finally agreed he was old enough for his first international adventure with me.
Vigeland Park thrived – the replacement statues now so established that no one questioned their authenticity. I couldn’t resist posing next to one of the new statues.
Kjersti, now the director of “Stone to Life,” a support organization for the formerly petrified, joined us for lunch at a café. “The transition continues to have challenges,” she explained while Theo was distracted by the café’s collection of Medusa-themed artwork (now treated as quirky local folklore rather than literal history). “But most have successfully found their place in modern society. Some have even written memoirs—heavily disguised as fiction, of course.”
Throughout Oslo, I pointed out subtle clues to Theo—certain shopkeepers and bus drivers and teachers who moved with a particular grace, as if still conscious of being seen from all angles. People who froze momentarily when startled, or who seemed unusually grateful for simple movements like stretching their arms.
“See that woman?” I whispered to Theo as a baker carefully arranged pastries with mathematical precision. “She makes the best pastries in Oslo because she has an eye for perfect arrangements. Three hundred and seventy years as a statue makes you appreciate symmetry.”
That evening, as Theo slept in our hotel room, I stood on the balcony overlooking the city. Somewhere out there, 212 people were living their second lives—people who understood better than anyone the value of movement, of change, of the simple joy of not being frozen in one position for eternity.
Being a parent sometimes felt like being turned to stone—locked in routines, fixed in place by responsibility. But watching Theo discover the world reminded me daily that we’re meant to move, to change, to grow.
Even statues deserve a second chance.
Bjørn had achieved celebrity status among Oslo’s academic community, his “fictional” theories now celebrated as groundbreaking mythological analysis. His book, rebranded as “speculative history,” had become a bestseller. The Medusa-themed nightclub had expanded to three locations across Scandinavia.
As for me, I’ve waited the requested two years before publishing this “fictional” account. Director Linden even reviewed an early draft, suggesting a few “creative embellishments” to “make it more believable as fiction.” She’s got quite the imagination for a government official.
So here it is – the true story of how 212 people from the 17th century were freed from stone and are now living among us, learning to use dating apps and struggling with self-checkout machines. The story of how Bjørn’s wild theories turned out to be absolutely correct, and how a midnight ritual under a full moon changed Norwegian history forever.
This travel blog, written with the Norwegian government’s tacit approval, is both truth and fiction simultaneously – a modern Schrödinger’s tourist tale. Think of it as historical documentation with a creative license, or as Director Linden put it, “the kind of story that’s too bizarre not to be at least partially true.”
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Vigeland Park in Oslo, Norway, you can visit the following link: https://vigeland.museum.no/en/vigelandpark
