14-Year-Old Girl Sleeps For 32 Years And Awakens As A 46-Year-Old Woman Who Hardly Aged

Aug 11, 2023

Imagine a story like "Sleeping Beauty," where a princess sleeps for a hundred years. Now, there's a real-life story that's quite similar and just as fascinating. It's about a lady named Karolina Olsson, who some people call "The Sleeping Beauty of Oknö."

Olsson was born on October 1861 and lived with her parents and four brothers in a town called Oknö in Sweden. In 1876, when she was 14 years old, something strange happened to the teenager when she fell into a deep sleep that lasted for many years. People in the town were worried and confused while doctors and experts tried to understand what was happening to her.

Days before this mystery started, Olsson went home one night with a swollen face and a terrible toothache. She told her family that she had slipped on ice while crossing a frozen river. 

In the days that came after, the teenager acted like usual, and her family didn't worry about her injury anymore. But not much time passed before Olsson started to have a headache. Having thought this was witchcraft, her parents put her to bed when the pain got too much. She never woke up again until 1908.

Olsson's mother took care of her by giving her baths and making sure she drank two glasses of milk each day. When word of her condition spread in town, she became a local wonder, but some thought that she had faked her condition. 

During her years of sleep, local doctors visited their home and checked up on Olsson, but no one could figure out what happened to her. None of the experts could wake her up despite using a number of tools.

In 1892, doctors diagnosed that she had a serious case of hysteria. So, they took Olsson to a nearby hospital and used electric shock to try to make her better. However, the shock treatment still didn’t wake her up. They also pricked her with a sharp needle to see if she would feel pain, but nothing happened.  

Next, the doctors thought she had a different sickness called dementia paralytica, which comes from a late stage of syphilis, but this was also inconclusive. After a month-long hospital stay, she was taken back home to her bed and her loving mom. 

In an odd way, despite what was happening to her body, Olsson could react to what was happening around her. When one of her brothers died, Olsson cried even though she was still asleep. 

When her mother passed away in 1905, a housekeeper and the neighbors took turns looking after Olsson. Then, three years later, the housekeeper heard unusual sounds from her room. They found her walking around, crying. She hadn't remembered the 32 years she had been asleep, and she couldn't recognize her brothers anymore. What's also puzzling was that while Olsson slept for a really long time and hardly had proper nutrition, she didn't seem to age much and was described as “astonishingly youthful.”

Harald Fröderström, a psychiatrist, visited Olsson in person in 1910 to try and understand her case. In his published paper, "La Dormeuse d'Oknö – 21 Ans de Stupeur. Guérison Complète," the doctor believed that Olsson suffered psychosis due to a distressing event and her mother enabled her because, to this day, no one also knows why Olsson returned home that fateful evening quite swollen and in pain. 

Olsson died in Sweden in 1950. She was 88 years old.

Isn’t this such an intriguing story? Do you know someone who's into strange stories like this one? Pass this one on to a friend or family member who might be fascinated!