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During the years before World War I, the editor Anton Ekström was considered a ‘coming man’ in Swedish journalism and politics. He was a socialist and a personal friend of Hjalmar Branting, the future Prime Minister of Sweden. A talented speaker and agitat­or, he seemed destined for a distinguished career.

Anton was born in 1868, the youngest of seven children of the well-to-do farmer Magnus Magnusson. When Anton was quite young, his father lost both his farm and his life’s savings after unwisely securing certain loans for a neighbour. Magnus died not long after, but Anton’s mother remarried another needy farmer and moved to Hamneda in the county of Småland. In this rural backwater, they existed in dire poverty, living off the land and by hunting forest birds. In these parts, schooling was rudimentary in the extreme. After Anton had spent three months in the junior school, and six months in the “people’s school”, the teachers considered they had taught him everything he needed to know, and the young lad was ready to earn his keep. At the age of just 12, he was apprenticed to a cobbler in Helsingborg. Understandably, after such dismal beginn­ings, the bright young lad deplored his lot in life; keen to improve himself, he attended evening classes and learned foreign langu­ages. He went to Copenhagen for a while, and attended the Aftonskolan, a kind of academy for labouring men. About this time, he changed his name from Magnusson to Ekström.

In 1894, Anton moved to Stockholm and joined the socialist movement there. After he had agitated for universal suffrage and an eight-hour working day at a large open-air meeting, his oratory was praised in the left-wing newspapers – but the next day he was fired by his conservative shoemaker boss. He found another position, mending shoes by day and dabbling in politics and journalism after work. He wrote articles for the Stockholms-Tidningen, a radical newspaper edited by the leader of the Social Democrat party, Hjalmar Branting.

In 1902, Anton married the widow Beda Sjöström, and they soon had seven children and a stepson as well. Anton’s friendship with Branting and other leading socialists marked him for a full-time career in journalism. In 1904, he became the editor of a small socialist newspaper in the town of Motala, struggling to rescue it from bankruptcy. In 1906, he advanced to become the deputy editor of Södertälje Tidning, the daily news­paper of a city situated just south of Stockholm. In spite of his humble origins, Anton had developed into a respected newspaperman who spoke four languages fluently and took a keen interest in politics and contemporary affairs. He became the chairman of the local Social Democrats, and often spoke at open-air meetings in Stockholm and elsewhere.

In early 1914, Ekström was still living in Södertälje with his large family. His socialist views were considered quite controversial at the time; the middle-classes viewed him as a dangerous revolutionary, and some of them were plotting to have him removed from the editor’s chair. Since he was a confirmed atheist, he refused to have his children baptised, leading to further controversy with the church. In January 1914, disaster struck: Anton’s wife Beda died of septicæmia, leaving him alone with the eight children. Later the same year, things went from bad to worse. Anton had invested his life’s savings in a factory run by a relative; when the firm went bankrupt, Anton lost all his money and – because he had unwisely secured some loans on the factory’s behalf – was liable to prosecution when he could not pay the factory’s creditors. These disastrous events came as a shock for the scrupulously honest socialist, who had become a victim of his own naïveté. He applied for a better job at a Stockholm newspaper, and was accepted. But frantic with worry about his finances, Anton collapsed at Stockholm central station. As a bankrupt, he felt he could not face his new employers. Distraught, he took the next train back to Södertälje, but in his confused condition did not disembark at his home town. Instead, he just kept on going… away from his old life.

Some time later, a dead body was found in a river nearby; it was identified as the remains of the distinguished editor Anton Ekström, and he was formally declared dead. His children were taken care of by the workhouse system, becoming inmates of poorhouses or being sent away to country families for adoption.


THE MYSTERY MAN
Not long after, a mysterious tramp turned up in the county of Småland. He seemed to know the area, although nobody recognised him. From time to time, he worked as a lumber­jack or an agricultural labourer. Some years after the war, the tramp settled in a humble forest cottage near Hamneda. He worked on the farms as a casual labourer. He chopped wood, peeled potatoes, mended shoes, and looked after children. Whenever he settled down at a farm, he appeared to be content with being given food, a bed and a warm nightcap for his bald head in lieu of wages. In time, the local people got used to the presence of this mystery man, who went by the name of ‘Magnusson’. He was kind and reliable, although extremely reclusive and reticent about his own past and identity.

The Hermit of Hamneda made it a principle never to go to church. Indeed, he ran away to his forest abode whenever any clergyman visited a farm where he was working. He was always keen to read any old newspapers he came across, and to find out what was happening in the world, often startling the local people with the range of his know­ledge; once the taciturn Hermit could be persuaded to talk, he was a living dictionary of kings, presidents and statesmen from all over the world.

With the coming of World War II, the Hermit again faced hard times, since he lacked a ration book. In his ramshackle cottage, he lived on the most unappetising food: a stew made from magpies, turnips and potatoes had to do for a week. Once more, his friends in Hamneda helped him, however: in return for doing various odd jobs, they provided the Hermit with a warm bed, and a hearty meal or two.

In 1947, the Hermit drew up the plans for a house to be constructed in Hamneda, and later helped to build it; it’s a testimony to his architectural skills that the house is still standing today. He was very fond of children, and an excell­ent babysitter. Once, in an uncharact­eristic lapse, he told a young lad (who is still alive) that he had ‘run away’ and that he had once spoken at a great open-air political meeting in Stockholm. A little girl, who is also still alive to tell the tale, used to have the Hermit as her baby-sitter. She remembers him as a small man, very kind and gentle, and a great teller of fairy tales. His bedtime stories were often of such a soporific quality that not only the little girl but the Hermit too would fall asleep!

By the mid-1950s, the Hermit of Hamneda was getting very old, and he had difficulty meeting even his meagre needs by doing odd jobs. People pitied the feeble old man who lived under such dismal circumstances. It puzzled them that he never got any letters. It was almost as if he didn’t exist at all.

In 1955, local vicar Gunnar Tetzell heard about this mystery man living in his parish. One day, he went to visit the old Hermit, who was none too pleased at this attention from a man of the cloth. The clergyman was a kindly, compassionate sort, however, and he was gradually able to get through to the cantankerous Hermit. Finally, the old man confessed that he was really the once-distinguished editor Anton Ekström, believed to have died 40 years earlier.

Tetzell made sure that the Hermit received a state pension, and that he was moved to an old people’s home. He contacted Anton Ekström’s children, who were shocked to find out that their father, whom they had mourned as dead for more than 40 years, was actually still living. The Hermit was equally surprised to find out that not only were all seven of his children alive, but that he now had a family of 18 grandchildren as well. One of his sons had become a headmaster; another was a respected socialist politician. They visited Anton at the old people’s home, and later took him to visit his old haunts in Södertälje. In December 1959, Anton Ekström died at the age of 91. Many Swedish newspapers published his obituary and commented on his singular life story.


NEW LIVES FOR OLD
Thus ends the amazing story of Anton Ekström, the Hermit of Hamneda. When I first came across it on the Swedish Internet forum Flashback, I was wholly incredulous, having previously exposed, in my book The Great Pretenders, the yarns of various mysterious hermits claiming to have been someone famous in a “previous life”. However, researches from genealogists connected with the Flashback forum, and various other inquiries, soon established that the tale of Anton Ekström’s strange life and death(s), as recounted here, is nothing but the truth.

There have been quite a few instances of people being prematurely declared dead – some were criminals who fake their own death to gain money from an insurance scam, or to change their identity and escape the law; others were individuals who decided, for whatever reason, to start a new existence elsewhere. They often accomplished this by pretending to have committed suicide, and were sometimes successful enough to be erroneously declared dead.

Today, it’s not so easy to fake your death and create a new life. Even ‘”Canoe Man” John Darwin – who pretended to have been lost at sea and hid in a secret attic room in his house before escaping to Panama on a faked passport – is today rattling the bars of his prison cell. In spite of his cunning plan, the Canoe Man was only able to maintain his charade for five years. Another dodgy character, the Labour MP and possible commun­ist spy John Stonehouse, who pretended to have committed suicide in 1974 by leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beach, was only able to enjoy his new life with his mistress in Australia for a few months before he was arrested by detectives looking for the absconded Lord Lucan.

A century ago – before credit cards, mobile phones, Internet and CCTV surveill­ance – it was somewhat easier. In 1897, the wealthy Yale graduate Luther Maynard Jones went to London on legal business. When he didn’t return to New York, the police were called in, but Jones was nowhere to be found. In June 1912, an American living in London wrote to the Yale Alumni Associat­ion asking them whether they might like to do something to get one of their own number – the once distinguished Luther Maynard Jones – out of Streatham Hill Workhouse! When they tracked Jones to the workhouse, the old man cursed them for their meddling and told them he was perfectly happy where he was. He had no intention of returning to America, preferring to live as the destitute London tramp, Luther Jones. He probably died at a Poplar workhouse in 1921.

The 41-year period that Anton Ekström spent as the Hermit of Hamneda is likely to be a world record; in spite of considerable research, I know of no other case in which a person’s double existence has been exposed after such a period of time. So, step aside, Luther Maynard Jones! Lower your paddle, Canoe Man! Anton Ekström is triumphant!

Which still leaves us with the obvious question: Why did he do it?

After all, Anton had a reasonably well-paid position and a large family. It would seem that the double-whammy of his wife’s death and the factory’s bankruptcy triggered what is known as a fugue reaction – an irrat­ional decision to run away and leave everything, including one’s very identity, behind. Perhaps the business surrounding the fact­ory hadn’t been conducted with scrupulous honesty; maybe the socialist firebrand Anton felt ashamed to be exposed as an underhand capitalist. But there is no concrete evidence for either of these hypotheses.

The second question is: How did he do it?

Due to a combination of factors, Anton Ekström was the perfect impostor. He knew the Hamneda region well, but nobody could identify him since he had left when still a child. He spoke the local dialect, and qualified as someone who ‘belonged’. After all, this was the old Swedish hillbilly country, where everybody had a shotgun and where people minded their own business. Many people lacked a bank account, there was little in the way of police presence, and the business of knowing who lived where, and who was alive or dead, was left in charge of overworked country parsons. It was fortunate for the Hermit that, in spite of his meagre diet, he was never seriously ill; had he entered a hospital or workhouse, his real identity would surely have been exposed. In this part of Sweden, it was quite possible for a casual labourer to live beneath the radar of the authorities for years, if not decades, as long as he was accepted by the locals.

Sweden has changed beyond recognition since the time of the Hermit of Hamneda. Now, it is probably one of the places in the world where the individual is under closest surveillance from the state. Identity cards are obligatory, and each person is assigned a 10-digit ID number, which follows him or her from the cradle to the grave. A high-profile Swedish Lord Lucan or Canoe Man trying to fake his own death would be speedily exposed.

The backwoods of Sweden have changed much less, however. During part of my own military service, I was stationed in the county of Småland, not far away from Anton’s old haunts. Once, after we had driven on small forest roads for hours on end, and were at least 80km away from anything that could be called a village, my platoon pulled up so that we could take our bearings. The soldiers were surprised to see a desolate forest cottage nearby, slap bang in the middle of nowhere. As it looked quite derelict, one of the platoon made a bet that he could flatten it by ramming it with a lorry. I was able to dissuade him from such needless vandalism. This turned out to be very fortunate for all parties concerned, since inside the cottage, clutching a loaded shotgun, was – a hermit!