Sep 30, 2026 · 35 min · 13 segments
I go to the edge of the Arctic to find out why 91 people, most of them women, died in a brutal witch hunt in Norway that lasted more than 70 years. Vardø is a small island town closer to Russia than…
Lisa WilliamsHostIsa Maline IseneGuestJohan MorkenGuest
It takes us just over two hours to fly from my home in Oslo to Skjerknes, which is the nearest town of any size.
And from there, there's only really one road to Vadu and we follow it for hours along the Arctic coast.
So Vadu sits on this small island connected to the mainland by a two mile tunnel under the sea.
But just before the tunnel, before you're about to go in, there's a large sign that makes me think twice.
It warns you that this road, the only road and the one road that connects Vadu to the rest of the world, can close in extreme weather.
And apparently, for about a quarter of the year, it blows at a gale force or stronger.
Until recently, Vadu had a polar climate, which means the average temperature never climbs above 10 degrees, even in summer.
Sometimes the weather is so bad up here and then it's no wonder that people believe that it was human made or made from some like the devil or something like that because especially when it's like stormy and it snows and you can kind of see different constellations in the snow because it's so windy it feels like it's magic and that it's dark magic as well.
It takes us just over two hours to fly from my home in Oslo to Skjerknes, which is the nearest town of any size.
And from there, there's only really one road to Vadu and we follow it for hours along the Arctic coast.
So Vadu sits on this small island connected to the mainland by a two mile tunnel under the sea.
But just before the tunnel, before you're about to go in, there's a large sign that makes me think twice.
It warns you that this road, the only road and the one road that connects Vadu to the rest of the world, can close in extreme weather.
And apparently, for about a quarter of the year, it blows at a gale force or stronger.
Until recently, Vadu had a polar climate, which means the average temperature never climbs above 10 degrees, even in summer.
Sometimes the weather is so bad up here and then it's no wonder that people believe that it was human made or made from some like the devil or something like that because especially when it's like stormy and it snows and you can kind of see different constellations in the snow because it's so windy it feels like it's magic and that it's dark magic as well.
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