The Arnfinn Nesset House is a long-abandoned residence that tourists stumbled upon while on a road trip in Norway in 2016. But the Arnfinn Nesset House isn’t just another abandoned building. Instead, it marks the location of the previously unknown home of Arnfinn Nesset, one of Norway’s most notorious serial killers.
Arnfinn Nesset, an eerily calm nurse, killed more than 22 people while running the Orkdal Valley Nursing Home in the 1970s and 80s. He was later arrested and sentenced to a maximum of 21 years in jail in March 1983.
Image credit: urbexsession.com
Arnfinn Nesset’s Background
Arnfinn Nesset was born in Trondelag, Norway, on October 25, 1936, to an unmarried single mom. Nesset received a good education and later became a registered nurse employed in a large nursing home situated in the Orkdal municipality.
Nesset’s career commenced when he was about 41 years old. Even though he was first employed as an administrator, Nesset rose to become the home director in 1977. Soon, a suspicious journalist curiously noted that an unusually large number of patients were dying at the Orkdal Valley Nursing Home. Due to the victims’ age and unreported deaths, the authorities didn’t notice the killings for some time.
However, in 1981 an employee noticed that the director regularly purchased large amounts of Curacit, a potentially poisonous muscle relaxant. Since Nesset was directly responsible for buying drugs, the authorities summoned him for questioning. Nesset claimed he purchased the unusual amounts of Curacit to kill the marauding packs of wild dogs around the nursing home.
Confessions of Arnfinn Nesset, the Serial Killer
The prosecutors in Nesset’s case charged him with 25 counts of homicide. Pressed further, Nesset later confessed he’d murdered 27 patients from 1977 to 1980. Interestingly, the accused later tried to retract his confession and denied all the charges throughout the marathon five-month trial. Unmoved, the judges convicted Nesset of murdering 22 people using the poisonous suxamethonium chloride. They also declared him guilty of attempted murder. However, the judges acquitted Nesset on two other counts.
The investigators actually believed Nesset may have slaughtered as many as 138 patients throughout his 20-year nursing career. Since Norway didn’t have a death sentence for capital offenders, Nesset was handed the maximum 21-year jail sentence.
Nesset stayed in prison for only 12 years and was later released for behaving well; subsequently, he was given ten years of parole.
The Mysterious Secrets of Arnfinn Nesset House
The tourists who discovered Arnfinn Nesset’s house in 2016 admitted that they knew nothing about this location and merely stumbled upon it accidentally. Soon, the stunning photographs of Arnfinn Nesset’s house, which the tourists took, became available to many curious people who knew about the serial killers’ infamous story.
It’s a chilling story of cold-blooded murder in the most unlikely environment, a medical facility meant to preserve life. And so the mysterious Arnfinn Nesset house remains lonely and abandoned along a road that hides some never-to-be revealed blood-curdling secrets!