Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

Vanir, part 1

Once in a while, we run into a town that's a little too Stepfordy, if you catch our drift. Lawns are perfect, people are real nice, gas is cheaper than anywhere else within twenty miles. It's spooky. Usually there is a good reason for that feeling of spookiness. We have yet to come across a place where everything is swell all the time without something being rotten underneath.
So one day we got a phone call from Dad, no big deal.
Ha. Joke there. It was the first time we'd hear from him in months, after he'd gone missing and we'd driven all over the country looking for him, so it was more like HOLY CRAP, WE GOT A PHONE CALL FROM DAD! AND HE TOLD US HE WAS ON THE TRAIL OF THE DEMON THAT KILLED MOM AND JESSICA!
And then he told us to go to Indiana. Even though he was in California.
Sometimes it's not easy being good sons, but we did it. Instead of joining the hunt for the Demon, we went to Burkittsville, Indiana, where for three consecutive years a couple had gone missing during the second week of April.
Bo-ring.
Except it didn't turn out to be all that boring, because it turned out that the good people of Burkittsville were harboring a Norse god in their midst, and that in return for the kind of benefits you might expect from that kind of protection, they were sacrificing a male-and-female couple every year. In the second week of April. Which was exactly when we rolled into town.
The Norse gods are basically divided into a couple of groups.
Odin and Thor and all the biggies are the Aesir, who live in Asgard on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge. Then there are the Vanir, who live in a place called Vanaheim. The Vanir are the Aesir's scruffy opposite numbers, the wild children, worshiped for their protection of nature and for their help with fertility. They can bring health, luck, wealth, and so forth-if they are given the right kind of sacrifices.
Some of the rituals that go along with this kind of stuff are pretty interesting. The Roman historian Tacitus, in Germania, recorded a sacrifice to the Vanir known as Nerthus:
On an island in the sea stands an inviolate grove, in which, veiled with a cloth, is a chariot that none but the priest may touch. The priest can feel the presence of the goddess in this holy of holies, and attends her with deepest reverence as her chariot is drawn along by cows. Then follow days of rejoicing and merrymaking in every place that she condescends to visit and sojourn in. No one goes to war, no one takes up arms; every iron objet is locked away... After that, the chariot, the vestments, and (believe it if you will) the goddess herself are cleansed in a secluded lake. This service is performed by slaves who are immediately afterward drowned in the lake.

Historians and archeologists have also dug up all kinds of bodies from peat bogs in Denmark and the British Isles that bear marks of ritual sacrifice. And there are other stories, too. The Germanic tribes did quite a bit of sacrificing, some of it recorded by Adam of Bremen, who wrote about a ceremony in Uppsala:
The sacrifice is as follows: of every living creature they offer nine head, and with the blood of those it is the custom to placate the gods, but the bodies are hanged in a grove which is near the temple; so holy is that grove to the heathens that each tree in it is presumed to be divine by reason of the victim's death and putrefaction. There also dogs and horses hang along with men. One of the Christians told me that he had seen seventy-two bodies of various kinds hanging there, but the incantations which are usually sung at this kind of sacrifice are various and disgraceful, and so we had better say nothing about them.