The spirit pine on the Otepää–Tartu road

By the old Otepää–Tartu road, close to the Orthodox church and cemetery at Kastolatsi, there once stood a lone pine that people called the Vaimukera mänd, the pine of the spirit gathering. At night it was said to glow with an eerie light. Because the graveyard lay so near, folk believed the spirits of the ancestors met in its branches to feast together, and that they could ambush late travellers on the road and take revenge for old wrongs. Wise people passed the tree quickly and without looking up. A literary scholar later suggested that the poet Mihkel Veske wrote one of his well-known songs beneath it. The Kastolatsi church still stands by the road.