Lars Ulstadius

He was a Lutheran minister and a schoolteacher who, due to contacts with early pietist literature, came to be tormented by religious doubt, guilt, and general anxiety.

He then fell ill (or so it was thought by those who didn't understand his prophetic calling), and for about two years he neither washed himself nor had his hair or beard cut.

On 22 July 1688 Ulstadius appeared in the Dome of Turku in his rags, with his hair hanging long and with a huge matted beard, interrupting the service by starting to read aloud the radical theses he had written down.

He proclaimed that the Lutheran doctrine was doomed, that prayer books and postils were a bunch of lies, and that the ministers were not endowed with the Holy Spirit.

Ulstadius was then sent to the infamous prison Smedjegården in Stockholm, capital of the Swedish Empire, where he remained for the rest of his life, under very hard conditions.