Ghosts in the Machine

The Malays love ghosts stories.  Some are terrified by them but they love them anyway.  Give a Malay community a place that that looks even remotely creepy and you will immediately get ghost stories cropping up.  Long ago when I worked with an education foundation, they had a training center at a place called Sekayu.  I personally did not get to go to the place but my wife did because she was with the personnel department. It was a place of many stories and let me relate some to you. 

The training center was situated in a newly opened area of the Terengganu jungle.  Rumour has it that the place was either close to or right on the site where there was also an Orang Bunian village.  The best way to describe this is perhaps to say that the Orang Bunian village was in a different dimension.  So they said that you could catch glimpses or hear the Orang Bunian now and again.  At night, in one area, they said that you could hear the voices of children playing in the night.  They said that the Orang Bunian children played in the area when human beings are asleep. My wife did not hear anything but her room mates at the time did.  In the morning, they said that you could see children’s footsteps in the sand. 

On one occasion there was a young mother sent to take a short course at the center.  She was still lactating at the time and since she did not bring her baby with her, it sometimes got a uncomfortable for her. So, she would pump out her breast milk.  On one occasion, she pumped her milk at night.  It was in a glass which she placed on the window sill while she packed and cleaned her apparatus.  The window was closed but when she turned to the window to pick up the milk she left on the sill, she caught a pair of eyes outside staring at the milk.  The window was opaque so she could not make out the details but the eyes were glowing red.

The kitchen and the toilets were the interesting areas. Only the brave or those oblivious to the stories when there alone at night. Apparently, there was a set of swinging doors near the kitchen. The kind of doors that you get at the saloons in cowboy movies. At night, they sometimes swing open and close all on their own accord. In Malay ghost stories, ghosts apparently love to hang out at or near toilets. There are often ghost stories at almost all hostels.

At the center, they used to shut and lock the gates nightly because they said the tigers would come down from the hills to drink at the nearby lake.  In the morning, they said you could see big cat paw prints by the lake.  I didn't hear any stories about weretigers here but in another place where people saw big paw prints but no one saw the tigers, stories of weretigers cropped up pretty soon after.

This is just a few, if you visit the newsagents, you’ll see magazines dedicated to these so called mystery stories and they even come out with novella sized books that compile these stories for connoisseurs.  One thing to remember though, it is not only the Malays who love these stories, other Malaysians love them too. Only their stories are slightly different. The basic theme is however the same: Malaysian believe that we are not alone.

So, have you ever looked at your mirror in the dark lately?