Spirits and Ghosts in the East – Part One

Mae Nak Phra Khanong

A book I recently bought has revived my interest in the ghosts and supernatural beings of the Far East.

Since my stay in Malaysia, I have tried to investigate the profound belief in their existence even among highly educated people, while in Italy the belief in ghosts is usually associated with a “magical thought” related to people with low school level, if not completely villager or “peasant”.

Instead in Malaysia, as in Indonesia, the certainty of the existence of spirits is transversal, by age and socio-cultural level.

To the point of almost convincing me too.

Short story about it. My home, inside the university, was near a lake, and in the evening I always made the same journey, in the dark, crossing the lake on a small bridge. I suffered a lot that year, walking a lot and taking hundreds of photographs. I was very, very tired.

It can be said that I was bent over with fatigue.

The ustadz of the university, an expert in Islam, read my aura one afternoon and told me that I was always tired because I returned every evening by the lake and that place was full of jins, the spirits, who loved to follow me to the home. Among these was the ghost of an old woman who had clung to my shoulders, in love with me, and she never left me, and at night when I slept she sucked my blood.

I laughed out loud.

Then I went to Jakarta, Indonesia, and was asked to do a traditional massage. The woman who did it to me was making strange guttural sounds, forcing air out of her mouth. It was somewhat comical.

But when she began to rub my back she began to pronounce an Islamic formula to invoke Allah, and her guttural sounds grew in intensity. I asked her what was going on and she replied that she had found the ghost of an old woman who was hugging me and making me sick.

I rolled my eyes. How was this possible? The masseuse and the ustadz did not know each other and were in two different countries.

Anyway, she finally pulled it off me between burps and aggressive massages.

When I returned to Malaysia I was much less tired. And for a while, I avoided passing by the lake at night.

Let's call it a suggestion.

 

I knew one thing: almost all the ghosts and spirits in those parts are female, as can be seen well in many Asian horror films.

At the university, I met a student who was writing a postgraduate thesis on this topic, on the sociological motivation of the female predominance among ghosts and evil spirits.

I left before she finished it, but we were both clear that the most profound motivation was to associate the women with fear, in order to better control them. Since childhood people grow up, in those places, as well as in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines, with the unconscious awareness that women are monstrous beings to be feared.

Man has wisdom – akal, they say in Malaysia – woman nakal, lustful, desirous, corrupting, prey to carnal instincts.

Woman is the devourer and man's duty is to contain her dangerous nature.

 

It is not that this vision of women is lacking in the West.

If the witches who went to the stake in the Middle Ages are famous, it is worth remembering for their symbolic value the Keres of Greek mythology, the female spirits of death, or the goddesses who personified violent death, attracted by bloody deaths on the battlefields. They had no power to kill but waited, thirsting for human blood, to then feast on the dead. The Keres were dark beings with gnashing teeth and claws daughters of Nyx (the Night) and as such sisters of beings such as Moirai, who controlled the fate of souls, and Thanatos, the god of Death. Some later authorities, such as Cicero, called them by a Latin name, Tenebrae (“the Darkness”).

 

Keres

In absolute terms, the figure to which the ghost or the female malignant spirit is closest in Asia is that of the vampire, in fact: she who sucks blood is almost always male.

It is no coincidence that the book I eagerly read is entitled: “Mae Nak – Vampire women and hungry spirits from the Far East”, written by Alessandra Campoli for Exòrma Edizioni.

Mae Nak is perhaps the most famous ghost, not only in Thailand where she lives.

Different spirits are described in the book even if the greatest space is dedicated to the terrible Mae Nak, to whom a temple in Bangkok is also dedicated, and dozens of horror films.

Like many such spirits, Mae Nak shares a tragic history, a terrible existence that made her the source of terror she is now.

It's a story that dates back to the 18th century.

Set during the reign of King Mongkut, in a small forest village by the bank of the Phra Khanong River. This was a time of warfare and the kingdom was under constant threat from enemy tribes.

In that village lived the beautiful Nak, who became the bride of her beloved Mak.

Theirs was a simple life, made up of agriculture and immense mutual love. Until one day her husband's call to arms came, just as his young wife was expecting their first child. He left, promising that he would be back in time to see their baby born.

While Nak anxiously awaited her husband's return, Mak was seriously wounded in the war and treated in a monastery. As soon as he was able to walk, after months of convalescence, he asked the monks to let him go to see his wife. The abbot of the monastery – who was also a powerful exorcist – suggested that he not go and become a monk in the monastery, but the man was willing to return and so he did.

He found his wife with their child in her arms, waiting for him as she did every day on the river bank.

Thus the story seemed to end, in the sign of love.

But the truth was another.

Nak's delivery was difficult and both the mother and her baby died from complications of her birth. Also, as was the belief in the village, when a woman died with her child in childbirth, everyone was terrified, for they knew that they might return as malevolent and vengeful spirits; therefore the necessary rituals were performed to avert the unfortunate event: their mouths were closed with long needles so that their hungry spirits did not return to feed on blood and their bodies were buried in the forest, far from the village.

But all this was not enough to prevent Nak from returning as a revenant, or those deceased but undead creatures who, unaware of their death, or reluctant to enter the world of the dead, remain attached to the world of the living, becoming haunting and dangerous presences.

They are usually vampiric creatures trapped in a limbo between life and death, and the pain they feel is the source of their dark and violent nature.

Not surprisingly, in Thailand, the most feared spirits are the phi tai hong, or spirits who died by violent death. Not yet ready to die, the trauma of violent death makes them terribly hungry for existence, which is satisfied by feeding on the lifeblood – very often the blood – of those they meet.

Among them, the most dangerous and violent is phi tai hong tong klom: the spirits of women who died during pregnancy or in giving birth to the newborn, who dies with the mother.

In this case, the angry and vengeful spirit is not only that of the mother but also that of the newborn, and both go in search of her lost husband, in a fascinating and frightening mixture of love-seeking and vengeance.

This is the spirit of Nek, who envelops her husband in a spell making him believe that everything is as before, their home (actually destroyed), their love, and herself still beautiful.

Beyond the domestic walls, however, her spirit continues to kill all those in the village she believes guilty of her death and anyone who tries to warn Mak of the curse.

It will be by chance that the man will know the truly monstrous nature of his wife and will flee taking refuge in the Buddhist temple of Wet Mahabut.

In short, the fate of the village will be saved by a Buddhist monk who will be able to close the spirit of Nek in an amphora and throw it into the river.

It was only by digging up the bodies that Nak would find peace, with the monk's promise that in the next life she could live in peace with her beloved husband and their son.

 

There are many film versions of this story: it is a classic of Asian horror.

At the heart is always this vengeful and hungry female spirit.

Sometimes it goes beyond the usual portrait of a woman with white robes, very long hair and nails, and a face like a mask, which in the West was made famous by the series “The Ring”, an American remake of the classic Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata from 1998, based on the novel by Koji Suzuki.

Horrible is phi krasue, perhaps the most disturbing of them, a flying woman's head with her dangling internal organs hanging below her neck, which she infects with her saliva as she travels from body to body.

In Malaysia she is known as penanggalan, populating ancient Malay tales and legends. As in the witches of the Middle Ages, she too was originally a witch who, to escape her lynching, fell off cutting off her head which instead of rolling began to fly.

In this case, her fate is even more obscure than the Thai version, because her nourishment is puerperal blood, sucking the double lifeblood of the pregnant woman and her fetus like a vampire.

Thus it was a tradition in Malaysia to surround the house of a pregnant woman with pointed stakes so as to entangle the flying innards of the spirit.

In the Philippines, it becomes manananggal, which also has a long proboscis to enter the pregnant woman and feed on the unborn child's heart.

In this case, the spirit can become a beautiful woman to deceive humans.

Of these spirits, a trait emerges that is very important and is linked to my initial speech, namely that of the symbolic power behind these myths.

As Campoli writes well in the book:

“Avidly sucking the precious liquid, penanggalan becomes the emblem of that bond that exists between the apparition of the monstrous and the blood of childbirth which, a reason for impurity and bearer of an intrinsic destructive power and fatal influences, is, like menstrual blood, the undisputed object of ancestral taboos.” (p. 50)

 

Manananggal

 

And here the discourse becomes anthropological rather than mere folklore linked to spirits and ghosts.

The legend establishes the collective stigma for female impurity, its danger, and does so by telling of flying heads and vengeful spirits.

 

But I want to focus on the spirits of Malaysia and Indonesia.

I will do that in the next part.

However, I leave you with a short list of the spirits that inhabit those places to make you understand the richness of popular tradition.

 

Bajang: The spirit of a stillborn child in the form of a civet (musang).

Bota: A type of evil spirit, usually a giant.

Hantu galah: a ghost with long thin arms and legs like bamboo canes.

Hantu kopek: a female ghost with big breasts who attracts men who cheat on their wives.

Hantu kum-kum: the ghost of an old woman who sucks the blood of virgin girls to regain her youth.

Hantu lilin: a wandering spirit who carries a lighted torch or candle at night.

Hantu Pemburu: the ghostly hunter whose head always looks up with a sprout growing from his neck

Hantu punjut: a ghost who catches children wandering in the forest late at night

Hantu tinggi: lit. “tall ghost”, a type of giant who flees at the sight of a naked body

Jembalang: a demon or evil spirit that usually brings disease.

Lang suir: the mother of a pontianak. She is able to take the form of an owl with long claws and attacks pregnant women out of jealousy.

Mambang: animistic spirits of various natural phenomena.

Orang minyak: a cursed man covered in black oil who rapes women at night, made famous by a 1958 film by the famous actor and singer P. Ramlee.

Pelesit: a type of grasshopper that predates the arrival of the polong.

Penanggal: a flying head with its disembodied gastric sac dangling below and sucking the blood of newborns.

Penunggu: tutelary spirits of particular places such as caves, forests, and mountains.

Pocong: a ghost wrapped in a white burial shroud

Polong: a female-like spirit the size of a thumb.

Puaka: nature spirit of a place usually said to reside in abandoned buildings

Raksaksa: man-eating humanoid demons often able to change appearance at will.

Toyol: the spirit of a stillborn child, appears as a naked baby.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED...

Italian version