A child becoming invisible and reappears days later. A man, lost in the jungles, believed dead, reenters the world of man, looking like a skeleton.
Stories like these are common in Borneo, and seem to point to the presence of an invisible, and mostly uncomforting world: The realm of evil spirits.
In the realm of evil spirits
On a Sunday afternoon in December 2006, I went to my land to collect some discarded hardwood beams, with the purpose of building a few bookshelves. The strong downpours having paused, only a faint drizzle sprayed down to my head through the leaves as I walked the slippery lane through our fruit orchard.
“Don’t stay too long,” Maureen had told me. She was always afraid of what the Borneo people call the hot rain, a drizzle that brings the presence of spirits even during daylight. Not listening, I started to gather the timber and bring it back to my car. Huge clouds towered above my head, and it was only a question of time until the next burst of rain would erupt. I was in a hurry to finish my job.
Later during the day, I felt a strong headache, which didn’t go away, neither at night of uneasy sleep, or during the next morning in the office, despite a few Alka-Seltzers. Coming home at lunchtime, Maureen gave me a very painful massage at my arms, and the headache went away.
“It’s the ghost,” she said, with a cryptic smile on her face.
The same day I questioned Margaret, an Orang Ulu lady who works with me in the office.
“Better watch out with the hot rain,” she said. “Even if you come only close to the bad spirit, it may enter your body. We (the Orang Ulu tribes people) normally put a little bit of grass on our hats, when we go out on the land. The grass acts as a form of disguise, and the bad spirit cannot see or smell us, as it hovers above. Children are particularly at risk. The bad ghost can make the kid invisible, and take it away into the realm of darkness.”
“How come,” I inquired incredulously. “Have you ever seen it happen?”
“It happened a while ago in the Upper Baram region,” Margaret replied.
“That time, an old lady went walking to her tapioca fields, in the company of her granddaughter. As it started to drizzle, she asked the kid to stay at a little shelter hat, located only some 50 yards away, and slightly above from her tapioca plots.
“For a moment, the old lady was busy harvesting tapioca roots, and turned her back to the area, where she had left her granddaughter. Having harvested a bundle of roots, the old lady returned on the muddy track. Only a couple of minutes had passed. She looked out, and called for her granddaughter, but there was no trace of the little girl. She searched for more than an hour in the surroundings of her tapioca fields, without any success. Then, it was getting dark, and the old lady returned to the longhouse in both anxious and sad mood. She knew something wasn’t right.
“The next morning, the alerted village population spread out and searched for the little girl, without finding a trace of her. Three entire days passed, and there was no hope left.
“But on the fourth day, the girl mysteriously reappeared; precisely at the same spot the grandma had left her, above the tapioca plots. The little girl looked pale and severely traumatized, and mumbled strange things that nobody understood and didn’t make sense. Her appearance looked dirty - she had soil and grass in her mouth and ears.
“When questioned about what had happened, she replied that she had been watching the search teams, as they were looking for her, but nobody could see her. Captive of the evil spirits, that surrounded her, she called, cried, and screamed, but nobody could hear her. She tried to touch people, but nobody would feel her touch. Even today, she behaves a little strange, and always seems to have one foot in the invisible world.”
“It has happened even to adult persons,” Margaret continued after a pause.
“A few years ago, a party from the Geological Society of Malaysia went on an expedition into a wild and remote area, up from Kapit in the vicinity of the Indonesian border. My friend Kim-Kiat, who was on the expedition team, once told me that story.
“They were a group of about eight men, geologists and helpers, and were cutting a path up a jungle-covered valley. One of the men, a helper and experienced jungle tracker, requested to stay behind, to do ‘his business,’ saying that he would catch up quickly with the team.
“However, when he didn’t turn up a ten, twenty and thirty minutes later, the party got worried and decided to go back along the trail, and to search for him. But how hard they tried there was no sign of the missing helper. They called him, but only eerie echoes reverberated from the dark walls of jungle that surrounded them. He had seemingly disappeared. The research team alerted the closest Penan (a nomadic jungle tribe) settlement. For three days they searched the entire area, but again there was no sign of the missing man.
“The research party cancelled the expedition, and returned back to the base camp. More searches were carried out, that concluded negatively without finding a trace.
“The news about the man’s disappearance spread rapidly, and caused a lot of sorrow. People started to finger-point, in search of a culprit. The family of missing man was particularly angry, and even started a court case against the organizers of the field party. The latter refused to pay, given the fact that no corpse, not even the slightest evidence of the missing man could be found. That way the court case ran into a stalemate, and dragged on for some eighteen months.
“Then, suddenly, and to everyone’s surprise, the missing helper reappeared – on the other edge of the jungle, several hundreds of kilometers deep in Indonesian Kalimantan. His clothes were only rags, and his body was only skin and bones.
When he reappeared, the Indonesians in the field ran away, believing they had seen a ghost, so skeleton-like the man looked.
“Finally people took the courage to question him about what happened. He told that he had been lost for only 1.5 days. Alone in the jungle, he had initially met a group of people, who had invited him to follow them to catch-up rapidly with his colleges, whilst following the same trail. However, as hours passed, he never caught up or saw even a glimpse of this team. The new companions, however, seemed to lead him deeper into the jungle. Finally, feeling suspicious, he sat down and prayed. Suddenly, at this very moment, his mysterious companions disappeared. He realized he had been following a group of ghosts that had taken the appearance of humans.
The same day, he reached the edge of the jungle, the limit of civilization, in Indonesia, and returned back to Sarawak. It is said, that one day in the world of ghosts is equivalent to one year in the world of people.”
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