Hunting a Hantu.
Ghostly manifestations tend to follow the same types everywhere. In particular there is a world-wide resemblance among those unruly and exuberant spirits which are best called by their German name – Poltergeist. They amuse themselves in houses by throwing about furniture large and small, crockery, stones and other missiles, to the destruction of the windows and peace of mind of the inhabitants.
Mr W T Stead has been credited with saying in an interview that “stone-throwing ghosts” are confined to tropical countries, but if he did he was wrong. The newspapers reported a good case in Hull in 1908, and another in Bolton in 1909.
Daniel Defoe was familiar with much the same sort of thing. In his “Political History of the Devil” (1726) he speaks with some contempt of the tricks the Devil is supposed to play, “such as tumbling chairs and stools about the house, setting pots and vessels upside down, tossing the glass and crockery-ware about without breaking, and such-like mean, foolish things.”
This is exactly the behaviour of the modern Poltergeist, except that he is less considerate to crockery ware. “My Lady Hatt’s devil in Essex,” whose doings Defoe describes in detail, was as destructive as its present-day successors unless a mallet was provided for it in a certain chamber. But if it got its mallet “it would come very orderly and knock with it all night against the wainscot and disturb the neighbourhood, and then go away in the morning as satisfied as may be.”
Now for a modern instance. In a small Chinese mining village in Perak, in the Malay Peninsula, news was one day brought to the inspector of police for the district that a certain house had been troubled nightly for a week by a hantu or demon. Large stones and bricks would be flung against the wooden walls by some invisible agency. Cups, cooking utensils, tin joss-stick holders, and other small objects disappeared mysteriously during the day, to come flying in through the open door after nightfall. People asleep were mysteriously soused with water, and several times the thatched roof was found afire.
But dangerous as its tricks might seem, the hantu was apparently not without some saving common sense, for no one had been hurt and no damage done except to fragile missiles. Malays would have left the haunted spot at once, but the Chinaman, if not more sceptical, is less easily driven away from his property. Evening after evening crowds had gathered round the house while the disturbance continued, and searched diligently for the person, if person it was, who was playing these extraordinary tricks, but not a trace of him could they find. Then the hantu grew bolder. The disturbances, which at first were confined to the evening, began to occur by day as well.
Bicycles brought the inspector and me to the scene about 9 p.m., and we saw a collection of the hantu’s missiles, which included a parang (a big heavy knife used for chopping wood), bricks, and lumps of stone. Inquiries elicited no information as to the species of hantu which are supposed to be at work. The Chinamen were not familiar with the countless demons of Malaya. One of the latter is the hantu dapor, which enters Malay kitchens (dapor) at night to steal any curry and rice which may be there. If you see the embers glowing up into flame and hear the blowing of his mouth you may know that he is there.
He wears pots for bracelets and a necklace of curry pots, and from each of his elbows projects a sharp knife. If you can catch him he will give you anything you ask for, as will several other varieties of the demons of this country; but if you are wise you will not try it, for he can use his elbow-knives with precision and effect. This creature frequently sets fire to the kitchens he visits, but he is not noisy.
Though the people occupying it were poor, the house itself was not a bad one as the houses of natives go in these parts, being made of wood and fairly large. It was built round a well, which was left open to the sky, and the walls of the rooms round it did not rise to the roof. In one such room was the bed on which water had several times fallen. Obviously the water came from the well and had been thrown over the wall; by so much the mystery was diminished.
While we waited and talked and tried to check the hospitality of these poor people (they fetched beer in quart bottles and whisky) no sound more unusual than the dropping of a cocoa-nut from a palm outside was heard for some time. But at last cries came from the kitchen. Another fire had been discovered and extinguished by a girl of about seventeen, who – it appeared – had also discovered the previous one. This strengthened the idea I had started with, based on Mr F Podmore’s study of Poltergeists in his “Modern Spiritualism.” Mr Podmore concluded from his investigations that the cause of these disturbances was almost always a child or a young girl, usually one subject to hysteria or epilepsy.
The other people in the house were all adults or infants, so that it behoved us to watch this girl who had the knack of discovering the hantu‘s attempts at arson. She was told to stay in the room where we were, and with a very bad grace she did so. Finally we allowed her to go, thinking that she might use her freedom to provide some positive evidence. Another long wait followed, but at last a loud bang sounded in the passage leading to the room in which we were seated. Entering it, we saw that the girl was sitting on the side of a bed looking out through the open door of her room. She ran out and pointed excitedly to some fragments of a lump of hard earth which were lying on the floor of the passage.
Now the missile could have been thrown from the bed to strike the wall where it did, and it was noticeable that the girl paused to wash her hands hurriedly as she came out. Her eyes did not look as if she had just been suddenly awakened, and her manner was highly excited. The next step was to look at the bed. Under the pillow there were two lumps of hard earth and some crumbled soil. That closed the investigation. The girl herself volubly denied that she had thrown anything, and perhaps she was speaking sincerely, for the self-deception of a person in a slightly abnormal mental state who is acting a part has no limits. What was stranger, not one of her relatives was in the slightest degree convinced. Perhaps they knew her to be truthful, and perhaps they accepted her suggestion that the hantu had put the clods beneath her pillow.
But we felt, as we rode home in the small hours, that the problem was solved, and with a certain regret I set this down as another ghost explained away. The disturbances virtually ceased from that night. Except for another little fire, discovered and doubtless started by the same girl, nothing more has been heard of the Sungei Siput hantu. The girl who created it may have had a definite motive for doing so. Her parents had betrothed her in the usual Chinese fashion, and it is suggested that she wished to drive away from the house a certain old woman in whose care she was, and who, if the girl had views of her own as to the bestowal of her hand, perhaps kept too strict an eye on her doings. This may be so, but as an eye-witness I find it hard to think of her conduct as merely a plot carried out in cold blood. In part, at least, the explanation must be found on Mr Podmore’s lines. J. O’MAY.
Manchester Guardian, 4th May 1910.