WHO YOU GONNA CALL

Darqx' WORDS OF INFINITE WISDOM:

If you go down to the woods today
You're in for a big surprise

Keep these pearls of wisdom in mind and you shall soon reach eternal bliss!






GHOSTBUSTERS!

It's still super early for Halloween but it's Hungry Ghost over here so that...gives us double the spirits? Or is that ? One or the other i guess lol

Anyway for those of you not in the know Hungry Ghost is a Chinese festival that runs for a month (we are actually nearing the end of it now!), where restless spirits are free to roam the earth, potentially causing issues if they are not appeased with prayers, burnt paper offerings and food. Now the island is supposedly a pretty haunted place anyway, so with that in mind let me share with you a few vaguely creepy, (possibly) true unexplained stories.

False Alarm

About a fortnight ago i was woken up at 6:30am by the familiar beeping of my watch alarm, which prompted me to roll right back over and go back to sleep considering i usually get up at 7am to get ready for work and i really like sleep. When i woke up for reals there was this moment of clarity that my watch alarm had woken me up at 6:30. Nowhere in my watch functions is there any time or alarm or anything set to 6:30am. I checked.

In which case, what the hell did i hear at 6:30?

Leave a light on for me

This has happened at least once, without fail, every time i have the house to myself for extended periods of time (and never any other time). I can't decide whether it's some sort of paranormal activity or whether i am just crouching tiger hidden incompetent at turning lights off properly |D However, there was one such moment that can't be explained by sheer incompetency.

The way everything is set up in my house' hall, it's less time consuming and more efficient to do a round circuit of the room and turn everything off as you go. So for example you start at one end of the wall, make your way down that wall, go to the adjoining next wall and so on until you reach the opposite side of the room to where you started. As you might suspect this makes it insanely hard to leave anything on because it would stand out like a million suns in an otherwise pitch black space.

Which is why i was so confused that one time when i found one of the lights in the middle of the circuit still on the next morning.

Come on in

This supposedly happened a really long time ago to one of my former teachers (and it's Hungry Ghost related!). She's white and at the time didn't know too much about the Hungry Ghost festival or the traditions of why there where small colourful paper flags stuck along the streets other than they looked quite pretty; so she moved one a bit and stuck it in front of her house.

PRO TIP: Those flags are there to direct the ghosts to the temples for their offerings.

She had unexplained noises and disturbances in her house until someone realised what she'd done and told her to remove the flag.

She can jump so high!

My aunty told me this story (so cousin, i hope you never read this because knowing you you will not want to stay at home alone any more lol). When they first moved here and were settling into their new home, my younger cousin (who was like...3 at the time or something) had been looking out the window when he started carrying on like "Wow she is amazing how does she jump so high!" When aunty asked him what he was talking about he said that there had been a strange, ugly old lady looking at him through the window, before she had apparently jumped on to/over the roof.

Behind their house is a small patch of jungle with a number of banana trees. In Asian mythology there are lady ghosts known as pontianaks who reputedly live in banana trees. Just something to consider.

During the first few years living in their house, my two cousins also seemed to get tiny strange cuts at random, like little papercuts. Only them and not their parents. We've chalked it down to them being little and maybe hurting themselves on corners of furniture or something without realising it, as it doesn't happen anymore now that they are older. But it was still odd how they could say, go into the shower perfectly fine, and then come out and have an injury they wouldn't notice until someone pointed it out to them.

Missing person

Sometime back in 2000 and something a tourist went missing in our jungle (although, whether he simply got lost or decided to commit suicide is debatable). After about a week and a bit of search and rescue it was concluded that he possibly fell/jumped off a cliff into the ocean as his hire car was parked near the trail for a hard to reach beach, and that was that. Until one of the locals hiking through a more inner part of the jungle came across his camera, which was allegedly hanging from a tree branch. To this day no one knows what happened to him or where his body is. 

Lovely view and possibly a ghost or two

After the new hospital was built no one really knew what to do with the old hospital, which was this kind of sprawling building near an ocean-side cliff. Eventually it got done up and turned into a nice motel type place. Rumour has it that sometimes people who stay in the little self contained cottage right near the edge of the cliff experience minor odd happenings. Such as strange stains on their pillows or one kind of muted smell that they are aware of for only a few seconds.

Not so odd, maybe, if you consider that that little house used to be the hospital morgue.

The unspoken rule amongst most people is that you don't tell anyone staying there that fun fact unless they bring something up about the place or if you want to see how they react. Call it evil local humour.

Hungry ghosts

If you follow my tumblr you'll have seen this already lol

A week or so back our local newsletter ran a back article story about the ongoing Hungry Ghost Month. Just your standard fare about what it was about, how it was celebrated here and one or two photos of offerings being burnt at the temples.

And then people started noticing this in one of the photos:

Is that a face?

Or are we just perceiving it as one?