The Ghost Sickness: True Documented Cases of Mass Spiritual Possession in Malaysia

It's a typical day at the factory, though with not the best conditions. Well, except for the administration of the place. They get air conditioned offices, while the rest around six hundred and fifty production workers get to be on the loud floor. It's hot and poorly ventilated. Now they make shoes for one of the largest companies in the area, primarily for export, and everything for milling, sewing, assembly, and packing are done on site. But unfortunately for the production workers, things are about to get worse because whispers around the factory were speaking of bizarre behavior in the assembly and sewing departments, behavior they said that was caused by spirit possession. Workers would suddenly gain abnormal strength and they would become hysterical and others would have to hold them down and it would spread to the rest. They would scream, convulse, and loose consciousness in large groups all at once. But it wouldn't end there. These events started occurring in other places in Malaysia, in rural schools and hostels, with all similar occurrences, but all of them involved women, and with some cases happening in recent years. What was going on today We're going to be exploring one of the most bizarre cases of mass spiritual possession in Malaysia, heavily documented cases that involved curses, sightings of an evil, dark spirit, and events that school officials and business owners still struggle to understand. My name is Edwin and here is a horror story. The late nineteen seventies, Malaysia was getting industrialized pretty quickly, and a shoe factory known as Kota Celatan, located in the rural landscape of northern Malacca, was just another result of it, but it became known for being the center of an extraordinary phenomenon. This factory relied heavily on intensive labor, mainly coming from five hundred and thirty three young Malay women that lived in the neighboring villages and got involved with assembly and sewing. If the events on spirit possession weren't new, if we have to go back to the very beginning, we would have to start in June of nineteen seventy seven. It was then when the factory got a new general manager known only as c. F and he was much stricter than the rest. Just around the same time he started, there was a spike in disturbances and in those ten months from July nineteen seventy seven to April nineteen seventy eight, the factory underwent more than forty outbreaks of mass spirit possession. But what were these like? These events would come out of nowhere. Affected Malay female workers would suddenly start convulsing, violently, mumbling, screaming, and losing conscious business, as well as showing aggressive behavior. When others would step into help, they were surprised by the victims abnormal strength. But the possessions spread from women to women. Yet they didn't seem to affect Chinese or Indian female workers, nor any of the male employees. But it was one event, a severe incident, when the general manager was forced to shut down the entire factory for almost two weeks after thirty women began to get possessed. At the same time, the workers thought that this was spiritual retribution, explaining it by saying that one of the workers had inadvertently disturbed a family of spirits, one that was residing in the factory's large water tank. It was retaliating by possessing the girls. Another belief was that the evil spirits were targeting and possessing unclean girls, those that had violated traditional moral codes by drinking alcohol, dancing at night, or mixing too freely with men. At the time, the management was made up of mainly Chinese guys, and they were baffled by what was happening, so they decided to accept the worker's explanations and sent the girls home on medical leave. Then to mend the situation with the invisible forces, they sent in Bomos traditional healers to perform exorcisms and purification rituals, including slaughtering a goat, and it seemed to help. But this was one of the most notable stories of mass spirit possession and journalists were already investigating. Reporting on the theories of researchers and medical experts, they reached a consensus that what they were witnessing was epidemic hysteria. And if we stepped back a few years to nineteen seventy four, we find another case that signals to the same thing. It's a place over a thirteen day period that started in May of nineteen seventy four. This was the only recorded case of epidemic hysteria that affected a Chinese extended family at the time, and it involved members of four nuclear families. It's one that was living about seven miles from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Here's what happened. It was May eighteenth, nineteen seventy four, and the sister in law of y W had some complications after giving birth. The brother voluntarily went into a trance to pray for her recovery, but despite his efforts, she died. The family was holding a religious ceremony for her when suddenly y W abruptly ran about four hundred yards. He crossed the main road and then down a dark path back to his home, screaming that evil spirits were chasing him. Back at the house was a father, a seventy three year old man with slurring speech from a stroke that he had two months prior, and he was concerned that death was after him, not his son. They had already taken his daughter in law. Was it the same entity that had chased Yw? So on the second night, he put on his red sash, something that he wore when he went into a trance for diagnoses or for healing of illnesses because he was also a spirit medium. He induced the trance, praying that YW take over his duties, claiming that both of his sons YW and Ys were to be possessed by his gods. The third day, two others went into a brief trance when they consulted another spirit medium, a woman. A family becoming more aggressive. One of the brothers in law tried to choke another, and in a panic, dark figures appeared, described to be devils. They actually chased them. Two family members ran out of the house at two in the morning to seek help from the spirit medium at a nearby village, who was able to help them. By the fourth day, the family was having sudden outbursts and trying to run out of their houses, but friends would hold him back, while other family members stayed away, either because of fear or by the advice of the spirit medium. On day five, the brother of the first man that had encountered the dark figure rushed out of the house and climbed up a pine tree, and his friends were concerned for his life, so they quickly found this sack and they stood on a table trying to break his fall when he jumped down. To the fear of onlookers, he jumped and he landed on his heel and crashed on the wooden table, completely shattering it and nearby in one of the houses. Another relative was screaming and grabbed their pet cat and strangled it to death. Not even one hundred yards away. Y W was muttering to himself. Some of them rushed out to grab a nearby spirit mediums to come and perform healing ceremonies, but nothing was working. They needed to get the word out to find someone who could deal with this, so on day six, the story made headlines in the Chinese newspaper in Kuala Lumpur. They were calling for Bomos, the Taoist priest, to come and help this family, who had already spent a lot of money trying to get treatment. By ten in the morning, a crowd of about twenty was gathering in front of the spirit medium's house, where three of the siblings were. The site was eerie to see why. S was sitting with his head bent quietly, when suddenly he got up and rushed to the door. He was quickly restrained by his friends. Another one was hyperventilating, arms and legs stretched out in a type of spasm. She seemed to understand what was being told to her. Unfortunately, she was able to slow down her breathing and relax but hy W was speaking Gibberish, saying that he was a leper arguing with the spirit medium about it, and when he was about to get examined, he rushed out of the house and had to be carried back. On the eighth day, Ys was hospitalized due to the advice of one of the spirit mediums who noticed that his pulse was very weak. Yw was still having trances. He climbed onto a neighbor's roof and swam in the water tank, and again he himself ended up being hospitalized on day thirteen. There were several explanations that were provided because of the medicine men and women. They called it sieh ping, the Chinese term for possession by evil spirits or ghost sickness. Based on this belief, a living person is believed to be possessed by an ancestral ghost or spirit, and people that experience it show signs of disorientation, delirium, crying or laughing at random times, hallucinations, and sometimes doing things like hitting heads against walls. In mainland China and in Taiwan, this is framed not so something purely psychiatric, but a linking point between spirit communication because an ancestor is trying to communicate or coming back through another family member and mental illness. This diagnosis pointed to the family themselves having offended or accidentally crossed the path of some spirits, while other theories said that perhaps the father must have done something evil in his youth and now his children were being punished through possession. But either way, traditional healers got to work things like bathing with Jampi magic water, squeezing lime on the head, and giving out talismans to be burnt and drunk as medicine, which helped the wife of one of the brothers. The incident shook an entire country and was even studied by a university hospital psychiatrist through home visits, interviews and hospital management. The conclusion was pretty interesting. The psychiatrist said that the outbreak was epidemic state where the members that were affected had suffered from mysterical dissociative reactions had all been unleashed after the triggering event, which was the death of a sister in law and the father's recent stroke as well. But why w The initiator had a secondary diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and delayed pathological grief. Apparently something that we found out later was that he had gotten in a motorcycle accident six years prior that killed a friend and he felt guilty about it. Fortunately he was able to receive treatment. But epidemic hysteria in Malaysia was not new even then. In fact, there was a series of events that happened between nineteen sixty two and nineteen seventy one, even before this time that I just told you about, where twenty nine schools in the Peninsular Malaysia area were recorded to have had this happen, but in the year nineteen seventy one they saw a total of seventeen schools being involved. The incidents had some similarity. It was usually young Malay schoolgirls in the lower and upper secondary classes. In all of these cases, Spontaneous possession by agin we might know as a free spirit happens when a person interferes with the spirit living spaces or if the victim involved has a low semangat known as a low life force or low vital energy. There was a detailed study of one of these outbreaks, the one we're going to look at today, and it happened in early nineteen seventy one in an isolated rural Malay school hostile. But first some context. The hostel had gotten messed up after some of the floods of January and adding more chaos to everything. There was a history of poor administration after they got relief money, and the headmaster was known to frequently make unannounced embarrassing visit to the female living quarters, which went against Malay customary laws. Okay, so, six weeks after the floods, one of the hostile girls started to get these titanic spasms, and Abomo came and healed her, but two weeks later she had two more seizures. A couple of days after that, two more residents became possessed, but one of them, while she was undergoing the spirit possession, said in a strange tone an accent, that the place was dirty. There was jealousy among the hostile girls. The complaint was that the girls had thrown away their sanitary towels into a mining pool behind the hostel and had ritually and physically polluted the living quarters of an offended gin. Next days, more girls became possessed, and eventually five girls would go into possession every day, and within the period of ten weeks, eight girls had gone into possession. And they were even forming this sorority under this spokesman which they had come up with. There had been some kind of organization to the possessions. By the end of April nineteen seventy one, officials from the Ministry of Education were called in to investigate the outbreak, and when they arrived, five girls went into hysteria together. The headmen of this small town, a district officer, community leaders, and the chairman of the school board of governors all showed up. Now, I want to clear this up. This is an interesting scene. Here we have school and city officials and the girl that is being possessed by this spokesman, who is this trans like state spirit now along with them as a spirit medium, and the headmaster and the local chief of the village. So it's like all these people talking to this spirit through this girl. In the bizarre scene, all of the men are kneeling in front of the girl who is known as a spokesman, and for thirty minutes they negotiate the relief of the possession, finally reaching an agreement they would sacrifice a white chicken. Now this sounds a little strange to some of us, but it was the way that she said it that baffled everyone because her tone was like that of a Malay royal person, poetic and in a vocabulary that seemed far beyond her educational status. Three days later, it was a Friday, there was a ritual ceremony in the school in front of three hundred witnesses that would calm down the offended gin. They had elements and instruments that were super old and the Powan, a traditional spirit healer, reassured the offended gin that they would not offend him again. Then he instituted a three day abstinence period that the whole community would follow, and if the rules were broken, then the gin could potentially repossess the girls. But after this the episodes of hysteria stopped. All of these cases of mass spirit possession have been studied and researched by professionals, including psychiatrists that dealt directly with the victims. But I feel like this last one, that one about the screaming Scrol girls, might help explain the rest for context. Malaysia and the majority of the Malay community believes in spirits almost by default, which is why I was able to find so many ghost stories during my visit there. Now, most of these stories mentioned gins, and in this case, gins were believed to live in the area behind the girls hostel. The gins decided to attack the girls because they were polluting the area, but waited until the semangad the life force of the girls was at their lowest. But what may have contributed to this, Well, remember the headmaster, well, the woman in charge of the hostel had left the job because he kept interfering and he didn't bother to find another one, and then he would end up showing up at the hostile at weird hours of the day and night, which the girls were embarrassed by. The customary law say that it was taboo for a male to enter where a woman lives. Now, what this guy did to defend himself was that he saw them as his daughters. That's what he said, so he was allowed to do this despite the social taboo. But still these girls were afraid that he would walk in while they were still undressed. Generally, everyone in the community thought that it was wrong for a man to manage a girl's hostel. Already, so there was a strong suspicion that he may have molested them, but had no evidence. And then, of course another stressor were the january floods that left everything in disrepair. And when the case study of the factory, there was a new addition of the strict general manager and harsh working conditions, and the case of the Chinese family, there was a recent death that caused all this stress is that was waiting for in order to possess the victims. The community seems to think so, despite all of the seemingly logical explanations, because even in this case of the screaming school girls, the community used the poor administration of the school and the bad headmaster teacher relationship, as well as his strange visits to the girls hostels, all as reasons for him to get fired. However, the head master was able to keep his job in the end when they got a hostile manager and attempts were made to fix the relationship with the teachers. The epidemic hysteria was never mentioned as a reason to get him fired, and the reason for the hysteria was still attributed to the spirits that had been disturbed. Now there might be a strong connection between spiritual possession and what medical professionals define as hysteria under stress and due situations. There's a lot more that didn't get explained. What about these dark figures that appear like in the schoolgirls event or with yw who was chased by one? Actually, this image of a dark figure was circulating around social media with the schoolgirls. It even created more hysteria. I got the chance to look at it, and honestly, it is a little creepy, but it's blurry, and I don't know, it's a little questionable. Still. It's all of this stress and anger externalized into supernatural causes. And has it been this way all along? What if it isn't. What if all of these supernatural explanations are being diluted down to something our human brains can comprehend and accept. What if there really are ancestral spirits among us, waiting in the darkness for a single moment of weakness before they make their move. This episode of horror Story was created by me Edwin Koarubiaz and if you want me to send you a weekly true haunting or mystery, click the link in the description. Our newsletter is free for everyone. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it's scary everyone too soon