Thursday, April 28, 2016

Malaysia’s bomohs: Witch doctors in modern society...

Last week, students at several schools in the town of Pengkalan Chepa in the eastern Malaysian state of Kelantan suddenly began screaming and gyrating, seeing a particular Malay ghost called Pontianak, also known as Kuntilanak in Indonesia — evil, half-dead, foul-smelling, dripping blood with a nail stuck in her neck, a shrieking female poltergeist.

The case of girls in school dorms or dorm-like habitats in multinational microchip assembly plants such as those in Penang is not new. In the 1970s and 1980s they were regular occurrences, with factories filled with screaming women, and western multinationals kept close contact with bomohs, or Malay shamans, to dispel the spirits.

Nor are they are unique to Malaysia although Malaysia seems a particular center for the phenomenon. They have been observed since the Middle Ages, where nuns in a French convent simultaneously began mewing like cats, according Robert E. Bartholomew and Erich Good, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer in May of 2000. Episodes, the two wrote, typically occur in small, tightly knit groups such as schools, factories, convents and orphanages.

Growing up, I recall elite boarding schools such as those Mara Junior Science Colleges experiencing mass hysteria and group-dynamics demon possession as well In a Kuantan town in the mid-1970s. One ghost was said to look like an angry belly-rubbing monk from Thailand, a “bomoh-Siam-looking ghost” that sat on the rooftop of the girls’ dorms. One girl said she saw him and the dormitory exploded into humming and screaming and ghost-dancing and praying, and the bomoh was called in. He brought a live chicken as a tool for healing. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Malaysia school shut amid 'mass hysteria' over sightings of a black figure...
  2. Bomoh called in as girls in Malaysian school are hit by hysteria...
  3. Malaysian witch doctor government asked to help with missing plane now...
  4. Chinese ridicule Malaysia's recruitment of 'witch doctor' to track missing plane...
  5. "Bomohs" in Malaysia capture 12 djinns from possessed girl and seal them up...
  6. Malaysian girls fall for bomoh’s virginity ‘restoration’ con!!!

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