Ghosts and Ghouls of Asia:

Pocong

In Indonesian (and Malaysian) belief, a pocong (pronounced “Poh-Chong”) is the reanimated body and trapped soul of a deceased person who was not given the proper burial rights.

The pocong is described as the decomposing body of a recently buried individual wrapped in a kain kafan; which is a shroud traditionally used in Muslim burials that is wrapped completed around the body, including the feet and head where it is tied with a knot on top, leaving only the face exposed.

According to belief, the soul will remain on Earth for 40 days, and after this period has elapsed, the knot tied around the top of the head should be undone, so that the soul can ascend.

Neglecting to do so will cause the decomposing body to rise from the grave and hop around during the night, often times causing havoc. Many rural villages blame crimes on the pocong.

Pocongs are said to make great distance in seconds and are able to jump distances of 150ft in one bound. Once they lock their target on an unfortunate victim, they are relentless in their pursuit. 

To see a pocong at night is extremely bad luck, as they can be face to face with their victim in a split second.

If you see a pocong, you must run as fast as you can in the opposite direction and resist the temptation to look back- doing so would result in the ghoul appearing directly in front of you.

There are many movies features the pocong, here is a small selection:

Pocong 2 (2006) [ X ]

40 Hari Bangkitnya Pocong [ X ] 

The real Pocong [ X ] 

Sumpah (ini) pocong! [ X ] 

Tali Pocong Perawan (2008) [ X ] 

Wewe Gombel

Wewe Gombel is a child snatching super natural entity in Javanese / Sudanese mythology.

A classic old hag character with a twist, the Wewe Gombel snatches away troubled children who stay out after dark. She is described as an old woman with overly exaggerated long dropping breasts.

 The origin story of Wewe Gomble is that she was a woman from Semarang who murdered her husband after he cheated on when he discovered that she was unable to bear his children. The village chases her away and harassed her until she eventually took her own life.

She became a vengeful ghost who kidnapped mistreated children and cared for them until their parents changed their ways.

Sundel Bolong

Sundel Bolong is a vengeful ghost in Indonesian mythology, and is born of a beautiful woman (often said to be a sex worker) who died violently or during pregnancy. She is sometimes thought to have given birth either in her grave or had the baby removed from her body after death, leaving her with a large hole or open wound on her back or side, which is usually hidden by her long black hair.

Clad in a white dress, she would sometimes appear before men, sometimes  castrating or injuring them in some way.

Sundel Bolong was famously played by an actress named Suzanna Martha Frederika Van Osch- aka. Suzanna, the Indonesian queen of horror.

Suzanna was born in Buitenzorg in the Dutch East Indies and had acting roles in various ghost movies (and other genres) throughout her career.  She starred in the 1981/2 movie simply titled “Sundel Bolong” directed by Sisworo Gutama Putra, which features an iconic scene in which her character eats a large amount of chicken satay at a food shop and drinking boiling hot soup, only for it to spill out of the maggot infested wound in her back.

Watch the scene here [ X ] 

Full movie here [ X ] 

Bhoot

Identified by their backwards facing feet or sometimes upturned features, a Bhoot is a supernatural entity in Indian folklore that can shape shift into any animal at will.

They are the wandering souls of those who met violent ends and had unfinished business on Earth making them unable to move on after death. In some cases they may not have been properly buried.

Bhoots usually do not make contact with the Earth, as it is considered sacred and they cannot touch it, instead they choose to hover above the ground. They are also said to speak in a nasal voice, as if they have a cold.

Much like vampires they have no reflection and no shadow and like ghosts in many traditions they are usually bound to their place of death or a building that is familiar to them.  

Often times people will accidentally make the acquaintance of a bhoot, before they link or even notice the identifying trails of this paranormal being.

To repel a Bhoot, water or iron can be used. Burning turmeric, similar to burning sage, can keep them at bay. Scattering earth on oneself also works, however a bhoot can never be fully destroyed. 

Krasue กระสือ

 (Note: Although the Krasue exists under many different names and with slight variation in behavior, this article will be concentrating on the Thai Krasue กระสือ.)

 The Krasue is an undead, some say cursed, being. It is described as having the head and long hair of a beautiful woman and a string of organs and entrails, including the heart and lungs, hanging from its trachea. It floats through the night sky in rural areas, emitting a halo of light. 

The ghost is said to have vampire like fangs, and has been heavily featured in horror films and horror themed comic books throughout the years in Thailand. In some villages, women who often looked exhausted or were perceived as strange by the rest of the community were though to transform into Krause at sunset and fly around detached from their bodies with an insatiable hunger for flesh. Much like the Mexican Chupacabra, it would drain the blood of local livestock, however would resort to eating vegetation or feces if no living creature was available.

 Afterwards, the Krasue would use the clean laundry left out by any locals to wipe the remains of its meal from its face and mouth. This is why many older Thai’s will warn not to leave your laundry hanging out overnight, for fear of attracting ghosts or ghouls. 

Another characteristic of the Krasue is the threat it harbors to pregnant women. It is said to use its long, thin snaking tongue to infiltrate the womb and eat the baby.

 This is possibly an explanation for miscarriage and disease in a time when reasons for such things were unknown. The Krasue would screech and moan outside the homes of pregnant women, much like a banshee. 

The occupant would place a thorned plant around the perimeter of their home to ward it off. 

After a night of gorging itself, the Krasue would return home. The headless body is cautiously concealed as any fatal damage to it would lead to an agonizing death. This is one way to hunt and kill the Krasue, as well as severing the organs from the head.

 The exact origins of the creature are unknown, however there are stories that the krasue was a Khmer princess, who was burned at the stake for refusing to give up her lover from a lower social status despite being arranged to marry to a wealthy Siamese aristocrat following Cambodia’s loss in the war. 

She was said to have arranged a powerful practitioner of black magic to cast a spell that would protect her from the flames. Unfortunately, the spell only activated halfway through the burning, leaving the princess with only her head and a string of organs hanging down from her neck. 

Other legends speak of the practice of black magic gone awry, possession, witchcraft, bad karma and the consumption of food or beverages tainted with the saliva or other biological secretions from a Krasue.

Orang Medan, the ghost ship:

It was around 1947.

Two American ships were making their way through the Strait of Malacca between west Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra when they received a coded distress call from the “Orang Medan”; a Dutch merchant ship.

“"S.O.S. from Orang Medan.

We float.

All officers including the Captain, dead in chartroom and on the bridge.

Probably whole of crew dead”

There was a brief silence before the last message came through, stating simply:

“I die.”

One of the two American ships, “The silver star” managed to locate and board the ship, where they found the entire population of the ship dead, laying on their backs with curled fingers, mouths and eyes wide and gaping.

A fire broke out on the ship, causing them to evacuate and watch as the ship exploded and then sank.

No record of a ship named the “Orang Medan” was ever found.

LAWANG SEWU : THE HOUSE OF A THOUSAND DOORS

A few years ago I found myself in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia, in search of the infamous Dutch colonial era building nick named “Lawang Sewu”.

The locals told me about the place, after discovering my interest in history and the macabre, and suggested that we go to a night tour of the place.

When we showed up we were met by one man who would be giving the tour in Bahasa, but a friend of mine offered to translate any important points. There were also a few other tourists, some from Korea, and some from China, if I remember correctly, as well as some domestic tourists.

Lawang Sewu translates as “Thousand doors” and the building is called so on account of the many sections, doors, arcs and rooms built into its design. It took three years to build, with construction finally completed in 1907, and was initially built for the use of the first Dutch East Indies railway company, “Nederlandsch Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij”, up until the Japanese Invasion in ’42.

The Japanese took over the building for their own use and turned the basement of building B into a prison, where they also executed people.

On entry to the building, we were met by a grand reception room with a beautiful stained glass window on curving stair cases. It really was a great piece of architecture.

We ascended the staircase and were strictly told not to leave our small tour group or the tour guide, as it was easy to get lost.

I left to go rattle a few of those thousand door handles, some were locked shut with big rusted pad locks, some doors were ajar revealing empty rooms, save for carpets of dust and the odd piece of dilapidated furniture.

I trailed behind the group and was lead to an empty room, barren, with an unfinished wooden floor, a big ribcage of iron beams under the ceiling.

The tour guide stopped and told us the Japanese used to hang people from the beams, and that most likely we were walking through the ghosts of the hanged.

He also paused to offer us one of his free services, which was “opening our eyes to the dead”. 

He told us, with a deadpan expression, that he could do an old ritual that involved smearing either graveyard dirt, or the dirt from the floor of the room, over our eyelids, and that once we opened our eyes we would be able to see ghosts, instantly.

The only stipulation being, that we would never be able to un-see them, as there was no way to reverse the ritual.

No thanks.

After no one took him up on his offer- be it the fear of living in the constant horror of seeing gross old dead people 24/7, or the crust of bird shit that would inevitably be scooped up with dirt he was offering to smear near our eye balls, he lead us to the basement.

We had to wear rubber boots as it was flooded with about a foot of water, there were no lights so a few people in the group carried torches, but not enough to really illuminate the place.

A few of the locals in the group I was with were too scared to go down there and opted out, fearing that they might leave with a ghost of two attached to them.

The basement was in building B, which the Japanese had turned it into a detention center where they brutally tortured and executed people. My friend turned to me, the beams of torch light cutting past his face in the pitch black tunnel, and translated some of them to me.

“You see those square concrete things?”

He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me to a small door that one of the Korean tourists was checking out with their flash light. There was a concrete room, dark and wet, with rows of square vats.

“Well the Japanese would put around six prisoners in there and make them sit hunched up together, then the rain would come in and fill it with water. Can you imagine looking next to you and seeing your dead, bloated friend?”

“That’s where they would cut off people’s heads, and the blood would run down into that drain” he said, pointing to another room.

 “You see this?” He asked.

There were a row of small alcoves. Like really small.

“They are standing prisons. They would put up to twelve prisoners in there. Twelve! It doesn’t even look possible.”

 (picture from an online source.)

I stood in one of them to see how many of me could fit in there, and jolted by his slack jawed, wide eyed response, quickly jumped back out. It was a strange feeling, though, to stand in a spot that had soaked up the residual energy of so much pain and misery. 

One can’t help but wonder what would compel anyone to torture. How a mind can even conjure up such twisted ways to do so is beyond me. I had read a couple of Laurens Van Der Post books and his accounts of the Japanese during world war two, the things he had been through and seen and survived at the hands of the Japanese sent a chill down my spine.

In his book “Dawn of a new moon” Van Der Post had written about being a prisoner under the Japanese army in Sukabumi and Bandung. On the subject, during a depression, he was said to have written in his diary “It is one of the hardest things in this prison life: the strain caused by being continually in the power of people who are only half-sane and live in twilight of reason and humanity."

I couldn’t help but remember this quote at that moment.

People often visited Lawang Sewu as if it were a ghost house at a carnival. T.V shows shoot episodes there for entertainment, scaring their contestants out of the prize money with tales of ghosts and hauntings, but no myth or folklore or sighting could ever be more terrifying that what happened in the basement of building B to those Dutch prisoners and nationalist Indonesian youth who were imprisoned there.

Real life is horror.

The tour guide made us all turn off our torches and stand in complete silence in the pitch black. He was reenacting the scene from a famous episode from a reality paranormal TV show "Dunia Lain - Lawang Sewu" where a man sits in the exact basement we were all standing in, in the darkness, and they capture a ghost on the night cam.

I didn’t see or hear anything, bar a couple of nervously giggling Chinese tourists.

Our tour was over.

It was an unforgettable trip.

We met up with the friends from our group who were too afraid to join us in the basement and headed out into the night. I breathed a sigh of relief to be back outside in the open. Lawang sewu is like another dimention and it had really given me the creeps.

I heard that the Government attempted to rebrand it and make it into some kind of cultural center, but I’m not so sure that the house of a thousand doors will ever shake its gruesome history.

If you want to stop by, here's the address: 

TJalan Pemuda, Komplek Tugu Muda, Semarang, Jawa Tengah 13220, Indonesia