(Original headline: Ona sees dead people )
Ona Rasikan, 21, has no way of dodging ghosts and is resigned to her fate. “I try to pray to keep my sanity and hope for divine intervention to keep me safe. Given a choice, I would not want to see ghosts. Nobody would,” she says.
For her, the eerie contacts with ghosts are not confined to a particular month, like Ghost Month. These unnerving experiences can occur anytime, anywhere.
Her first sighting of the paranormal occurred when she was just 10. She had a sleepover at a friend’s house. That night it was raining and she heard someone calling her thrice. When she confronted her friend the next day, she realised to her horror that she had not called her.
“Something was amiss,” she recalls, as she looked out the window from the canteen of a hospital in Jalan Pudu, Kuala Lumpur, where she was being interviewed. “About 50m away stood the ghostly figure, calling me. My friend’s house was next to a graveyard.”
One of her scariest encounters was with a beautiful pontianak (female vampire) in Banten, West Java, when she was 14. Her face was pale as she related a series of ghostly encounters.
She warmed her hands against a hot glass of Chinese tea and shuddered. I reached out to hold her icy cold hands; momentarily, I felt her fear.
“A group of us were walking home at about 10.30pm. I was the last one. Out of nowhere, her nose caught a whiff of a fragrance in the air – that of assorted flowers and misik oil (applied on dead bodies).
“I asked myself: ‘What’s that smell?’ Then I felt a tug at my tee-shirt. After a few more tugs, I felt annoyed and turned around to see if any of my friends was playing a prank.”
Instead, she claims she saw the ghost of a woman holding a baby.
She screamed and everyone ran for dear life. One of them tripped and fell into a drain.
After that incident, she fell ill for a month.
The most unusual encounter was with a durian ghost.
At 18, she and five friends were returning from town on motorcycles after a night of dancing. On the way to the village, they had to pass through secluded stretches of trees and undergrowth.
Along one stretch, their motorcycles suddenly stalled for no reason and they alighted. Then the lights started blinking.
They heard a thud and saw that a durian had fallen and rolled onto their path. One of her friends picked up the thorny fruit and screamed, “Hantu, hantu, lari lari (Ghost, ghost, run, run).” They tried to run but felt as if their legs were tied and their mouths were locked. So they sat huddled together, trembling.
“The durian had eyes, a mouth, a nose and long, sharp fangs. That freaked us out,” she claims.
“At about 1am, a passer-by found us in a state of shock. Only after he touched one of us did we awaken from the ‘trance’.”
Later, the girls found out that the haunting probably had to do with a tragedy in which someone died after leaping off a bridge nearby.
Another time, Ona saw a roll of cloth with lights blocking her path. She knew that it was unwise to touch or move the cloth.
She prayed: “Saya tak kacau. Tolong kasi jalan (I do not want to cause any problem. Please give me a way),” and took another way to her destination. When she turned back, the roll of textiles had vanished.
She also claims that she has seen a pontianak on the branches of a guava tree and, on another occasion, a pochong, a ghost all wrapped up in white cloth.
While the pontianak had the most eerie laughter, the pochong moved in the most unusual manner, recalls Ona.
Two years ago, she claims she had another haunting. As she was sweeping the floor of her employer’s apartment in Petaling Jaya at about 5pm, a female ghost called out to her.
“The ghost was in a white outfit and floating. It had no face but had long hair and it was waving to me,” she says. Ona fled.
Her most frightening and vulnerable moment was when she was apparently possessed by 40 evil spirits many years ago.
“I was screaming, laughing and crying. My voice would waver and alter from a man’s to a woman’s voice. Three bomohs came to my rescue,” she says, adding that she has no memory of the exorcism.
However, she remembers suffering aches and pain all over her body.
