Haunted by History: True Tales from Indonesia

Like one hand he was carrying his head and another one he was holding a leash that tied to a black dog. And when he turned around he saw that. Goes Today, we have an account from Indonesia, where ghost tales are steeped in history, tragedy, in the lingering presence of colonial trauma. My name is Edwin and here is Sarah. It's true scary story. In Indonesia. What makes the country unique is the fact that their history also tiedened with mysticism, and the way people remember also ties in with anything related to ghost spirits. It's a country that is predominantly Muslims and also belief in superstitions. Although these ghost stories are really sad, they're also giving up a very creepy, non jump scary scene. Then these all happen to my family members. Jakarta is actually a very busy, bustling place. There's a lot of people, it's highly populated, traffic everywhere. But ghosts still exists because when it comes to ghost it doesn't matter where you are in Indonesia. If there's a place that is dusty, dark and moist, they will definitely be there. But also Jakarta is like a rich history of being the city where the Dutch government used to reside and now the Indonesian government reside. It used to be the camel city of Indonesia, but now they moved to Pontiana because the Dutch government ruled the place. There will be mentions of executions, there will be mentions of massacre. There will be mentioned of anything that is a rural part of history that ended up becoming ghost stories. This happened in nineteen eighties. This was around the time when my father was in university. This haunted siding occurred at an office house that one of his brother in law owned. His brother in law was a wealthy man and the son of a military general, so happened to own factory in North Sumatra. This office house was around the area of Sisingamagaraja, where in Indonesia suchially as one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city of Jakarta, there were old houses naturally, Essentially, this office house was just a two floor home that was large enough to fit in office space. In Indonesia, this is very common. They would have office on the first floor and then the second floor will be a house. All the Mediti said, you have in a house. It's right there. Some of my dad's friends stayed in there. You know, when you're in university, right, especially like when you're about to graduate, most of the times you pull an all night and he essentially did your work at around the devil's hour, as they say midnight, you know, from midnight to three am, Like we're always around that time, and that's exactly what he was doing. He was doing his final paper. He was using the office portion of the house, so it was the first floor. Because there were a bunch of computers in this office. He went to use one of these cubicles where they had the computer to write his assignment. It was very dark, so the only source of flight was just coming from the computer's screen. He was very focused on this work he was typing in. He didn't realized that time was going. When he turned around, he saw a figure of a man dressed in traditional Eastern outfit. He was just taken aback because wise there an Arabic man standing in the house. The man was just standing not far from him, but it was like in a distance, like basically the end of the office met the stairways. He saw this individual standing by the stairs and then to continue to do his work. He turned around, the man was still there. This individual did not even look at him. He was just staring at the stairs, and for some reason, he slowly started making his way up, except he never seemed to reach the top. At some point he would return back to the very start of the stairs. My dad's friend was a little bit taken aback, but at the stated that he was curious because what was this man trying to do, so he wanted to check on him. He walk up to this person because maybe this person was lost, or maybe he was one of the residents of the house that he didn't even know about. So he approached this individual. He looked all right, except when you notice he didn't try to go upstairs, but he had no legs. It was basically faded. So the entire time this figure was just flowing because he had no legs. It was a ghost. Everything was just blurry. The moment you reach his legs area, this ghost he continued to float upstairs, never reached the end. But as soon as his friend saw as I approached it ghost he went upstairs and then slowly he faded into the darkness. He almost disappeated. Then are gone, he was gone. Obviously, that freaked the friend out. He ran out of the the house and accidentally bump into a security guard. Said, oh my god, oh my god, I just saw a man floating up the stairs. And then the security guard said it was the Middle Eastern or at least dressed like a Middle Eastern man. And then a friend it was like, yeah, how do you know that, and so the security guard said, oh, yeah, let me explain. So this goes he was the patriarch of the family who was the original owner of this house. So this office house actually used to be a house that was belonged to relatively well to do Middle Eastern family who were also Indonesian citizens. This family, they were just like a relatively well to do, unassuming family there, like they're just mining their own business, just like a normal family would, and everybody lived pretty normal lives until in nineteen forties, so basically Indonesia and during the period of the Second World War, we were invaded by the Japanese. The Japanese took over because the Dutch was basically attacked by the Germans. As we know, the Dutch power weakend. So the Japanese were basically trying to invade the entire Southeast Asia. They came in to other places because people heard about what they did in the Philippines, but they also did the same thing that they did in the Philippines to Indonesia. It's no exception to what they did to this family because when the Japanese arrived in Indonesia and invading the place, they went to this family's home and start massacring the entire family. It was a bloody mess. There were no survivors. Everybody were brutally murdered. Because a lot of the people in this family didn't die peacefully. There are always few family members who were still around the house, haunting the place. The thing is, they never disturbed anybody. They were just existing. They were just existing. They appeared, but they never ever interact with anybody. But after hearing that story, as scary as the ghost presidence, it was also very horrible to hear what happened to this family given the circumstances, because again, they're just a normal well to do Arabic family who unfortunately got entirely destroyed by the Japanese during this horrific part in Indonesian history. This was happening around two thousand and ten at my aunt's neighborhood. Now, my neighborhood is very crowded yet haunted place, especially since it was not far from a railway station and train tracks. There have been instances of people seeing ghosts at the train tracks, people getting killed at the train tracks by accident. There will be people on their motorcycles going back and forth. You could hear a rooster dueling from afar Oh. It was like it was a caciphonia of noises basically, but I love it anyway. As you can tell, very busy, bustling place. This is Jakarta again. So you would cross the train track and then you would enter a bunch of convenience stores, general stores, and then you see bunch of houses. In Indonesia, the houses tend to be much smaller but stack Some of these houses have two floors, a lot of them due to high crimes in the country. They had high fences. It just so happened that my aunt right across her residence was her in loast house. He had pretty tall fences with jagged as that sort of looked like the sharp part of a spare, just to avoid bourglers from entering in in case they were climbing the fence. They could get injured by these things. This house had in the front yard there's the driveway with a garage, and next to this driveway there was the main entrance of the house and then there's another driveway. But in between these two driveways was like a small little garden where they had pebbles potted plants. In the middle of it, there was a tall weeping fig tree. If you look at it at night, it was actually pretty spooky because when you think of like weeping big especially in Indonesia, weeping fig was described as very haunted. It looked like a normal tree. He had like the attributes of a typical tree, one of those trees in Indonesia that was described as a very bhysinicism elements to it, because the only difference is that weeping figs would have fines that were attached to the trees and they would go downwards, so it's almost as if like the trees have like strings and it would like just like gently sway at night, it's just giving up like very creepy vibes. It was sort of spread out almost like covering the balcony part of the house. This Weeping Victory tend to be associated with anything ghost related. There will be ghost that is, for example, ghost would stay there is basically like a like a very common ghost in Southeast Asia. She would have long, dark hair that pretty much covered her face. She would wear a white long sleeve dress. And they're actually like signs where you know she's near. If you hear weird animal noises, I mean she's there. If you hear her laughing, she's there now. If you hear like a fate laughter from her, like I said, like she was like laughing from afar, that means she's very close to you. But if you hear her very clearly as if she was near you, that means she's far away from me. That's kind of like how you know this ghost exists. And usually this ghost is associated with the Weeping Fig tree, and it just does so happened. There's particular afternoon where one of the housemates that will belong to the in laws god possessed by one of the ghosts who reside in that tree. I think she was just doing like her daily chores when she fainted and people found out she got possessed by her ghost of the Weeping Fig tree, and then they found out there was an old woman. There are a bunch of elderly women spirits residing in that house by one of them, in particular, possess one of my in lost housemaids were working around the house front yard at the time. They ended up calling people from the nearby mosque to exercise her. Basically, they went pretty well. I think the saddest part sort of come when they told the story about who this post was and the history of the area where this situation occurred. I've seen people getting possessed and stuff like it's like this another Tuesday. The neighborhood where my aunt and her and lost live it used to be an area where during the Dutch colonial times they used this place to execute people. They did public executions here, this Weeping Victory in particular, was used for public hangings. The ghosts who resided in this tree, some of them were victims of this horrible execution method. The people who are hung there, there's still residing in that tree. They were not rest easy. They didn't die like the peaceful way, they didn't go into another life gently. So essentially they stayed in that in that tree for so long. And who told this story none other but the people who exercised their So anything that you're hearing Indonesia that is creepy and scary, usually there are horrific historical connotations to them. Our ghosts are tightened with our brutal past because one is basically a victim of a massacre and the other one was a victim of a public hanging. Now, these people were like executed because of the crimes that they deserved, like some of them were just hung because again colonialism was evil, right, so they basically were unjustly executed, unjustly tried and executed. And that's where it landed. This particular ghost inspired like a really not so good horror movie in my in my country. But when you look at again this this ghost was a tight end it with Indonesian history too. There's a public cemetery Indonnetia called there was a graves keeper who was overseeing the cemetery when he encountered the ghost of a Catholic priest. But this Catholic priest was headless, like one hand he was carrying his head and another one he was holding a leashte tied to a black dog. And this grave keeper said that like the moment I know that this ghost was there, it was basically when I heard the sound of a dog howling or barking like that, and when he turned around, he saw that ghost. And this story ended up spreading throughout the country and it got hold into a bunch of curious high school kids, and so they're like, hey, you know, let's check this ghost out. Let's do some kind of like a horror truth or their type of movement where we will find this ghost. And it didn't end up encountering this ghost, and they also reported it that it was there, but it didn't do anything. It didn't possess them, it didn't hurt them. It's just apparently like people suspect that this ghost was just trying to find his way to his own grave, which is in another cemetery called Anakos. She's like way far away from this cemetery. He uses dog as a way to guide him there. Not many people knew the like the history of the man who's who ended up becoming this particular ghost. But the most common stories that this man was when he was alive, he was a Dutch Catholic priest who ended up becoming an Indonesian citizen after you know, the country became independent. This was like around the time where Indonesia was in the process of deporting a lot of Dutch people back to the Netherlands after century of colonialism. There are a lot of people that every time there are you know, a lot of people that every time they see Dutch people, they start having this like fight or fight response and they would get really agitated and angry because of those years of oppression. So he was just you know, minding his own business, was just walking the street, wind his own business when people attacked them because they thought like he was one of those Dutch people who were like still living in the country and like trying to basically invade Indonesia again. Like it ended up like a him using a sight and this site sort of like chop off his head. They were attacking him so hard, they were like basically just like hacking into him to the point that his head just just detached from his body and he obviously he passed away. And that's why how he became a headless ghost. He was like like a Dutch Catholic priest who did nothing. That's the thing about Indonesian ghost or some of them are actually related to colonialism and just our brutal past. When I think of these stories like they are scary, but they're also sad. Don't get me wrong, I'm afraid of ghosts. But whenever I heard the origins of these ghosts, that's the part where I'm like, stuff was like, it was like very very sad. It was also very brutal. When you think of like these ghost stories like they like they don't just come up nowhere. Ghost stories in Indonesia always involved dark magic, mysticism, and colonialism. Thank you Sarah for sharing your experiences with us. I learned a lot about Indonesia and it's haunting past. And if you have a true scary story that you want to share, funder form over at true scarystory dot com. Scheduling for this episode was domed by Bianca Chavis, Editing and sound design by Sarah Vorhez Wendel a VW Sound. Additional production by me Edwin Klorubaz and the Scary fmteam. If you're following the show, we'll be back next week with another story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon. M