Malay Nightmare

It would be hard to find anywhere in the world a more hard-working and dutiful group of students than those at the Salahiah Girls Institute in northern Malaya. All day for six days a week, the girls, aged twelve to 20, drill in Arabic, study the Moslem faith, recite from the Koran. Beyond the high wall that surrounds the school are lush green fields, but the girls never play on them, for recreation has no place in the ascetic life of the religious institute. In this austere atmosphere, one day last month, a terrifying thing happened. "Who knows what it is all about?" sighed Salahiah's President Haji Hashim bin Haji in despair. "Perhaps it is the will of Allah."

The nightmare began when the girls suddenly became possessed. They laughed insanely, screamed, danced, jumped about, became so frenetic that it took five men to hold one girl down. The first attack lasted five hours, but others soon followed. A girl might suddenly start screaming "He is coming! He is coming! He is going to choke me!" If another girl went to her aid, she was soon being choked too. Some girls complained of being pricked by needles, would thereupon go into a frenzy of body slapping, giggling, jumping and screaming. "One night," says an instructor, "was the worst ever. The girls punched, screamed, laughed until the noise was enough to drive a man mad."

The citizens of Haji Salleh village naturally became alarmed. Something, the people said, has cast a spell over the girls and they sent for some local bomohs (medicine men) to drive the evil away. The first delegation of bomohs failed miserably: after the girls returned from their Hari Raya Haji holiday (20 days before the Moslem New Year), they went on a rampage again. Another six bomohs came, but after prayers, incantations and trances, announced that the evil spirit was much greater than they. One bomoh decided that the spirit must lodge in a certain rubber tree, ordered the tree cut down. Five days later, the hysterics broke out once more. Obviously, decided the other bomohs, the tree spirit had been made even angrier when it lost its home.

What could be done? A yogi sent word that he could clear matters up in 30 minutes: "Ghosts scatter at my very presence," said he. "I can make oranges fly in the air." But the school decided on a new tack, at long last called in a physician. Last week the school was carrying out the doctor's recommendations by tearing down part of the big wall and giving the girls a little more freedom and fun. But just in case medical science failed, it also took the precaution of proclaiming 30 straight days of prayer to ask protection against those frightful whatever-they-were who may or may not have lived in that rubber tree.

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