The Possession Of Newbie Taoist (菜鸟道士上身记)

Uncle Sam was in the funeral service industry for more than 20 years before retirement. He has many very interesting ghost stories to share and it is fun to chat with him since we are in the so called ‘brotherhood’ and that we do have some common interests: Feng Shui master, Taoist and funeral service.

This is a true story prevailed in the local funeral service industry for many years:

If you are not aware, there are basically two types of Taoists: the ones who do not perform funeral services and the ones who do. The ones who perform funeral services are known as 喃嘸佬 or ‘uncle namo’ (not Nimbo!).

So the story goes:

A beautiful young lady committed suicide due to some reasons and after some police investigation her corpse was sent to hospital for postmortem. Later the deceased was claimed by her parents and Uncle Sam was contacted to arrange for her funeral service.

Funeral service facilities then were not like today with air-conditioning and established building. Uncle Sam only owned a small wooden house for his funeral service and the lady’s body just being laid at the backyard while workers cleaned the corpse. Luckily there weren’t too many passerbies using the place or people may think someone was indeed washing a long pig!

While the washing and changing of clothing of the deceased were in progress at the back, many activities also being done in the front to set up altars and preparing food offerings for subsequent deliverance ritual. A young Taoist somehow sneaked to the backyard to peep at the lady’s body being washed. We could only imagine what the young Taoist did while ‘enjoying’ the corpse…

It was said that the young Taoist only returned after a while to change into his ritual costume in order to start the deliverance ritual. As he was chanting with a monotonous tone, suddenly he started to say something gibberish and his body started to tremble as if he was going into trance.

After a while this young Taoist started to dance and taking off his clothing while saying: “… I want everyone to know what you did…” in a lady’s tone. This incident has stirred a big commotion amongst the funeral visitors as such thing has never happened.

An old spirit medium next door was immediately summoned to the scene to pacify the commotion. The young Taoist was subsequently dismissed for obvious reasons. Since then Uncle Sam only employs older Taoists with more than 10 years experiences as they are more immune to spirit possession. Of course we don’t hear of such incidents now days in modern funeral service establishments.