Drowned Ghost Vs Siam Bomoh (水鬼斗暹师)

This is my guru who was an old Siam bomoh's (Thai magician) real case which happened about 20 years ago. At that time I was an apprentice in Thai magic under this bomoh whose house was situated just about 60m or so from the Muda River. So during annual flooding, I would help my guru to move to my old house for a few weeks until the flood water subsided.

The Muda River or Sungai Muda as the locals would call it was quite famous of its giant fresh water prawns and ever expensive but tasty kelah fish. So many experienced anglers and divers came to this river to fish.

On that particular afternoon, four local experience divers told a sundry shop owner that they wanted to catch some lampang fish and prawns. It was around 2pm then and as usual, those local divers did not make use of expansive diving equipments; most of the time the only equipment those divers used is their own pair of hands.

At around 4pm, two of the divers rushed to the said shop owner and asked him to call the police and emergency respond teams. On enquiry, the panic divers said two of their companions were nowhere to be found and they were feared drowned.

So the whole kampong folks were alerted and a team of experienced swimmers were assembled to perform search and rescue while waiting for the authorities to arrive. The police, ambulance and the local fire department arrived an hour later. The fire department sent in two divers to search for the missing two.

At around 7pm, since the sky was getting dark; the official search and rescue had decided to stop for the day and to be continued the next day. While the authorities could wait, the victims’ family couldn’t; so they called my guru and I helped him to prepare the required materials.

We arrived at the river bank at around 8pm, the family members of the missing persons were waiting for us. As soon as my guru had settled down, he asked me to take out a piece of wooden plate and on the plate I put 7 pieces of flowers of different colors, 7 pieces of white candles, betel nut, betel leafs and a pot of kemayan (benzoin).

After the items are arranged, my Siam guru sat in front of the stuffs and start chanting:

“Jantang santang…  Nama patah…”

Then my guru asked me to put the plate on the river water and let it float. Interestingly, the plate was floating up and downstream as if it was being controlled by some forces. After about 5 minutes or so, the plate sank into water under a bridge.

At this point, my guru instructed two good swimmers from the kampong to search the water under the bridge. After less than 10 minutes or so, the swimmers found the bodies of two divers. Both of the corpses were hugging each other and the bodies already turned into black green in colors.

Interestingly speaking, the place under that bridge was being searched by the search and rescue departments before but nothing was found then. Another very interesting point is that there were finger marks on both of the corpses. My guru commented that the river was the home of many drowned ghosts; if possible one should not go into the water alone.

After the bodies were found, before we depart; my guru asked the two survived divers what did they see during their initial dive and this is their reply:

“After the four of them dived into the water, they saw around 5 to 6 numbers of super big freshwater prawns swimming under the bridge. Those prawns were so big that they had never anything like that before throughout their 20 years of diving life.

So all of us swam towards the giant prawns but those prawns responded very quickly. My friend and I decided to give up but the other two continued with pursuing. We decided to rise to surface to take a rest while waiting for the other two.

After two hours of waiting, we sensed something was wrong; so we called for help…”

The Siam guru later told me that the plate movements that everyone saw was due to his familiar spirit or the local calls it the ‘hantu raya’. I did see this ‘hantu raya’ when I inherited my guru’s possessions after he passed away. This spirit would show itself in the form of long hair creature about 10 feet tall when I had neglected to make offerings to it.

Of course, now days those modern gurus cannot perform such ritual any more as they are more concentrated in making money and throwing slanders in the intranet; most of their magic rituals are fake and without proper lineage transmissions. Sad to say so…