Ghostly Maze (鬼打墙)

Ghostly maze is a phenomenon where a person just walks around a place and couldn’t find a way out for a very long time.

Scientific minded people has found an explanation to this mystery: If a person is blind folded or walk in the dark, then his/her stronger leg will take a bigger step compared to his/her weaker ones. So, he/she will appear to walk in circles if seen by a second person. Likewise, if the surrounding looks the same such as in a rubber plantation, oil palm plantation, open wilderness or field; or even in alleys people can lost his/her way because the eyes and mind are blurred. And, that is from the perspective of science.

But what science cannot explain is that most of the time while a missing person is purportedly to have walked in a circle, and rescuers are sent to search for the missing within a very small piece of area; no traces of the missing person could be found. Instead, the missing person would complaint that he/she was in the search area all the while and that he/she even shouted at the rescue team but their shout was ignored.

Some village folks believe that a missing person maybe trapped or blindfolded by local spirits. In local terms, the person is trapped by ‘ghostly maze’. If a person believed he/she has fallen into ghostly maze, the only way to get out of this curse is to pull down his/her pants and ‘pee’. Of course, a Ninja would use the kuji-kiri (九字结) method and a Taoist would invoke the help of his spiritual masters. Personally, I think the ‘peeing’ method is the best!

Kids living in rubber plantations if they are not in the school, they would just wander in the plantations fishing, hunting or just roaming about until darkness fall. The only time you could find them behaving themselves would be on rainy days or at night. Likewise, when I was staying with my grandparents in the piece of rubber plantation; I used to roam in the plantation with my cousin until darkness fall.

One evening, after two of us fished in a lake located at the edge of the rubber plantation; we took our normal route back. As we were walking and walking, suddenly the most familiar scene in front of us became more or less the same. We found ourselves just walked and walked as if we were walking around and around the same area for many times. As we were getting tired, we bumped into two lady farmers who stayed just opposite my grandparent’s house. When I say opposite, it was about 100 yards away.

Apparently the ladies too lost their ways and they seemed to have walked for a longer period longer than ours. Now four of us started to chat about our problems and suddenly I thought of a method mentioned by my grandpa. This method is to ‘pee’. Though my cousin has no objection, the ladies were certainly against this seemingly foolish suggestion. But as time goes by and the environment in the rubber plantation does get dark faster than the outside world, they had to agree.

So, I asked the ladies to turn their back, me and my cousin started to pee.

Believe it or not, as soon as we have peed, the road in front of us suddenly became clear and an orb appeared in front of us at a distance. What else, all of us moved forward and no matter how fast we walked; we could not get near the orb. After a round of chasing, we finally arrived at our house. Though we couldn’t explain what that orb was and why the sky suddenly cleared; we were certainly happy to be home on time for dinner; thus avoiding scolding.