Sunday, October 30, 2016

The Hung Ghost Lovers (吊鬼恋人)


The ending of a pair of couple would be quite different according to timing and place if I could say so.

If a pair of lovers are in love in this modern times and the place is in the modern day West, then they can either get married without due concerns; even if each of them is not at par such as that a teacher and a student. However, this couple may still get together even in conservative Asia if they can ignore cynical society remarks. Whatever case that might be, this pair of lovers will not choose to die unless some jealous party choose to end their lives by brute force: in the West, this couple may be gunned down. In Asia, they maybe stabbed or blown to pieces with dynamite.

In not so distance past, such as in the 50’s; an odd couple like that of the above may choose to end their lives. There were not many choices to choose by. Most of the people would choose to hang themselves amongst other methods. Of course, in modern times; people might put on red clothing and jumped from a skyscraper. If we flash back to ancient China, then this odd couple are likely to be put into a pig cage and drown in a river. People call this as ‘soaking pig’s cage’ (浸猪笼). If this did happen, then the title would be ‘drowned ghost’ instead of ‘hung ghost’.

Malayan society in the 60’s was quite conservative and love affairs between a teacher and a student was not unheard off; but this type of love affairs was rarely blessed especially those ones in clerical schools. This story happened in a clerical school in KK during the 1960’s. It is said that a lady teacher in her 30’s fell in love with an 18-year-old young lad and naturally their love affair was faced with not only objections from the lad’s parents; but also the school management.

Seeing no end to their marriage, both of the teacher and student chosen to hang themselves in a school store room. And, thus the beginning of my story…

After the teacher-student couple committed suicide, their restless souls were seen lingered within the school compound. At times, this spiritual couple would walk on the roofs of neighbouring houses making cracking noise in the midst of the night. Some residents even claimed to have seen two pair of legs hanging down from the above from their bedroom windows.

In the early 80’s, the school were demolished making way for town development project. Since then, this hung ghost couple was occasionally seen sitting on a tall talang tree near the old school rubbles during full moon night. The male hung ghost would just stare at the full moon and the female one would always look down watching passer-by.

I visited the place with my KK friends two years ago at night but found no traces of the spiritual couple despite the warnings from the locals. Though I could see two black shadows passed in front of me fairly quickly but I was not very sure if they were what I was looking for. Since we found nothing significant, we decided to go for a cup of coffee. Maybe the ghostly couple has moved on since it was already more than 50 years and that they had finally gotten together; as human or otherwise.

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