Ghost Talks (鬼吃泥)

Ordinary people will not be able to understand what ghosts tell them for the language of ghosts would sound like people talk with a mouthful of soil in their mouth. The Cantonese call this type of ghost talks as ‘ghosts eat soil’ (鬼吃泥).

Fiona told me of her encounter with a stranger without any facial expressions who continued to talk to her for about 5 minutes or so in a language that she couldn’t understand. Though Fiona tried very hard to make sense of what the stranger wanted to express:

One afternoon, after an appointment with her doctor, Fiona waited at the carpark roofed walkway of a Penang hospital with her Indonesian maid for the rain to stop. It was around 4:30pm and the rain hasn’t shown any sign of subsiding, while waiting impatiently for the rain to ease so that Fiona could get to her car; a stranger without any facial expressions approached Fiona and started to talk to her in some cryptic language that she couldn’t understand. Although Fiona hinted to the gentleman that she wasn’t interested in his conversation, the stranger continued to talked for 5 minutes or so and then vanished into thin air.

Surprised of what she had experienced, Fiona asked her made: “Did you see the man who talked to me just now?”

The maid’s answer somewhat troubled Fiona further: “No, mam. You were talking all by yourself and constantly hinted me to go away. I was about to ask you where should I go…”

Only later that Fiona remembered that the stranger somehow looked like her distant uncle who died a few years ago in the same hospital. My advice to Fiona was that perhaps her distant deceased uncle wanted some offerings made to him. After all, the Chinese ghost month was around the corner when Fiona met her thought to be ghost of an uncle.

Being a sorcerer of many lineages, during one time I too kept hearing people talking near my ears while I fell asleep. Some of those words were intelligible but most of those words were just like someone were talking in a language that was out of this world. I could hear audible voice whispering beside my ears trying very hard to convey what it wanted to tell me but at the end of the day, I couldn’t make any senses out of it. So, at times I had to tell those voices to shut up or say in a language that I could understand. But those hard to understand messages continued to pour into my ears until I decided to stop all those ghost magic or else I would become crazy for sure.

Maybe what modern ghost hunters do by recording down all those ghost talks and analyse them with a voice analysing software is a wise approach. If I learnt those modern electronic gadgets earlier, perhaps I could have picked up many important ghostly information from other side. So said, I am a little too old for going back to ghost magic and tempering with electronic gadgets nowadays. As the saying goes: “you can’t teach old dog new tricks.”