Revenge of the Pontianak?: Encounters with the Spirit World in Malaysia

17-year-old student Siti Nurannisa recounts: “Before I knew it, I was looking into the ‘otherworld’. Scenes of blood, gore and violence” and that “the scariest thing I saw was a face of pure evil.” Another student recalled seeing “a smiling Buddhist monk” on top of a dormitory during a school singing competition at an elite boarding school. The preceding accounts are all recollections of spirit possession or “ghost”/spirit sightings by students in schools in Malaysia’s northeastern state of Kelantan. 

Both Malaysian and western media outlets have reported on instances of spirit possession and ghost sighting in Malaysia (2016, 2019). A 2019 BBC article reporting on a ghost sighting in a Malaysian school that afflicted 39 students notes that these mass sighting/possessions often begin with one student and then spread to others in the vicinity. The same BBC article is quick to medicalize the event, in a particularly gendered way (I’m thinking about the etymology of the word hysteria and that these events have largely affected women) by describing it as a case of “mass hysteria” (BBC 2019). An American medical sociologist quoted in the article, Robert Bartholomew describes the phenomenon “as a collective stress response prompting an overstimulation of the nervous system.” (BBC 2019) Bartholomew’s medicalization of the event conflicts with the ways in which students who were part of similar events understand them “not as an outbreak of mass hysteria but as a supernatural event.” (BBC 2019, Siti Ain) Others, attempting to find ways to describe these events explain them as the result of a rigidly Islamic conservative social system in Kelantan (in particular) that induces anxiety and provides few outlets for relief. 

I’m primarily interested in thinking about the language those who experience these events use to describe them. Additionally, who, and what do these students encounter during these events and how are these figures imagined?  For example, why did one student encounter a “smiling Buddhist monk”? I’m also interested in exploring the contexts in which these events occur. The press coverage of these events seems to say they primarily take place in schools (Facebook users also report sighting in police stations) while anthropologist Aihwa Ong writes about spirit possession in Malaysian factories. Far from “traditional”,  “conservative”, and “superstitious,” (as some of the interviewees in the article claim), the context in which these encounters occur reveals them to be profoundly modern. But maybe we should move away from examining these encounters in the context of these binaries. 

Finally, what happens in response to these events? How do communities and institutions cope with their aftermath? The 2019 article mentions the intervention of a spiritual healer, the marketing of an “anti-hysteria kit” with both Koranic and medical foundations, and the felling of trees—-because certain types of spirits are associated with trees, one afflicted school decided to cut down all the trees on its premises. This response reveals the ways in which the spirit world affects and shapes not only groups of students but also the natural environment.

Sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48850490, http://ghostclubsg.blogspot.com/2013/11/pontianak-scares-malaysia-police…

Image Source: http://ghostclubsg.blogspot.com/2013/11/pontianak-scares-malaysia-police…