The Penanggal

I don't know if you ever heard of the name 'Penanggal' before. If you live within the southeast asia, Penaggal might be called using different names, such as 'Kra-sue' in Thailand, and 'Manananggal' in Philiphines.

In Malay ghosts myth, its name comes from the word 'tanggal' which in english directly translated to 'remove'. You must be wondering why it is called such names. Let me explain it briefly to you, the description of Penaggal.

According to stories of people who once encountered it, Penanggal looked like a floating disembodied form, with a head and internal organs trailing underneath it. Imagine a long dangling jellyfish, but instead of tentacles, attached underneath a bloodied head, are its lungs, intestines and still pumping hearts. Can you imagine that in your head? However, from afar, according to stories, a Penanggal looked more like a floating ball of flame.

A Penanggal are normally women, there are no stories that described penanggal as men. They are not technically ghosts or undead beings but humans who had practiced black magic. In the Malay culture, black magic are often learned as to gain something, such as in the case of a Penanggal, to obtain beauty. However, every black magic learned always has its catchcatch, which is, they need to obey a certain rules, or face the consequences.

It is said that a Penanggal is made when a person practices that said black magic, but are unable to follow the rules and was punished to be cursed as a Penanggal. A Penanggal is only active at night, and passes as ordinary woman in daytime. It is said that a Penanggal often soaks its organs in vinegar to help it shrink, which made it easier to return to their detached body, which in some culture explains why a Penanggal carries the smell of vinegar.

Like most vampire-liked creature, a Penanggal feeds on blood, often women who is giving birth. As traditional malay houses were build higher from the grounds or called as stilt-houses, the Penanggal will hide under the houses and and use its long toungue to lap up the blood of the mothers giving birth. In some myth, it is told that sometime a Penanggal eats fishes and frogs in paddy fields.

From the descriptions of a Penanggal given, I hope you would understand how terrified I am when my aunt told me the rumours she heard about a sightings of the creature in our village. I was 6 at the time and I kid you not, that story made me scared of going to the toilet alone.

My grandfather house is located in Penang Island, Malaysia, a very beautiful and cultured place. I'm sure if you had visited Penang, or resided there, you would vouch for my statement that the place is beautiful. The foods were wonderful too. Anyway, about my grandfather's house, which were inherited by my father now, is quite large. It's a two storrey old styled house where the second floor were built by woods. It had many rooms but some of the rooms were sealed off, including the whole second floor, due to safety reasons.

My aunt, who is unmarried currently lived there alone by herself. The house was often send chills down my spine and I always felt that there is something wrong with it. I wonder how my aunt could live there alone. In the malay culture, we believe that if a place is kept vacant for a long time, invisible beings, like 'jinn' or 'bunian' would start to occupy there. That's probably why sometimes I could hear things walking on the second floor (because the second floor were made out of woods and whenever somebody were to walk upstairs, you could hear the floor creaking).

Anyway, when I was six, we spent the night at the house. I overheard my aunt talking to my dad that she heard the villagers spoke about the sightings of a penanggal. She had taken measures of placing thorny plants at the door and every windows. It is said that a Penanggal is quite scared of thorny things as it can damage its dangling organs. That is why if you visited some old style villages, you could see people planting thorny plants like cactus and such. But I believe in this modern times, thorny plants are just for decorations. You don't need to be a Penaggal anymore to look pretty as there's this thing called plastic surgery. All you need is to be rich to afford one.

That night, I woke in the middle of the night and suddenly had an urge to go to the toilet. I tried to ask my big brother to accompany me but he scowled at me and continued sleeping. All six of us slept in the living room, as I said before, the other rooms were sealed off due to safety reasons. I did not dare to wake up my parents, i don't really know why. But I remembered when we were little my siblings and I rather asked each other's help rather than burdening our parents with small things.

I decided to go alone, no point of asking my 4 year old or 2 year old sisters to accompany me. The toilet is located at the end of the house. Beside the toilet, is the kitchen on the right, and an empty large store on the left. To go to the toilet, I need to pass a hallway where the stairs, which leads to the second sealed-off floor, was located. I was not, and still am, not a big fan of the stairs. I hated the stairs. I often felt somebody was sitting there, watching our every moves.

The kitchen too had long been abandoned. Like I said, the house is quite big and my aunt, who is lazy, never cooked. The most used area of that house would be the living room, where she placed her bed too. She never cooked, and meals were brought from outside, often bought before coming home from work. I forgot to mention that my father's family was quite rich when my grandfather was still alive. My grandmother, aunts and uncles never had to clean for themselves. My father was quite spoilt too as a child.

There's a maid to clean the house every now and then. After my grandfater passed away, the house was left in a very bad condition. My grandmother, before she passed away, was a little bit paranoid and refused to hire a maid to clean the house because she noticed some of her jewelleries went missing after maids started cleaning. To make things worse, my aunt, the one currently living there, is a hoarder. She loves collecting cheap things like food containers, etc, which she never used. The old ones too were never thrown away.

So after the death of both my grandparents, my aunt lived there alone, leaving the condition of the house to be quite filthy. The storage on the left of the bathroom, was quite big too. And it is only sealed by a grilled metal door which means you can see the insides of the storage area. Sometimes when my eyes are playing tricks on me, i could see a white figure, stood in the middle of the dark room.

As I walked leaving the living room, anxiety starts attacking me. I walked quickly, trying not to obviously run, passed the stairs in the hallway. My mother once told me that if I happen to see something, pretend that I see nothing. We believe that ghosts only attack people when they notice people could see them. So I was trying my best to act cool.

When I reached the toilet I tried my best not to look inside the storage room. I kept my eyes low staring at the floor. I opened the bathroom lights and proceeded to go inside. The bathroom roof was made of zinc and there is an opening that connected the bathroom and the kitchen. So you could see the kitchen's roof from the toilet. The light lighting the bathroom is from a bulb that hangs from a wire in the middle of the roof.

As I was doing my business, suddenly I heard something on the roof, like when you pulled a rope of chords across the zinc roof. At first I was not thinking of anything, probably some branches from a tree was ruffling against the roof. After a while, I thought of what kind of tree that has branches spread and pulled across the roof. And then the stories about the Penanggal my aunt were telling my father came flashing into my mind and I finished my business with sweats, trying my best to act cool, hoping the penanggal would not noticed me noticing it. After that I quickly ran when I heard a louder scraping sound against the zinc roof.

I ran across the hall, passed the stairs, always keeping my eyes to the floor, to avoid myself seeing something horrible, like ghosts etcetra. When I reached the living room, I quickly lie on the spot I was sleeping earlier. My heart was thumping heard and I did not care that I didn't flush the toilet. Opposite where I was sleeping, was a windowpane glass where the curtains was short. The glass panes were blurry but you could see a little outside, the outlines of the trees.

For a moment my heart stop when I spotted something glowing red, like a fireball floating outside. I quickly closed my eyes and pretend to sleep. My brain was conscious throughout the night but I did not move, even when I felt the urge to scratch from the itchiness of the mosquito bites. I could not remember how or when I fell asleep, but I woke up the next morning by the chatter of my parents and my aunt having breakfast.

I went to the bathroom, reliving every moment of the night before, washing my face and brushing my teeth. In the morning, the house feels normal. I glance at the storage room. The storage room too was less scary at night. I walked back to the living room, glancing at the stairs on the way, still sent shivers down my neck. I sat on the table too to have breakfast and to eavesdrop the adults talking. I ate the 'roti canai' my father had bought from a nearby stall and listened to what my aunt was saying.

She told my father that last night, the villagers had caught a penanggal and followed it. A penanggal always returns back to its body before sunrise. She told them that the Penanggal belonged to a person that  resides in the other village next to them. However she did not tell them what happened to the person, only a 'bomoh' was called to rectify the situation.

-The End-