The Crying Women

This is another scary folklore that took place in Laos during the time when my grandma was a child.

It was year 1947, in the small village called Hu Nam Mu when my grandma's uncle, who was an old bachelor in his late 30s, married a young girl from another village that was a few miles away. The girl was already engaged to her boyfriend, but my grandma's uncle dragged her back to the village by force with help from his friends.

When they were dragging her she screamed and called for help, but no one came to help her.

***Note: When she was screaming in fear and agony, she probably attracted a poj ntxoog(ghost) which is why she died later on.

A few months had passed, and the girl continued to lived in despair. She was so depressed that she took her life by eating poison. She committed suicide in the forest at the area where the villagers would go to cut woods.

A few hours after her death, my grandma's family found her body when they went to go cut wood. It was lying behind a rotting tree trunk. The girl was already turning purple, and foam was coming out of her mouth. My grandma said she died with her eyes open, and her body had an awful stench.

They took her back to the village and prepared a funeral for her.

The village did not have a txiv qeej [bamboo flute blower], so my grandma's dad and uncle had to go call one from another village.

That day when they were doing her funeral, the txiv qeej was blowing his qeej around the dead girl and heard a voice saying, "Hlub tsis hlub los tuag tsis qiv muag." (Translate to: Love or not, I died without closing my eyes.) He was wondering why someone would say something like that, but he had to finish his job.

Again while blowing his qeej, he heard a woman said, "Hlub tsis hlub, los tuag tsis qiv muag." He was a little freaked out but had to continue. It happened for the third time, and he was curious as to who was saying it. He decided to take a look at the coffin to see if it's the dead girl.

When he looked at the dead girl, he saw her with her eyes opened and smiling back at him. Her eyes were moving and following him wherever he went. He froze and shook from immense fear. He had been a txiv qeej for a while but had never come across a situation like this. He dropped his qeej and ran out of the house.

The people were confused as to why he took off and went out to go ask him. He could not talk back but just kept shaking. They went back into the house and for some reason the room looked darker than usual. They started smelling a foul stench, and then they heard a knocking sound coming from the coffin.

It went, "Knock. Knock. Sawv los tsis sawv. Knock. Knock. Yuav sawv yuav sawv." (Translate to: Get up or not get up. Getting up, getting up.) They were all spooked at this point, and the elders said that they will have to haste up he funeral because this one will be coming back as a walking corpse. They finished the funeral quickly that day and buried her.

Many months had passed, and from my grandma's point of view, she and her friends were going to "the area that the girl died" to chop woods. When they got there, they heard a woman's cry. My grandma was still too young to know anything at that time, but she remembered her older cousins were so scared and kept whispering in each other's ears. They decided to turn back because they were too afraid to walk any further.

My grandma and her friends were not the only ones to hear the crying woman. Many of the villagers who went into that part of the forest to chop wood at or around that location would hear the same thing. They said that if you say her name or even talk about her tragic story, she would show herself to you and follow you home. She would play with the pots and pans in the kitchen, and at night, she would stand at the edge of the bed and drag you off your bed with her cold hands. If you want to avoid her angry ghost from haunting you, just try not to think or talk about her, but it is really hard not to do this, so the villagers banned that area and found a different part of the forest to chop woods.

The End...