Crime and the paranormal
Even when I was little and growing up in Malaysia, I overheard tales told by older kids about how thieves had burgled such and such a home using black magic. In my childish ignorance I imagined the thieves, sporting fearsome beards and moustaches, striding majestically into homes, and with a wave of their wands putting the occupants of the homes to sleep before robbing them. My father unwittingly strengthened this image all the more, when one day, he told us that a house nearby was robbed after the thieves threw a piece of thick smouldering knotted rope into the house before robbing it. The copious smoke that issued from this rope and filled the home had apparently put all the occupants into a deep sleep, and allowed the thieves to rob the home at will. This case however cannot be classified solely under the paranormal category as the thieves may have soaked the rope in certain chemicals or plant juices which upon ignition could have produced the paralysing smoke.
These incidents however caused me great fear, and for a time I imagined every person whom I saw, who had a somewhat fierce disposition, to be actually a thief in disguise. Naturally, I outgrew these fears, but as I started work, they reappeared with a vengeance. I had by this time however gone into the practice of prayer and meditation, and as the reader will see, they acted as a bulwark against the forces of evil. I will relate below how some criminals in South East Asia use paranormal means to rob their victims.
One of the first cases I heard about regarding this matter after I started work, was how a friend of mine was robbed of all his possessions by a group of thieves who put my friend into a stupor as they carried out their deed. I was intrigued by this case and questioned my friend in detail as to what had happened.
He replied that he had come home from work that evening feeling extremely tired. He had a drink and sat in front of the TV and watched the evening news. It had grown dark outside as the news bulletin ended. My friend then switched on the lights and continued watching TV. He lived alone in his bungalow, as his wife and kids stayed in a large town nearby so that his kids could attend a good school there. My friend then told me that he felt that the lights started to grow dim. At the same time, he lost focus of everything around him. His furniture, the TV and all other items around him became blurred. A sudden stupor overcame him; and although he could still see the hazy forms of the furniture around him, he could not move his arms and legs and could not open his mouth. He felt as if he had been nailed to his chair. He then discerned the hazy forms of humans moving about in the hall where he was sitting. They appeared busy, moving here and there, but my friend could only watch their hazy forms, and could not even talk or get up from his chair. This went on for a while, and then there was silence. My friend must have dropped off to sleep in his chair. When he awoke the next morning, he was shocked to discover that the chair he was sitting on was the only item left in the house. Everything else had been burgled. He made a police report, but the items that were stolen were never recovered.
I followed up on several similar incidents in the region, and found that all of them had a similar pattern. The individual or all of the family members present would first inexplicably fall into a stupor. They would be unable to move or talk, but could hazily observe individuals moving about in the house, ostensibly removing all items from the home. The victims however would be unable to identify any of the thieves while they were in this state. If however, as usually occurred, the family was asleep when the robbers struck, they would not hear any sound and would not wake up from their sleep as the house was ransacked.
A lucky break in my investigation into the matter came quite unexpectedly. A trainee assistant manager came to stay with me who was an expert in this matter. He hailed from a state bordering Thailand. It is an open secret in South East Asia, that the Thais and the Javanese (from the island of Java in Indonesia) were the masters in this form of magic. Being so close to Thailand, my new housemate knew about the methods employed by thieves using paranormal means to rob, and more importantly how to neutralise their powers. This is what my house mate had to tell me.
The thieves would first recite a spell while in the vicinity of the house they had planned to rob. This invariably put all the residents in that house to sleep or into a stupor. The spell will not work under certain conditions - which I will deal with later. Once the thieves enter the property, at least two conditions had to be fulfilled in order for the spell to continue working. Firstly, something edible that is present in the house has to be eaten by one of the thieves. The leader of the group normally carries out this activity by eating something out of the refrigerator from the house. The other condition was that as the robbers leave the property after robbing it, one of robbers has to defecate just outside the front door of the house. These tell tale signs can always be noticed in houses that have been robbed in this manner. The spell it seems could only work if everything was in its natural order inthe house, and there were no creature/ humans in the house who can keep their eyes fully open. Thus families in areas where this form of robbery was rife resorted to counter measures to prevent the spell from working. These are some of the methods.
