The Life Force and A She-Devil's VooDoo

So I walked and I walked and the relentless haunting of the thousands of ghosts continued. By then, Ging would already have expected me to be dead. Then, I wondered if a defect life force was what was known as a ‘guardian angel’ and my ‘guardian angel’ was protecting me. I continued to have my rest breaks and there were still faces stuck to supermarket windows, fences and walls and ghosts of Western men in the shops, oblivious to my presence. But the stretches of desolate road where there were no buildings or, worse still, had dark, unoccupied buildings, were becoming increasingly frightening. Sometimes, there were blood-curdling screams and manic laughter coming from the pitch black darkness. Sometimes there were invisible and visible ghosts whooshing out of buildings or from behind vegetation, to attack me. Every time, my life force helped encourage me to not be frightened, be strong, not panic and certainly not die of fear. The horror of it all was the fact that it was not a dream. It was real life.

I had gone through Chonburi and I was only a few miles from Sri Racha, when the sun rose and instantly all the ghosts disappeared. I reached the centre of Sri Racha and sat down and drank a soft drink outside a pavement café. I was joined by a group of real Thai men who, for some reason, could sense I had been through a very bad experience. We communicated in a mixture of the little Thai language that I knew and the little English language that they knew. They asked me what was wrong with my right hand. I looked and I saw some bones of my right hand were sticking almost right out of the skin – they were obviously broken. My right thigh was also painful, as the pick-up truck must have made a harder contact with my right thigh and my right hand than I had previously thought.

I told them that I had been hit by a pick-up trick and explained about my experiences with the ghosts and that the accident was not the fault of the driver. They all nodded their heads and said that my experiences definitely had all the hallmarks of Cambodian black magic. Voodoo, in that part of the world, was accepted and believed by the vast majority of the people no matter what background they had come from. Rich, poor, old, young, intelligent, not intelligent, educated, not educated, religious, not religious, it did not matter – the belief was extremely strong and the huge evidence of centuries of actual events proved beyond doubt that the voodoo existed and worked.

They told me that I needed to go to hospital urgently. I agreed, and the kind, good-hearted Thai men took me to Sri Racha hospital for free. There was never any question of them wanting payment for helping me. In the hospital the nurses X-rayed my right hand and my right thigh. My right hand was broken in two places, so they put it in plaster. My right thigh was not broken but was badly swollen and bruised. They prescribed me some ‘deep heat’ type cream to massage several times daily into the affected areas. I gave the real Thai men my deepest gratitude and hobbled to the Sri Racha bus station knowing that I could not run away from the evil black magic and I would be experiencing further, nightly haunting.

I caught the long-distance bus from Sri Racha to Chonburi. Buses in Thailand were very good and the routes often covered great distances. They had comfortable seats, air-conditioning and were very safe. They were also very cheap – an adult could usually travel about one hundred miles for about £1.50. From Chonburi, I caught a local, smaller bus to near my home in Bang Pakong.

 There was a woman schoolteacher in our road who asked me what had happened. I told her and she asked me where Nang was and I said I did not know. She offered to help me with the application of the cream and buy food for me etc. She was a good real Thai woman who, whilst working at a local school, had met an American teacher who she planned to marry. She was worried that local people would criticise her for putting cream on my thigh and she was very shy about it. But she was more concerned about my wellbeing than their comments. She put the cream on my right thigh that late afternoon and then she went home. I waited for the sun to go down and the haunting to begin.

Although Ging probably believed she had already achieved my death, the black magic would not actually stop until it had been successful or, as I would discover later, it had worn off. The sun went down and the horror started almost exactly the same as before. The invisible, giggling Cambodian woman in my cupboard whooshed out, tapped me on my shoulder and then giggled and flirted with the heavy breathing invisible Cambodian man on the clothesline. Because of the pain in my thigh, I could not be bothered with standing and confronting them, so I looked at the clothesline and pretended to laugh fearlessly. That seemed to do the trick, and their Cambodian faces appeared on the shirts and then they disappeared.