Supernatural Confessions: To the uninitiated, these rites of fire and unfamiliar chanting would come across as something that is out of this world - and perhaps in a literal sense, it is - but for devotees of the faith and for Guru Murali this cleansing ritual is a monthly affair. Tales of black magic and supernatural exploits are topics that are as common to him as a banker talking to each other about the financial market. We fear what we do not know. In this report, Jane recounts her experience attending a fire ritual ceremony, also known as the Agnihotra. Report by Jane Franklin On Sunday 24th March 2019, the Supernatural Confessions team was invited to witness a Hindu ‘fire-cleansing’ ceremony conducted by Guru Murali of Om Mahesh Spiritual Alchemy. Guru Murali as we learned that evening is the only practising master of Aghori Vedic Hinduism in Singapore. The Aghori are a small group of ascetic shiva sadhus who command great reverence from Indian rural populations, as they are supposed to possess healing powers gained through their intensely eremitic rites and practices of renunciation and tápasya. A full fledged Aghori sadhus would have trouble living in modern society. Their traditional rites involve sitting on the cremated remains of the dead and eating the flesh of corpses. Aghori sadhus are often misunderstood because of these practices. As morbid as it sounds, these practices have nothing malevolent about them. Guru Murali who is married with two children is learned in the ways of the Aghori but is not able to realistically practice its traditions in Singapore. The address that we were given pointed us to Zi Zheng Gong Temple (15 Lor 21A Geylang). Initially I found it odd that a Hindu ritual was being held in a Ji Gong Toaist Temple. Eugene felt the same but he was more inclined to just go with the flow without much question. I got my answer soon after we arrived and came face to face with an all-black Ganesha statue hidden in the corner. Guru Murali then explained that Hinduism and Buddhism/Taoism shared many similar practices and that particular form of Ganesha was worshipped to clear effects of ‘black magic’ and ‘cleanse and restore positive aura’. When we had finished setting up our filming equipment, we were amazed at the sudden crowd we had found ourselves amongst. Guru Murali and his helpers took their place in front of a sacred fire. Agnihotra is an ancient fire ceremony originating from the sacred Vedic Hindu texts. This healing fire ceremony is considered one of the highest Vedic rituals where specially trained priests place offerings of ghee and grains into the fire while reciting Sanskrit mantras to invoke blessings of health and abundance. Sanskrit is an ancient language of vibration. The belief is that we can make changes in the atmosphere with Sanskrit mantras and fire prepared with specific organic substances. ![]() It was not long after a series of chanting that Guru Murali had entered a trance-like state. We were told that during the exorcism/cleansing ceremony, the Guru would go into a state of trance which is when a certain Hindu deity that is already within him is brought out to act through his body. The bubbly man we had seen just hours earlier was no longer present. What sat in front of us an intimidating version of Guru Murali in his full divine incantation, swaying back and forth while he chain-smoked cigars. Devotees took turns to seek his blessings Recounting my experience last night, there were two incidences that left a vivid imprint on my mind. A young woman had come to see Guru Murali citing that she was mentally disturbed, seeing apparitions and suspected she was a victim black magic. Was she the target of a jealous lover’s wrath or was she simply suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) after a life-changing mishap? She was only 21 years old but has been admitted to the asylum twice. Not wanting to go down that route again, she’s looking towards spiritual cleansing as an option. During the tedious ritual that involved tying black ‘holy strings’ on 9 points of her body, followed by chanting and evoking of mantras and discarding the strings in the sacred fire, she was told that she had black magic done on her by an old lover to keep her close. She had been cleansed and rid of all traces of black magic in the ceremony. Next in line was a young man who had purchased some poorly consecrated amulets from an online seller. He and his family started facing severe disturbances from the day he brought home the amulets . Had he invited something sinister into his home? He came to Guru Murali helpless, and desperate to be rid of them. Guru Murali recited several powerful incantations and held the amulets over the sacred fire before telling the young man to dispose of them into the sea. We later came to know that Guru Murali had first asked the entities residing in the amulets for forgiveness on his devotee’s behalf and then sent them away, telling them that they did not belong in our realm. The sacred fire seemed like a zillion sparks dancing in perfect disharmony, the glowing embers leaped and twirled in a fiery dance and the wall of intense heat threatened to melt my contact lenses away. It baffled me how Guru Murali sat in front of the sacred fire for 3 hours, completely unfazed, sometimes even passing his bare hands through the incandescent flames.
It’s a straight forward movie with no complications. You will like it for the simplicity of it and the tight storytelling. It’s a fresh divergent from the usual horror plot. The Prodigy shares similar traits to movies like The Omen and Chucky, where you have a boy with bad intentions minus the priest and end-of-the-world supernatural aspect. The Prodigy explores the themes of reincarnation. Is reincarnation real and what if the soul of a serial killer reincarnates in the body of your new born child? The Prodigy lays out the storyline in the first fifteen minutes of the show with a brilliant montage of a serial killer getting caught and gunned down in Ohio in the exact same time a new born child, Miles, is delivered in a hospital Pennsylvania. You immediately know what the next 75 minutes of the show is going to be. This is followed with more montages of the boy growing older exhibiting genius-like qualities for a child and some odd anti-social behaviour. The clock stops when the boy turns 8 years old and that’s when the horror officially begins. The technique works given that the movie expects audience to fall on prior knowledge of similar horror films to scare themselves with anticipation. Most of the scares are in our own heads. The setting is simple and revolves around a typical suburban house in America: long corridors, creaky floorboards, dark basement, staircases, ample living space, and rooms that are separated far apart. This movie though low budget (6 million USD) is very well produced relying on skillful storytelling and great acting. The mother-son pair of Taylor Schilling and Jackson Robert Scott delivers powerful performance often times with just a turn of facial expressions. Scott, born in 2008, first made his Hollywood debut as Georgie in the Stephen King horror movie IT in 2017, is reminiscent of Haley Joel Osment from sixth sense. The scene where Miles interacts with his therapist and reincarnation expert is one that I reckon would make the list of memorable classic horror moments and probably cement Scott’s career as the next horror child actor. This movie doesn’t deviate too far from the desperate-mother-trying-to-fight- evil-in-child trope but do expect some twists to the story which have critics divided over what to feel. The end feels like they have left enough room for there to be a sequel. Considering that the movie has grossed almost 18 million dollars, three times more than what it cost, in the opening week alone, I say we can expect a sequel to be in the works. On to the theme of reincarnation, there’s a line in the movie that says this belief is common in Asia but not so in western culture. That much is true. Reincarnation is the central tenet in religions like Hindism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism. Taoism believes in the afterlife and some even some minor Christian and Islamic denominations speaks of reincarnation in their doctrine. Reincarnation is perhaps one of the few supernatural topics that has been researched extensively and proven to be real. Though “real” is debatable here because sceptics are still claiming that the memories of a young child knowing exact details of a deceased is purely a coincidence. In a story told to me by a spiritual healer, there was a patient who came to him reporting a terrible migraine that wouldn’t go away. He never had it before growing up but strangely on the night of his twenty second birthday the back of his head started aching. The usual MRI and CT scan showed no abnormally and doctors couldn’t diagnose the cause of the pain. It was then that someone suggested he visited a hypnotic therapist for a past live regression session. It turned out that the man was murdered at the age of twenty two with a blow to his head and has reincarnated into this body bearing the traumas of the previous life. His mother later confirmed that the man had a large birthmark at the spot of the killing blow. The spiritual healer was recommended to help the soul reconcile and release past karmic impressions.
Check out the links to other reincarnation stories of famous people and podcast with Dr. Jim Tucker a Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences who works with children who report memories of previous lives. I've been an ustaz for close to ten years of my life and have seen many kinds of possession cases. This story I am about to share is about a young teenage boy who got into an motorbike accident. His leg was broken but he felt absolutely no pain. When they brought him to the hospital he was already behaving strangely. At first the doctors and his parents thought it was probably due to his body going into shock. The boy would be laughing and mumbling and just being very aggressive to the nurses tending to him.
Usually doctors who are men of science who do not believe in the supernatural but this happened in Malaysia and even though it is not openly discussed, many of us believe very much is things like djinns and other strange occurrences. That was when the doctor suggested to the parents to seek my help but as usual most sensible thinking people will not want to confront the supernatural and we rather believe in something that we can explain away. So after a few days of observation and seeing that the boy is recovering extremely fast, the doctors sent him home. That was when the haunting begun. The boy would refuse to read the Quran and every evening during praying time he would hiss and claw at his family members. The prayers from the nearby mosque played through a speaker that can be heard around the kampong would agitate him. His parents eventually called me to come and help. Like I said, I have seen my fair share of possession cases but this one seems to be quite violent. I did not expect this cleansing ritual to be easy. The boy was sitting in the living room when I arrived. He was just a normal teenager and did not behave in any way that would make me suspect that he had been possessed, and contrary to what others may think, we spiritual healers are not walking radars that can detect spirits or djinns around the place. All that only happens in the movies. I asked him about his accident and he told me the story that he was riding along the plantation as usual but decided to take a short cut this time as it was getting dark. The dirt road was bumpy but there wasn't any obstacles on the ground that could cause the accident. He felt something pushed him sideways off the road and he crashed into a tree with such force that his bike broke in half. He cannot recall anything after that. According to his parents, some villagers found him at the accident site walking aimlessly. The doctors found that hard to believe because his leg was twisted and broken when they saw him at the hospital. I told him to lie down on the floor and that I would pray for him. At first the boy refused, saying that he was ok and did not need us to bother him. See the thing about djinns is that they are good pretenders. They can lie to you and make you believe what you want to believe but for us spiritual healers it is very simple. When we started reciting the quran, that's when the djinn will feel so much pain they will start to emerge. This was exactly what happened here. When I started reciting the verses the boy started to shake and growl. I needed my assistants to help me hold him down. For a skinny boy who just had an accident a week ago he needed three grown men to hold him down. You can see from the video; if I had told you his leg was broken, you wouldn't believe. The djinn wanted to take over this boy's body and didn't want to leave. By right, the boy should have been dead from the accident but the djinn saved him and is now claiming the body for himself. So this type of possession is harder to heal because there's a danger that if I purge the djinn out the boy may fall into a coma and not wake up. For this boy it took me many months of consistent praying and bathing with blessed water to finally purge this djinn. But you see, these beings are very old and can live for very long time. So they can leave now, but they can also wait for a good time when the boy is not careful or for a moment of weakness for the djinn to enter his body again. Shared by Ustaz Herman [See video interview on Supernatural Confessions YouTube] I'd like to share a true story that happened when I was a teenager. My older sister, Sandra was 21 at that time. Like most young adults her age, she loved clubbing and did not heed the advice of our superstitious Cantonese parents to not stay out past sunset during the 7th month and not to wear black or red clothing.
One night while walking home rather drunk, Sandra had accidentally stepped on some food offerings on the pavement. Not one who believed in Chinese superstitions, she didn't think too much of it and continued on her way. That would mark the start of the nearly year-long ordeal which followed. My sister started to have really bad stomach cramps a few days later, which wouldn't go away. She suffered through the night unable to sleep. Over the course of the next few weeks, not only did he cramps continue, her stomach started to grow bigger, as if she was pregnant. My parents threw a fit and even accused her of getting knocked up by some boy though my sister maintained her innocence. My mum made an appointment with the women's clinic near our home and ultra sound scans revealed that her womb was empty! She was then sent to a gastro specialist for several tests which all came back negative. Her stomach continued to grow bigger in the coming months which triggered senseless rumours amongst the gossiping aunties in the neighbourhood. My parents were at their wits end and soon my sister could not even step out of the house and spent all of her time cooped up at home, in fear of being ridiculed. Sandra was withdrawn, depressed and became merely a shadow of her former self. Nearly 10 months later, my dad's aunt visited from Malaysia, after hearing about Sandra's plight. Sandra's condition had not improved and her stomach was huge as though she was carrying twins. Even if she truly had gotten knocked up, the baby should've been born by then. Upon seeing my sister, Aunty Fong told my family about a similar case that had happened to a girl in the kampong in Paloh and urged my parents to take my sister to get spiritual help. My parents along with Aunty Fong took Sandra to a Taoist medium who was a friend of Aunty Fong's. I was not allowed to go and only know the series of events through my parents. The medium had gone into a trance and whatever had taken over him said that my sister had stepped on some food offerings meant for a deceased young man during the last Hungry Ghost Festival. Instead of apologising, my sister had laughed it off in her drunken stupor. It was only then that Sandra finally admitted to what she had done. The medium went on to say that the spirit of the young man had followed her home and had taken a liking to my sister. It had sexual intercourse with her while she was asleep and "impregnated" her with a ghost child. It was going to come take her and his child away during the next Hungry Ghost Festival when the gates of Hell opened again. My sister was very lucky to have been brought to the medium just 2 months shy of the lunar 7th month. After several rituals which were performed by the medium, one which involved going to the Lim Chu Kang cemetery, my sister was cured. Her swollen stomach went down over the next two weeks. She was back to her old self. Sandra is now happily married and has relocated to Australia with her loving husband and adorable baby boy. I urge everyone to be respectful to the taboos associated with the Hungry Ghost Festival to avoid repercussions like what my sister had suffered." Shared by Elaine, 31, Tutor [Story Source: Supernatural Confessions] Our signaler claims he saw a Japanese soldier hanging from one of the branches smiling at him. ![]() First Encounter This happened to me about a year ago in the army, so its more or less still pretty fresh in my mind. Its not overly scary but it did creep me out for a month or two. For the most part, a lot of this could be explained as tricks of an overstressed brain, being in a jungle and all, although seven people seeing the same thing doesn't strike me as stress. On the very first night, my section mate, who's Malay, woke up to something pulling on his shirt and telling him slowly 'Don't disturb me again' repeatedly. This happened throughout the night and creeped me out like hell, also due to the fact that every hour or so he would wake me up asking if i heard it too. The following night, another of my section mates, from Papua New Guinea (he's an immigrant), was the sentry for my section. He spotted a black figure making its way towards where we slept and immediately assumed it to be one of our commanders sneaking up on us to make sure we had a guard awake. My mate loudly requested identification, and actually screamed when it jumped on the trees that grew right above us. We all woke up in time to see it practically Tarzan its way up the hill. Later, when we were tasked to dig shell scrapes, we were assigned the same spot of the hill. 10 minutes into the digging, we found that right under where we slept, there was a huge slab of red rock that was considerably smoother than the earth around it. It turned out to be a tombstone of sorts, about a century back when natives still managed the island. We actually sort of got lost in a century-old cemetery that was in the jungle as well, but i guess ill leave that for a different post The day after we found the tombstone, we had a navigation exercise that had us, as a section of seven people, find checkpoints all over the island. Technically, this isn't too hard to do, almost like a scavenger hunt, except that the points were small slips of paper tied to four or five of the thousand trees on the island. We did manage to find all of the checkpoints though, but at the end we were faced with a 400m bash through the swamp to reach back to base camp. What we didn't expect though was an abandoned cemetery in the middle of the swamp. The place was filled up to our knees with thick mud, and one of my section mates fell into a spot (we think it was a grave) that covered him to his chest before we managed to pull him up. There were bottles of ashes scattered around and a sealed up well that reminded me a lot of the Ring. Now this is all pretty ordinary standard stuff but what made it really creepy was that in the center of this swamp there was a patch of extremely well kept grass, almost carpet like, with this tree growing in the middle. My buddy muttered something along the lines of 'get out of here before its dark' and led us north-west, the supposed direction towards camp, and towards the tree. Now, i'm not exactly sure what happened after this because all of us seemed to experience different things. My Malay mate heard someone scream 'Why are you still here?' a few metres from him, while our signaler claims he saw a Japanese soldier hanging from one of the branches that was smiling at him. I personally seemed to have the mildest experience. Where the top most branch was, there was a man and a woman sitting on top there. I always expected ghosts to look hazy or greyish but these guys looked completely normal, less the sitting on a 5 metre high tree in the middle of the forest. The rest of my section just claimed to hear the same crying we heard the night before. We picked up our pace and practically ran past the tree and out onto a makeshift road. It might sound cliche, but at this point our comm set which had died for an hour, somehow turned itself back on. We were hearing constant reports about how my section hadn't reported in yet, even though it was 2 hours past the allocated time. Funny thing was that we were in the swamp for less than half an hour at 2.30pm. When we exited it was around 7.30. We obviously didn't report this to our commanders but the time lapse was something that kind of rattled us. Second Encounter I was doing regimental duties in the office next to mine a month ago when nature called. This happened around midnight as i was 'closing' several of the books. Now, the toilet is based outside round the curve of the corridor. When you open the door, you're met by a wall that doesn't connect all the way to the ceiling, leaving about 1/4 of the length empty. It serves as a partition to one of the cubicles. Well as i was saying, nature called, so i had to rush out to the toilet to take a huge dump. Upon entering, and I shit you not, there was a kid sitting on top of it. It didn't look like some The Grudge crap. The kid looked real enough, though i couldn't tell what gender it was either. Besides those two occurrences, there'd been minor things happening too. Like hearing clapping while there's no one else in the office. Office computers logging in themselves. My boss is convinced its some chinese feng shui issue. Shared by Patrick Timothy Boey [Story Source: Supernatural Confessions] [Image Source: Pinterest] ![]() I saw a recent submission on your page about a deceased construction worker and it sparked off a memory of my own. I used to live in the now defunct Goodrich Park condo situated somewhere in Kovan with 3 of my university buddies. We had rented the place at a really affordable price as the condo complex was about to be torn down. Towards the last 6 months, I noticed several units had been leased to Indian and Thai construction workers. They used to gather around the pool side and have frequent drinking sessions. No one minded as the pool was hardly utilised as most of the residents had already moved out. One night as I returned home from uni, I noticed that the police and ambulance were in my condo complex. Upon further inquiry, I came to find out that a heavily intoxicated Indian construction worker, Shekar had drowned in the condo's pool. He was found floating in the pool, face down, by a neighbour. The thought of it was really disturbing. I said a silent prayer for his soul and went my way. Several nights after, I had arrived home at about 11pm when I decided to stop at the pool side for my usual cigarette before heading into my apartment. I sat on a deck chair while drinking a can of beer to unwind from the long day I had. My headphones were on and I was engrossed in my music and handphone while enjoying my smoke. Through the blaring music, I suddenly heard the sounds of water being splashed, like as someone had jumped into the pool. When I looked up, there was no one around and the swimming pool water was as still as the night. Assuming it was my imagination, I didn't think too much of it. As I reached for my can of beer, I felt a sudden gust of wind and the hairs on the back of my neck stood instantly. The temperature had abruptly dropped and it was unusually chilly. It was then that I looked up and saw a lone Indian man standing at the other end of the pool area. He was staring hard at me and there was just something unusual about him. His stare made me feel as if I had done something so gravely unforgivable. I looked away as I reached out for my can of beer again. However, my beer can seemed to be missing! I searched around the deck chair and there was no sight of my beer. I looked towards the mysterious man and he too was gone! There was no way someone could have taken my beer can without me noticing in than span of a few seconds. I started to feel scared and decided it was time to head back into my apartment. I told my housemates what had happened and we all agreed that the recently deceased Shekar was looking out for me, making sure that no one else suffered the same untimely, fatal death that he had. Shared by Hui Shan, 29, Teacher [Story Source: Supernatural Confessions] |
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