Ghosts, Ancestors & Mythical Creatures
We live in an ocean of energies most human senses cannot perceive. We perceive just a fraction of the layers of the very lively reality all around us. Even our very bodies are a cosmos of tiny critters we don’t like to think about, but that is very much a part of our biome.
As a child growing up, my Mom was a person, half wood nymph, as she liked to say, who opened my mind and imagination to the spirit world and worlds beyond. Her stories and her way of walking this earth, in the space of wonder for the natural world, always sparked great curiosity in the unseen world around me. My mind had no closed gate to what might exist out there beyond my perception — all things were possible. Who am I to say what is real or not just because I cannot see or sense it myself? As humans, our senses of perception, vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell limit us to the measurable and tangible world. We can look to the animal kingdom and observe the super-sharp vision of an eagle, a dog’s ability to hear their human’s car coming home from many blocks away, a deer’s ability to smell the scent of a predator from half a mile away. They perceive what we cannot.
Some of us humans do perceive beyond the five senses. We all have that ability; most of us are not dialed into it because the mind is overtaxed with inputs from our perceived world. We are mostly disconnected from the natural world and our inner being necessary to unveil these sensory abilities. Whether intuition or enhanced perception in hearing, sensing, or seeing the thriving universe beyond what our mind has been conditioned to know and what our limited bodily senses can perceive.
Before I arrived in Zaire as a Peace Corps volunteer, I had awareness about the animist way of living of the Bantu people of this region where I would live and work. Animism from Latin: anima, ‘ breath, spirit, life’ believes that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things — animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and perhaps even words — as animated and alive. Given my upbringing, I was pretty open to and already embraced aspects of animism myself though it was not developed with the people I lived amongst. Everything meant something and carried an essence or spirit to it.
I planted a kitchen garden near the small river close to my house with easy access for watering during the dry season. The kitchen garden was multi-purpose; one was to feed me. The other two reasons were to demonstrate how to grow vegetables coveted by the locals but challenging to come by. I planned to introduce more proteins and vitamins into their meals. Their diets were limited almost entirely to fufu — a doughy substance made from cassava flour, and occasionally corn was added. Leaves of the cassava plant, saka saka, were stewed with palm oil, pili pili chilis, and rock salt— it filled the belly but lacked nutritional value.
Many children and pregnant women suffer from Konzo, a neurological disease caused by poorly processed manioc (cassava root). Manioc contains naturally occurring cyanide, and if the tuber roots, the main staple starchy food of the area, are not appropriately processed by peeling, soaking in water, and drying in the sun, the cyanide remains. Protein was one way to counteract the effects of cyanide poisoning, and the local diet was highly deficient inconsistent protein sources. So I planted vegetables and niebe — cowpeas high in protein and other vegetables to learn what would grow in this soil and climate, hoping to add variety and nutrition to the local food staples.
The tomatoes in my garden did not thrive. I babied them along, doing all I could to help them be healthy. They developed a blight of some kind and were failing to thrive. As I conferred with the villagers to seek reasons why the tomatoes might be dying, what fungus or pest might be attacking them? They looked at me quizically and said, well, your tomatoes aren’t growing because we saw Wivine walk through your garden on her way to the river. Wivine was my neighbor and friend, a young woman about my age. I was genuinely speechless, and they could see the struggle on my face to understand. They said matter-of-factly, ‘she is pregnant; pregnant women kill gardens.’ I never got a satisfactory answer about why they believed this to be accurate; they did. Every time I saw Wivine after that, I wondered at the power of her pregnancy to kill my tomatoes and secretly imagined putting a ‘no pregnant women allowed’ just outside in my garden. Just in case…
There was a lot of debate about where I could grow my garden. The dispute wasn’t over the land of the living; instead, the ancestors' land. The most fertile and best-situated land for crops and gardens was often the sacred and untouchable domain of the ancestors. Though their bodies were not buried there, their spirits were believed to inhabit these choice pieces of land and left fallow. My impatient twenty-two-year- often wanted to argue with the village chiefs to encourage them to use the land to produce more robust crops for their families and village. But, it was deemed hallowed ground; the ancestors owned the rights to it. I learned quickly there was no arguing with the laws of the ancestors.
In each village I worked with, a negotiation process happened with the village chief and elders about which piece of land could be used for sowing fields without causing a disturbance to the ancestors. The ancestors are a lively part of everyday life, unlike the west, where we reminisce about those who have passed. Ancestors were fed daily, spoken to, revered, and feared. The ancestors were as alive as the people in front of me, and their silent voices were sometimes more robust than those of the living. There were so many mysteries and so many things my mind and perception could not grasp.
When visiting a village in the forest, elders told me stories shared with them by their grandparents of the terrible times under King Leopold II of Belgium, the ‘Monster of the Congo. Ten million Congo people were murdered or mutilated in what was then the sadistic king’s personal ‘possession’ from 1885–1908, and after his death was under the rule of Belgium until 1960. The brutality and genocide that the Congo people endured is a forgotten holocaust. It’s a country of ghosts. So many millions were murdered over the centuries in the battle for dominion over rich land with some of the world's most sought-after natural resources.
They shared stories of the Bakongo people fleeing into the forest to hide whenever enemies were present. They said they became invisible in the jungle. I asked them to tell me more, imaging they had ways to camouflage themselves in the jungle's flora. They said ‘no,’ they physically became invisible. My eyes grew wide as they explained they became part of the forest, invisible to the human eye. Belgian soldiers could walk within inches of them and not know they were there. They shared with such conviction, and I could imagine those deadly times and sat in wonder at the possibility that they had mastered the ability to become invisible. My appreciation for the resilience of their ancestors grew every time I had the privilege of their company, and the spoken history of all their ancestors had endured.
Just as lively as the presence of the ancestors was that of ghosts. From what I could gather, ghosts were perceived differently than the ancestors. Ghosts were those ancestors that didn’t fully transition and whose objective seemed to scare people. I heard stories from other Peace Corps volunteers who reported seeing ghosts — one group of volunteers were staying temporarily in an old Belgian colonizer's home, and they witnessed the ghost of a young Belgian girl who just stood and stared, not unlike the twins from the film, The Shining, standing and staring down the long corridor. Cue shivers up the spine.
My neighbors, the Swikidisas, were making a long-distance trip leaving their eight children on their own for a week. They asked if I would watch over the children while they were gone. Of course, I agreed, the elder kids were already accustomed to cooking and caring for the younger kids, so I thought, piece of cake. I would be available if anything significant went wrong and check in a couple of times a day.
A day or so after the Swikidisa’s departed, I was startled awake by the terrified screams of children that chilled my blood. Before I fully came to my senses and could get out of bed, the Swikidisa children were pounding on my door, begging to be let in. I opened the door, and a flood of children poured into my mud hut. They hugged me close, and scared, tear-stained children, encircled me. They cried that a ghost had come into the house and hit them on the head while they slept.
I got them to settle down. There was no way they would return to their home without their parents and some serious ghostbuster action. I rolled out woven mats on the floor, and they finally fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning. For the next few days, the kids stayed with me. We played cards outside under the stars cooked meals for the lively passel of kids. As they built up the courage in the light of day, they gingerly approached their house to open up the doors and windows and hung jugs of water in the doorways. They explained that the water jugs would lure the head-slapping spirit into the trap. The kids continued to stay with me until their parents returned home and ensured the kids the ghost was gone. My two-room hut felt mighty empty when they returned home.
In every country I have traveled to in the world, I have heard stories and personal accounts of people believing in or declaring emphatically that they had seen a mythical creature, whether faieries, Bigfoot, mermaids, and other beings.
My ex-husband from Bosnia-Hercegovina swears that he saw Bigfoot, Štek in Croatian, when he was a boy. He saw it on a moonlit night standing on a hilltop in his village of Bobanova Draga, rolling rocks down the top of the hill where it stood. It makes one wonder if Saskwatch is truly folklore, then why does every culture in the world seem to be having the same stories and sightings? Is it springing from collective human consciousness or lived experiences? Is it a part of the human psyche to create mythical creatures for good storytelling, or do these creatures live and walk on the same earth as us, living in remote areas where they are less likely discovered? Perhaps the ability to become invisible to escape being seen? Visiting Nepal, I heard stories of Yeti sightings, and in Subsaharan Africa, it’s the Pongo.
The mermaid, or versions of a mermaid-like creature, is very prominent in many cultures. In the part of Africa I was in, she was called Mami Wata.
Mami Wata, La Siren, the African water spirit, half-human, half-fish, carrying a mirror and wrapped in a snake, remains respected and celebrated before the African nations came in contact with Europe. Stories of the encounters with the Mami Wata are widespread across entire Africa. In the most common version, she stalks the ocean's shores and abducts men and women while they are swimming or traveling in a boat. Suppose the goddess thinks that the captive is worthy of her. In that case, she will return them to the shore, completely dry with a changed attitude toward spirituality and religion that can often make them rich, attractive, and famous. I never personally met anyone who said they had encountered Mami Wata, but the spectacular storytelling brought her to life. Mami Wata is venerated throughout Africa and parts of South America, and the Caribbean.
The more of the world I see, the more cultures and mythology I encounter, the more I understand how little I have grasped the depths of this creation we live in. What is an illusion, what is a myth, what is real? What is hidden from us beyond the veil of our comprehension? What is right in front of us that our limited five senses cannot perceive? I live in wonder at it all, open to the possibility of it all, for in doing otherwise, I may miss magic happening right in front of me.
