Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The Hung Ghost Saviour (救命吊鬼)


It is said that a cat has nine lives. Perhaps it is not too much to say that Aunt Tan has the lives of a cat as she had attempted to kill herself seven times but still lived to tell her story to me!

Aunt Tan is suffering from mental depression and she is also on prescriptions too. One day, she told her daughter that she wanted to go out for a walk but instead, she jumped down from their second floor flat and broke both of her legs. Aunt Tan was subsequently admitted into the local hospital for 6 months and later she was sent to mental asylum for another 3 months. This was her first suicide attempt and she survived.

After returning home from mental asylum, Aunt Tan asked her daughter to buy her some sleeping pills as she complaint of difficult to sleep at night. So, her daughter gave the sleeping pills to Aunt Tan as requested. During one morning when no one was at home, Aunt Tan swallowed the entire bottle of sleeping pills and then laid in her bed to die. But after sleeping for 8 hours or so, she woke up and found herself okay. Feeling a little awkward, Aunt Tan brought the pill bottle to a pharmacy and only to be told that the pills she swallowed were imitations. This was her second attempt to kill herself.

Apparently this old lady wasn’t ready to give up her suicide attempt easily. One morning when Aunt Tan was left alone in her daughter’s house, she took a taxi to Butterworth from Penang. When the taxi passed through the middle of Penang Bridge, she asked the taxi driver to stop and let her out. When the good hearted driver found something wasn’t quite right; he stopped Aunt Tan and brought her to the local hospital. This was her third attempt.

A few weeks following Aunt Tan’s Penang Bridge jump failure, she tried to kill herself by gas inhalation in her house. That attempt too was discovered by her neighbour after smelling gas leaked from her house. It was not a moment too soon when the fire brigade came to rescue Aunt Tan and the whole block too. She was again admitted to mental asylum for three months. This was again Aunt Tan’s fourth attempt.

After a series of suicide attempts, Aunt Tan’s daughter hired a maid to keep an eye on her mother while she goes to work. Looked like the maid tactic worked for another few months until one day, Aunt Tan locked herself in her bedroom and tried to hang herself with a piece of nylon rope. She tied the rope to the ceiling fan and made a loop with the rope. Then she stood on a stool and put her head into the loop. As soon as Aunt Tan kicked the stool off to let gravity do the job, the rope snapped and Aunt Tan fell onto the floor. She was relatively unharmed. A few days later, she tried her luck for the second time. But this time, the ceiling fan gave way under Aunt Tan’s weight and fell onto the ground. Those were the fifth and sixth attempt for Aunt Tan to end her life.

Then one night, Aunt Tan sneaked out from her daughter’s flat and went to a haunted house nearby. She thought by committing suicide in a haunted building would be easier as the ghost in that area would lend her a helping hand to end her life. So said, Aunt Tan went into the haunted house and found the room that a young lady was said to have hung herself. After Aunt Tan tied the rope she was hoping to end her life with to the brim of a window frame, she climbed up to a comfortable height and put her neck in.

As soon as Aunt Tan’s neck was in the loop of the rope, she suddenly saw a ghostly face appeared in front of her. It was the face of a lady with long hair, a pair of bulging eyes, a sticking out long tongue and a rope was still hanging on the lady’s neck. This ghostly lady looked into Aunt Tan’s eyes with her dead fish like bulging eyes and said: “Do you want to look like me?”

Almost immediately, Aunt Tan gave out a sharp shriek; and she took a step back and fell down from a height and fainted. Apparently though Aunt Tan was not afraid of dying, she was indeed afraid of ghosts; moreover, coming face to face with one!

The last suicide attempt by Aunt Tan made her to sit down and think again of all her suicide attempts. Although Aunt Tan is still not fully recovered from her mental depressions, killing herself is definitely out of the question at this moment. Maybe Aunt Tan was saved by a hung ghost after all!

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