Kepuh village in Indonesia has been haunted by ghosts recently — mysterious white figures jumping out at unsuspecting passersby, then gliding off under a full-moon sky.
The village on Java has deployed a cast of “ghosts” to patrol the streets, hoping that age-old superstition can keep people indoors and safely away from COVID-19.
“We wanted to be different and create a deterrent effect because pocong are spooky and scary,” said Anjar Pancaningtyas, head of a village youth group that coordinated with the police on the initiative to promote social distancing.
Photo: EPA-EFE / Russian Ministry of Defense
Known as pocong, the ghostly figures are typically wrapped in white shrouds with powdered faces and kohl-rimmed eyes.
In local folklore they represent the trapped souls of the dead.
However, when they first started appearing this month they had the opposite effect: Instead of keeping people in they bought them out to catch a glimpse of the apparitions.
The organizers have since changed tack, launching surprise pocong patrols, with village volunteers playing the part of the ghosts.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has resisted a national lockdown to curb the disease, instead urging people to practice social distancing and good hygiene.
However, with the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths in Asia after China, some communities, such as Kepuh, have decided to take measures into their own hands, imposing the ghostly patrols, lockdowns and restricting movement in and out of their village.
“Residents still lack awareness about how to curb the spread of COVID-19 disease,” village head Priyadi said. “They want to live like normal, so it is very difficult for them to follow the instruction to stay at home.”
There are now 4,557 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Indonesia, and 399 deaths, with fears the numbers could rise significantly. University of Indonesia researchers estimate there could be 140,000 deaths and 1.5 million cases by next month without tougher curbs on movement.
When reporters recently visited Kepuh village, the supernatural strategy seemed to be working, with villagers running off in fright when the ghosts materialized.
“Since the pocong appeared, parents and children have not left their homes,” resident Karno Supadmo said. “And people will not gather or stay on the streets after evening prayers.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS