Not For Sale

Story told by:
Sara de Souza; blog owner
----------------------------

My parents told me and my brothers about their scary experience when we were in the car one evening while they were going to do their grocery shopping.

It was many years ago when I was still a toddler (I think I was about a year old, I am now turning 22 this year). My parents wanted to buy a property for the intention of leasing it out in the Petaling Jaya area. It was a corner lot at the end of a dead-end road, and right next to it was a small abandoned lot that had one of those small red Chinese prayer houses.

Upon first entering the house, my parents felt like the house "felt" funny. They felt uneasy but it was their rational decision that make them steadfast about wanting to buy the property. So they decided to think about it further, and my mom decided to consult my uncle, her half-brother. He was quite knowledgeable about "these" things and my mom wanted to know if the house was "clean" or appropriate to buy. So a few days after that they brought him to the house in Petaling Jaya where he said a few prayers. While that, he buried some sharp metal shards in the yard. After that was done, he announced that he will know the answer in his sleep that night.

So my parents and my uncle went back to my house. My uncle slept downstairs in the living room while my parents were about to nod off to sleep in their own room.

Suddenly the windows that were so hard to open before because of the structure of it, shut closed together with the toilet bathroom's door. This jolted both my parents from near-slumber and the hairs on my mom's arms started to stand on its own. Before my parents could fully react to what was going on, they heard me crying in my room. They described my crying was like as if something was choking me, making me scream in a gurgled manner.

They ran to my room, fearing the worst. When they got to me, they said I looked fine, although my face seemed red from all that crying. They cradled me in their arms and got out of the room to see the living room's light was on. My uncle was awake.

My parents, flabbergasted and scared, asked him about what was happening. He seemed calm and asked them to keep silent for a moment. He chanted a few prayers underneath his breath. He then told them to go back to sleep, he will discuss it in the morning.

The next morning after a sleepless night, my uncle finally told my parents what had happened.

He said that a Jin came into his dream and he was ripping tiger skins apart. He was very built with a large torso, and he didn't seem at all friendly. And he looked angry.

The Jin, in my uncle's dream, told him to leave the property alone because it was his house. So my parents decided not to buy the property in the end.

And I don't know if this incident is related or not, but after that I seemed to have a fancy towards knives and blades. When I was 2 or 3, I crawled into my mom's cupboard with a pair of really sharp fabric scissors made out of metal and shut the door behind me. After hours of searching for me, my mom opened her cupboard door to see the whole of the inside smeared with blood and me holding the scissors in my hand.

After that, through years 4-12 I always managed to get a hold of anything sharp, and each time I always cut myself. There was so many times I did that with butter knives (I hid in my toy house with a butter knife) and I remember clearly once with my dad's shaving razor. I scraped it across the outstretched palm of my hand until it bled. Yeah, my childhood was full of bandages.

I'm glad that all that stopped, but it just makes me wonder what I saw that made me scream about that fateful night.