Of Bizarre Happenings Defying Human Logic

It may sound stranger than fiction yet it is true. It is what would make for a rich plot in one of Nollywood or Bongowood movie that had witchcraft or elements of mysticism as a central theme. Yet these happenings, and rare sightings, bordering from weird to bizarre, and defying human or science logic, have from time to time been reported with the authentication of the same proving a hard sell.

  Not long ago in a Nakuru County village, a woman was sent packing by unseen forces believed to have been sent by her co-wife. She happened to be the first wife of a now deceased prosperous businessman. He had built her a house on a small acreage of land compared to his second wife. He and the latter were living on a vast track of land in an imposing bungalow. As is known that no woman can stand the sight of the other one sharing her husband, the first wife believed the second one, younger to be her own daughter, had taken her husband away.

  This first wife would complain her share or property, especially the land, was small and didn’t befit her status as the first wife. She had several children compared to the’ interloper’. She camped in the home of the second wife and took charge of the land as hers. The husband kept warning her to desist and return to her home or she would ‘see’. Sadly, he died before he could make any peace deal between his two wives.

  After the burial, the fist wife continued with business as usual. But one day, while tilling the garden, two human hands appeared from the ground, scooped loose soil and hurled it into her eyes. Her screams attracted scores of curious neighbours who dismissed her tale with some speculating that she may have struck on an object with hoe which sent soil flying into her eyes.

  A few days later, she was back to the same garden and while stooped down working, the same hands appeared again this time violently hurling the soil to her eyes almost rendering her blind. She claimed a voice, reportedly that of the deceased husband, told her to clear out of the compound for her own good.

  Sometimes back, also in a Nakuru County village, a former civil servant lay on his deathbed at his house. From time to time, he would scream pleading for mercy from an invisible assailant whom he would call by name. Each time this tormentor made visitations, he would be left with discernible marks of a physical assault that confounded many. At first, it was easier to dismiss the tale as a case of aggravated delirium owing to the nature of his terminal illness. But his naming the assailant and the crime he did against her raised questions than it answered about the state of his mind.

  According to an area resident, the man was said to have done worse things to an employee in his heydays as a civil servant who later vowed revenge after being spurned and dismissed. But she died in inexplicable circumstances and it was claimed her ghost had come to haunt him on his deathbed.

  Following his burial, strange happenings began to be seen. Residents claim a thick black snake emerges from his homestead and scares away passers-by at evenings. At daytimes, it spreads itself lengthwise across the road and makes for the hedges with the approach of any passer-by.

  An elderly area resident said he was going home sometimes back around 7p.m when the sound of a bleating sheep attracted him. Believing some animals were strangling the sheep, he edged to the hedge to have a peep inside. To his shock, it was this snake making the bleating noise and shot out as he approached. It is hard to authenticate his story, and others, as many had adopted a hush-hush approach to the issue owing to fear.

  And a man was forced demolish his home, sell his land and relocate back to his advanced parent’s home. This was to escape the wrath of his departed wife who was said to be making it to the dinning table in an apparition form asking why she hadn’t been factored in the meals. It’s reported she was against his desire for remarriage, that he ended sending his second wife away.

  Even relocating to his parent’s home didn’t ease his woes. The spiritual form of this wife stalks him everywhere. A former church member, he had now sunk to depression and had taken to alcoholism. But even in drinking dens, the phantom of his wife confronts him there that at times, he screams dunking under the tables pleading with her to leave him. And it happens in his sound state of mind even before he is intoxicated. Patrons says some of his drinks are spilled off mysteriously even when put on a stable table.

  An elderly villager says the man may have offended ancestral spirits and had been courting such misfortunes. According to some traditional Kikuyu beliefs, offending the spirits would result to a condition known as thahu (uncleanliness). To purify oneself, one needed to appease the angry spirits with animal sacrifices. And in the situation of this man, he should have demolished his house and constructed a new one. But this ‘solution’ doesn’t hold sway anymore as many beliefs had been swept under the carpet with modernism.

  During the height of Kenya's electoral violence in 2007, a man hailing from western Kenya and working as a farmhand for a wealthy Nakuru family, was attacked by members of a proscribed sect as he was fleeing Nakuru for the safety of his native home county. His bloodstained shirt, it was alleged, was taken to a witch doctor operating in western Kenya and, bizarrely, anyone who participated in shedding his blood began dying one after the other in mysterious circumstances. Within two years, none of the gang of about eleven members was alive.

  Curiously, a mganga mashuhuri (witch doctor), who claims to be a ‘demon buster’, says the ‘ghosts’ many people claim to see are actually demons. In the three cases highlighted above, the demons were involved in executing the will of aggrieved parties.

  The ‘doctor’, who purports to hail from Ukambani and operates at Free Area township on outskirts of Nakuru town, proclaims himself an expert in strange fields including preventing lightning sent by an enemy from striking one if his signage is to be believed. Though he’s guarded about his trade, he says demons wears the face of someone one is familiar with in order to torment the living. This is what makes one to ‘see’ ghost of somebody they know.

  His claims can be authenticated by the testimony of D.D Kaniaki, who in his book, Snatched from Satan’s Claws, reveals the depth he went into Satanism and how he would employ demons to afflict the living.

  The author claims that at his birth, a demon wearing the face of a dead uncle went into his parent’s room during his birth and demanded that he be named after that late uncle. This uncle, he says, was involved in deep occultism and it was weird how he ‘resurrected’, gave instructions, and returned to the dead.

  The mganga says what feeds the demonic is the negative words or remarks one makes against another. These evil powers will ensure harm is effected against the individual or the person the words, which acts as a curse, are directed towards. Thus, if one volubly says he or she will kill self, the demons will chance upon these words to push that person to suicide. Kaniaki supports these observations in his writings. The mganga further says the nature of attack on an individual; their homes and families depend on the operative demonic powers in a place. They can vary from mild tempered to violent ones that leaves destruction, sicknesses and curses in their wake. This explains why certain misfortunes afflict some places, people or homes.

  But a pastor, whose name would rather be anonymous, terms the mganga’s views as rubbish. He notes the waganga have never meant good to a society’s wellbeing, and where there are wagangas, poverty and hardships afflict the places. His take is the waganga’s are themselves conveyors of evil through the dark powers they employ and lives large thanks on the fear of their gullible customers.

  He says demons are bodiless entities that need a vessel like a human body to possess. He wonders what those who claim to see them in their true manifested forms as ghosts were either suffering from or had consumed.

  “There is a possibility those who claims to see them are either undergoing psychosomatic ailments or high on substances,” he says.

  He adds no departed soul can influence any happenings on the physical realms other than dark spiritual operative powers in places. This reinforces the argument of the mganga and the man of cloth too admits words spoken have power on them. They can bring either blessings or curses or influence the state of mind of an individual.

  The spirits, he notes, preys on fears of an individual and other loopholes to gain access. “Just as one leaves a house door open and a thief gains access, even the operative forces will seek a loophole in order to attack, occupy or destroy an individual or their homes. There is nothing like a departed soul avenging itself on the living,” he says.

  Some situations, however, are hard to countenance. Examples abounds like women being raped, men sodomized or things being banged in houses, food hurled from cooking stoves or even rocks being hurled on house rooftops, and by, you guess, these strange forces!

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