Ghost that lives in hog plum tree is scaring children away from school

After six students fell unconscious within a short time one day, triggering rumours of a ghost taking up residence in a tree next to a school building in south-western Bangladesh, children stopped attending classes, prompting the villagers of Hazipur in modern-day Patuakhali to decide to call in a witch doctor to chase the evil spirit away and set things right. The six say they have been visited by the demon, or “Ramayan” as is its name, who wants the 25-year-old hog plum tree to be chopped down and each to sacrifice a goat and distribute the meat among the locals to appease it. Doctors at Kalapara Upazila Health Complex who treated the six on the day of the fainting outbreak, term it a case of “mass hysteria”, that is manifestations of anxiety and hyperventilation.

News of one student becoming unconscious sparked off the outbreak, prompting others to feel malaise but for only a few hours. The phenomenon has nothing to do with the children's nutrition intake, they added, for they were healthy. “They need counselling and guardians and teachers can play a vital role in this matter,” stated Medical Officer Md Aminul Islam. This seems all too apparent for Laboni Baiddhya, the only Hindu of the group's five girls and single boy and the first to have gone unconscious. She and the others, all of whom are classmates except for two who are two years junior to her and studying in class six, were treated for six days at Barisal Sher-e-Bangla Medical College Hospital. But like the others she did not return to school.



Her father Hebol Baiddhya says she has been “acting weird”, scolding and sometimes becoming aggressive when approached. On September 15 she had, though for a short period, lost consciousness again. The situation is worse for Rojina, one of the two younger ones. Lying in bed most of the time, she has a blank look in her eyes, cries out in sudden fits and attacks people at random, said her mother Amena Begum. She stopped talking some days ago. Using a pen and paper, Rojina explained to this correspondent what “Ramayan” wanted. Students, in this case all of the school's 303, abstaining from classes is not what the 60-year-old Hazipur High School ever experienced, said 80-year-old shopkeeper Md Nur Islam.

The issue prompted a meeting to be called at the school on September 17, the day no students turned up, where some 500 villagers and the school authorities were present. A three-member committee comprising headmasters of the high school and an adjoining primary school and the high school managing committee's chairman has been formed to bring in Babul Huzur, the “spiritual healer” to use charms and chant incantations to exorcise the ghost. “We are trying our best to overcome the situation,” said the high school's headmaster Shah Jalal Munshi, apparently not convinced that it is the works of an evil spirit. He is worried over the Junior School Certificate and annual exams coming up in less than two months' time. Though puzzled, he has his suspicions and so waits till new evidence comes to light and unravels this mystery.