The Tale of the Haunted Cupboard

The Tale of the Haunted Cupboard

What woke me up I don't know. I just remember realizing there was someone in my house who shouldn't be there, and glancing over to see a robber almost within touching distance going through an antique wardrobe a friend had just left when she went back to Australia.

She saw me the same time as I saw her. I froze and waited for a knife or a gun, but thankfully she just ran into the night.

Calling the police for a minor burglary in any country isn't going to bring hoards of uniforms running, but you sort of expect a few questions, or a form for insurance presented. Not in Cambodia. When the officer arrived, he immediately began deep conversation with the staff, and it wasn't long before we had a culprit: the cupboard done it.

"There's your problem," he said triumphantly, gesturing grandly at the inanimate wooden object. "Did your friend have a problem when she had this cupboard too?" And I had to admit she had been robbed, a number of times, evoking gasps from the staff and knowing nodding. "It has bad ghosts," he said. "It's calling thieves to come to the house. That's why your robber went straight for the cupboard."

Cambodian logic defeats many people - mostly those who try to follow it using their own logic. I had long ago stopped taxing myself by doing this. Cambodians are majority Buddhist, but another belief system, animism, runs perhaps even more deeply and equally as strongly through their psyche. This is a country where "sorcerers" are still executed, where people let their son live with a giant python because it might be his reincarnated brother (and, despite the odds, the python doesn't harm him). A woman in Kandal has taken in a dog with alopecia because she believes it is her father returned, and magic flying cows and fortune telling turtles still make the newspapers from time to time.

"Ok. My cupboard is haunted. What do I do?"

We had previously been through the palaver of getting a spirit house for Buddha when I moved in, but being the stupid foreigner I am, I had not realized that this had thrown off the balance of the Neak Ta, or spirits of the house and garden, by not equally honoring them with a home. My House Spirit was insulted, and She was refusing to help me control bad spirits who were making trouble.

"If the Neak Ta of the inside of the house is content, you will know when you are about to be robbed and She can control the spirits of the cupboard from calling bad people," I was told.

So we went out and bought a home for the House Spirit. Decorated with garish Chinese lettering, and a mirror at its back, it was a bit loud, but there seemed little choice. And when we plugged it in, it gave a new meaning to loud, with miniature fairy lights flashing in a complex sequence of blue, yellow, red and green and two large red bulbs glowing on either side.

"Sa'at," said the Cambodians in unison - beautiful. At least someone thought so. We filled a small gold pot with sand and put two gold statues of Chinese gods at the back, placing money at the bottom of the pot before filling it up. And then the obligatory dead chicken arrived.

Steamed to perfection, its eyes staring sightlessly out from under its comb, its legs twisted crazily underneath it, the bird was placed reverently in front of the House Spirit's shrine along with flowers, incense and fruit and prayers were muttered. "I can still see his face," my daughter said, disgusted.

Despite the grand ceremony, the cupboard seemed unmoved. I don't know what I had expected - a sign - perhaps not as irrefutable as a horror movie special effect as the ghosts withered into the fiery depths of hell. But I expected something, and a wave of skepticism washed in.

The police caught my eye. "This sort of cupboard is only usually found in pagodas," he explained. "Different types of timber have different types of spirits - strong, weak, good, bad. Before I built my house I got an expert to examine every piece of timber and check for what spirits were in which pieces. Some types of timber have bad spirits - like this cupboard, its spirits might be bad or just naughty, but they can call thieves to come to them."

Indeed, the fence is very high and the thief must have scaled it not knowing if she could get out or how many people were in the house. That sort of boldness could only come from the siren call of the cupboard - or from a drug addiction, which I would have thought more likely anywhere else in the world, since all she took was my phone and my iron tablets, which were only labeled in English and probably looked quite promising to someone who can't read.

But I've found it never pays to underestimate beliefs here in Cambodia. Even if all it does is give me a fascinating lesson into another culture and make everyone around me feel better.

And so they left me with my disco-style new spirit house and a dead chicken, confident I was safer now. That was a week ago, and no thieves have attempted to revisit yet. Maybe it works. Maybe the mischievous Cupboard Spirits are finally under the control of the house and will never bother me again. I can only hope.