Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Epidemics of possessed women

The BBC reports on several cases of Malaysian women claiming dark, supernatural experiences.

One teenager describes her experience:

I was at my desk feeling sleepy when I felt a hard, sharp tap on my shoulder.

I turned round to see who it was and the room went dark.

Fear overtook me. I felt a sharp, splitting pain in my back and my head started spinning. I fell to the floor.

Before I knew it, I was looking into the 'otherworld'. Scenes of blood, gore and violence.

The scariest thing I saw was a face of pure evil.

It was haunting me, I couldn't escape. I opened my mouth and tried to scream but no sound came out.

I passed out.

Then other girls suffered related experiences.

Siti's outburst triggered a powerful chain reaction that ripped through the school. Within minutes students in other classrooms started screaming, their frantic cries ricocheting through the halls.

One girl fainted after claiming to have seen the same "dark figure".

Case after case unfolds. Some are quietly chilling:

"All hell broke loose" during a campus singing competition when a female student claimed to have spotted "a smiling Buddhist monk" on top of a nearby dormitory. "She let out a bloodcurdling scream," he recalls.

The BBC then examines different responses from Islamic scholars, folk shamans, psychologists, and others.

(thanks to Jesse "Not Screaming Yet" Walker)

Clowns against fear

While some people fear clowns, apparently others consider clowns to be defensive weapons.   In one New Zealand case, an employee about to be fired turned to a clown for support.

A Kiwi adman has chosen an unusual support person to accompany him to a redundancy meeting.

In lieu of the usual suspects of a friend, colleague or family member, the member of the creative team at FCB hired a professional clown to attend the meeting with him.

An image sent to the Herald overnight shows the staffer, sitting alongside his support clown while he talks to the individuals running the meeting.

The Herald understands that the clown blew up balloons and folded them into a series of animals throughout the meeting.

It's further understood that the clown mimed crying when the redundancy paperwork was handed over to the staffer.

Infocult in HR!