World Beyond the Grave
BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MBG/IV)
d_ozkan@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
One day to graduate school application deadlines! By the time you read this, of course, everything will be over and I'll go back to being a mildly lazy senior. Or I'll learn that my transcript letters got lost in transportation and turn into an apparition of sheer righteous fury, haunting Bilkent forevermore (there are quite a few people said to have done this, one of whom, Taira no Masakado, is quite likely the only ghost in the world to have a bank account. He's far richer than me, too.) Anyway, a word of advice to juniors: Take your TOEFL and GREs before your fourth year, send your transcripts at least two months before the deadline, start writing your Statements of Purpose, and start bugging teachers for recommendation letters early (but do that last one on March or so, since they're currently swamped by our own recommendations). Otherwise, well, you'll regret it in a year or so.
This is getting long, so let's cut down on the sagely advice and move on to the main course: the undead (well, I guess the main course isn't quite palatable this week). Some people, it seems, are just not content with their lot in the afterlife and rise back from their graves for reasons varying from sound, such as not getting a proper burial, to ridiculous, such as dying unmarried. On a side note, in order to defeat the latter, you need to get him married (good luck finding a bride) or bury him with a bottle of whisky so that when he comes back, he'll forget his sorrows and go back to his eternal slumber. Oh yeah, those are called strigoi, come from Romania, have quite a number of variants, and are vampires. Romanian vampires are generally of the Orlok type and not Dracula type, however.
The Far East has a slightly different kind of undead, of which the most well-known are probably the Chinese hopping corpses, which drain qi instead of blood. The most horrific, though, is probably the toyol, a small Malay haunt created via black magic from, uh, a dead fetus. You are then supposed to keep it in a jar, releasing it whenever you require its services. Not unlike a twisted version of Pokemon, where instead of a Pokeball ball you have a jar, and your Pokemon is a reanimated fetus. The toyol is generally utilized in small mischief, like stealing or playing pranks, tasks I am pretty sure can be accomplished without the use of an undead infant. It's also pretty strong, so I guess you can use it as a handyman.
Southeast Asia is in general famous for very interesting (and terrifying) supernatural beliefs, such as insect-summoning sorcerers filling their victims' guts with fly swarms or vampires with long, thread-like tongues which they spread around to drain blood from afar. The latter are said to be very fond of the blood of unborn fetuses. I don't know why that fetus obsession is there, but I don't think I can stomach it any longer.
Another interesting undead is the gashadokuro, a combined giant skeleton from Japan, the land of combining giant robots (which I am quite fond of since the heyday of Voltron, in itself the epitome of the genre because it is made by combining two shows together). This compound creature is formed from the skeletons of starvation victims, and as befitting a building-sized skeleton, it eats people. Incidentally, it is believed that starvation victims can turn into a great deal of other creatures, because the strong hunger they feel before their demise is thought to anchor them to the world of the living.
Anyhow, we finally have a winter worth calling winter. Since we're in that nice spot between the two salvos of exams, it's a good time to enjoy the snow. It's a good time to get sick too.