Pocong

The pocong is born of a rite left half done. In the Muslim burial of Indonesia and the Malay world, the body is washed, perfumed and wrapped in the kain kafan, the white cotton shroud, which is closed with ties so it can be carried: the most cited version speaks of three knots, above the crown, at the waist and at the feet, though some communities tie five or seven. Those knots are for the journey, not for the destination. Before the grave is closed they must be untied, so that the body rests loose on its right side, facing Mecca. When someone forgets, through a hurried burial, a family broken by grief or a dead man with no mourners, the deceased is left prisoner in his own winding sheet: the soul cannot find its way out of the body, and the body, unable to rest, rises from the loose earth at nightfall. So the folklore of Java and Sumatra tells it, and so it is repeated in Malaysia, Brunei and southern Thailand. The pocong is no predator: it is a walking ritual error, and everything it does, looming over roads, planting itself before a traveller, moaning, is the clumsy way a dead man asks to have his burial finished.

The pocong's whole repertoire comes out of its binding. Since its feet were left tied inside the shroud, it cannot walk: it moves in rigid hops, and the stories credit it with leaps of several metres, enough to land squarely in front of someone who thought they had left it behind. Between hop and hop, many tales have it float silently just above the ground, with that stillness of hanging cloth which is its most feared image. It does not claw or bite: its weapon is to appear. A white upright bundle where nothing should be, seen at night beside a graveyard, paralyses the witness without a touch. The shroud, while its knots hold, preserves it: the flesh does not rot, and harm adds nothing to it, because the worst has already happened. And its only way out is also its only weakness: if a living hand unties the knots, the pocong ends on the spot. There is no fight and no exorcism: what remains is an ordinary corpse again, ready to be buried as it should have been.

Those who describe it agree on the essentials: a human figure wrapped head to foot in a yellowish-white shroud, the topknot pointing skyward like a stalk, stains of grave earth, and an opening through which shows a grey face, sometimes swollen, with empty or darkened sockets. It appears to the man riding home late along village roads, to the night watchman in the small hours, to whoever cuts through a graveyard as a shortcut. In Java it is said that seeing it can also be a warning: a pocong haunting a house points to a botched burial or an unresolved death, and there are villages where the rumour of a pocong has been enough to reopen a grave and check the knots. Popular wisdom adds its recipes for escape, which change from village to village, run in swerves, do not look back, and those recipes betray what this terror really is: a domestic fright, of small communities, where the dead man and the witness probably knew each other by name.

The Indonesian pocong has its twin across the strait. In Malaysia and Brunei it is called hantu bungkus, the wrapped ghost, or hantu kochong, and the name is no accident: when Walter Skeat documented the Malay funeral in Malay Magic (1900), he noted that the gesture of closing the shroud by gathering its ends was called precisely kochong, and that the ties were five, three turns around the body, at the breast, the hips and the knees, plus the finishing knots above the head and below the feet. The count of the knots changes from one shore to the other; the logic never changes. Skeat himself heads his census of spirits with the hantu kubor, the grave demons, the class of the dead to which this shrouded one belongs. Lined up, the pocong's relatives draw a map of Asia: the Chinese jiangshi also advances in hops with a rigid body, also through a twisted funerary rite, though it is stopped by a Taoist talisman stuck to its forehead, while the pocong is undone by a hand that unties. The comparison has become a commonplace in Indonesia itself, where the pocong is today the most filmed ghost of its horror cinema and the cheapest costume in the world: a sheet and three knots.