The Other World - The Other Experience In Jumeirah

Spooky Goings-On  
By Annabel Kantaria

I once employed a Filipina housekeeper who saw it as her duty not just to keep my house clean, but also to save me from evil spirits. Despite being educated enough to know better, she was, like many Filipinos, very superstitious. For example, if we went grocery shopping together, she would leap into my path at opportune moments to save me from receiving bad luck from fellow shoppers whom she “could tell” were cursed, or from evil spirits hiding in the produce section.
I found it mildly amusing for a while but it started to grate when she became convinced that my house was haunted. There’s nothing funny about getting home from a 10-hour day at the office to be greeted by the spooked face of a housekeeper who believes a poltergeist’s been tampering with the air-conditioning.
Her most frequent complaint, though, was the mysterious footsteps she would hear walking upstairs when she was home alone. “And sometimes the bedroom door bangs, too,” she’d say in that eery voice that teenagers use when planning a séance. “The last house I worked in was haunted, too. Two ghosts.”  (This last piece of information delivered with a knowing nod and a raised eyebrow.)
I tried to explain to her that my house was built in 2005. We were the first people ever to live in it. The chances of it truly being haunted were minimal – maybe I should just get the electrician out to check the air-con? She argued that someone may have died while it was being built, or perhaps it was built on a burial site.
Not knowing the history of the piece of desert upon which my house is built, I couldn’t really argue. It’s also difficult not to be moved when you live with someone whose belief is so strong. Maybe there was something in it after all? Many of the different nationalities living in Dubai believe strongly in the supernatural. Emirates 24/7 reported this week on a part of Jumeirah, Dubai, that many residents believe is haunted.
Expats talk of plates sliding across tables, of remote-controlled cars driving on their own, of running taps, ghostly footsteps and even sightings of apparitions. A Pakistani gardener refuses to walk past one particular house in the area, claiming there’s a cold chill surrounding it and strange noises coming from it at night, even though it’s uninhabited. While three others backed up his story, none were willing to tell the reporter which house it is that’s known as “bhoot house” (ghost house).
It wouldn’t be such a stretch to imagine that the area is haunted. It’s close to Dubai’s most significant archaeological site, where remains of a souq and houses dating back to the 6^th century AD are still visible; and it’s not so far from Al Sufouh, where, in 1990, a tomb was excavated along with four cremation pits containing burnt human bone thought to be from as many as 200 bodies.
But, back to my own house. I asked my current housekeeper, also Filipina, if she believes in spirits and if she feels our house is haunted. “I believe in it,” she said. “But there’s nothing in this house. If there’s a spirit in the house I know because my hairs stand on end.” I didn’t tell her about the unmistakable footsteps I hear upstairs when everyone else is out.
Annabel Kantaria is a journalist who moved to Dubai long before most people knew where it was. She doesn’t ride a camel to work; has never seen a gold-plated golf buggy and only rarely has pink champagne for breakfast. 

Source: My Telegraph - April 21, 2011

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Jumeirah Jinns Giving Residents A Spookfest 

Tenants, gardeners and maids report mysterious apparitions, doors slamming and things moving on their own By Bindu Suresh Rai

The Jumeirah 2 neighbourhood has given several families sleepless nights.

It's 3am and footsteps can be heard echoing across the upstairs landing. A chill seeps into the room as a long dark shadow uncurls across the staircase, reaching out into the inky black darkness.
If this was a scene from a Hollywood movie, Ghostbusters would only be a short call away.
But for the many residents of Jumeirah 2 and 3, this everyday reality spins a spooky yarn of its own.
Over the last one year, cases of ghostly sightings and eerie and unexplained happenings have surfaced across residents of villas across the district.
The Jumeirah 2 neighbourhood, behind Choithrams supermarket in particular, has given several families sleepless nights.
Kate Naomi, a former Jumeirah resident wrote on the Expatwoman.com forum: “I consider myself a non-believer. But we moved into a house in Jumeirah, quite an old house actually, and all kinds of strange things started to happen. We tried to think up rational explanations but couldn’t seem to find any.
“There were a number of incidents - a plate sliding across the table on its own (heavy china one), there was nothing near it and the table was not wet. The gas cooker kept turning on; my sons toys kept activating themselves (remote control car driving round when no one is near the controller).”
If that wasn’t enough to give people the willies, she added: “My husband who is a complete non-believer told me he saw someone sitting on the stairs, a woman, and both of us have seen a small boy several times... It has happened in front of others too with my best friend sprinting for the door and wouldn’t come round after she witnessed some strange goings on. [sic].”
Kate went on to state that she later learned that no tenant has stayed in the house longer than six months.
Since her posts began, the family has moved homes and are relieved that incidents have not followed them into their new residence.
Kate’s experiences are not isolated. Another Jumeirah resident, Kitty, has also narrated similar experiences, saying: “We are living in Jumeirah three near Choithrams and also have odd things happening. The kitchen tap starts running around 10pm. I can hear footsteps upstairs when I know the kids are asleep. I also get the feeling that I am being watched and then the dog starts barking always in the same place where I feel the watching is coming from. Thankfully it does not seem to be a threatening presence.”
Another Expatforum poster, Wrinkly has a similar story to tell. “We live behind Safa Park and for the past six years have been having this ‘uneasy’ feeling in the house.
“My friend and her daughter came to visit and the daughter told us she saw a shadow in the house and a woman’s figure. Our neighbours never stay longer than a year and the people previously in our house also just stayed for a year and the people before them... I don’t know if it’s just my imagination going wild or there might be something more
A former burial site?
Stories have long since circulated over the Dubai grapevine that the Jumeirah district was once a burial ground for tribes over a century ago.
Kate is a firm believer in that, saying: “I know for a fact that there are a few old burial grounds in Jumeirah; I am pretty sure my house was located on one.”
Sophie, who is also a Jumeirah resident took to the online forum to talk about her maid complaining of seeing spirits, which soon propelled into a state of spooky incidences.
She wrote: “My daughter started with these stories of “friends” telling her “secrets” so I just chalked it up to imaginary friends, although she said one of them was “scaryman” and that has been a whole discussion with her. I am overly cautious with her TV to the point that there is no cable connection in the playroom...”
But when Sophie’s maid started to complain that spirits were haunting the house, all rationality went on pause mode.
“My villa is over 20 years old and the house next door is empty a lot and in the past five years has had a few different families,” she said. “But I also know that parts of Jumeirah are on top of old archaeological sites.”
Head to UAE interact and the government website confirms that Jumeirah was once a caravan stop for a trade route connecting Iraq and Rumoured grave sites having been covered over the decades have also made the rounds, but no one has ever confirmed the urban legend.
When 'Emirates 24|7' investigated, several similar stories cropped up with one Pakistani gardener, Shoaib Khan, saying: “I have worked in the area for seven years and there is a house here that all of us avoid walking past.
You feel a cold chill the minute you enter its compound and the dogs also bark incessantly when they approach it.
“No one has stayed in the villa for years and sometimes if you are out at night, you hear noises coming from it. I am telling you, there is an evil jinn in the house.”
Khan refused to escort this reporter to what he referred to as “bhoot villa” or “ghost villa”, nor would he divulge in its whereabouts.
Surprisingly, three others verified Khan’s story and all paled at the idea of divulging the address.
In Arabic folklore and Islamic teachings, jinns are supernatural beings that reside in a parallel world to humans. Jinns are known to be good, neutral or evil.
“The ones here are not good. They are evil,” said Liaqat Hassan, an Afghani driver who resides in Jumeirah three with his employers. “We have seen her, a woman who walks with her feet twisted. Anyone who looks her directly in the face goes mad.”
While Hassan’s dramatic story cannot be proved, his fear seemed genuine as he immediately started to recite verses from the Holy Quran and walked away.
Resident Sophie did ultimately end up employing the exorcism route to cleanse her home of any spirits, mischievous or of the evil kind.
She said: “The maid has not said anything about any spirits of late. It could also be that she was making it up and thought better to stop or my husband got a bit angry with her and scared her more than the spirits.”

Source: Emirates 247 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Paranormal Sighting In Learning Institutions With The Star

Does accounts of supernatural activities in schools are very much alive and well in this modern day and age?

Does sightings of apparitions and unexplained occurences are popular shared topics of conversations for current and former students of their eerie experiences?

About 3 months ago, StarEducation sent a callout asking students to write in their personal accounts of mysterious happenings in their schools or universities.

Based on The Sunday Star report on May 9, students walked down their journey doing their rounds in the local learning institutions looking at the creepy tales.

Colonial era schools such as this one in Kuala Lumpur tend to have more than their fair share of creepy stories.

Historic haunts
Invented or real histories of schools are a common starting ground for terrifying tales.

At the more historic schools around the country, it would seem that some of the troops who arrived in Malaya during the Japanese Occupation of the early 1940s have never left.
Tales of schools being former Japanese torture camps are a particularly popular explanation for apparitions of headless corpses and sounds of marching soldiers in the dead of night.

Perhaps the strangest tale in circulation at the moment are sightings of beheaded nuns in a well-known girls’ school in Kuala Lumpur.

 

While the school canteen may be the focal point for students during recess, it can at other times, turn out to be an eerie place where one can hear mysterious sounds and witness strange happenings.

 Although the brutalities committed during that era cannot be denied, conclusive proof of all the exact spots where the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police) murdered their victims is hard to find.

Consultant Mavindren Naidu however, believes that his former school in Ipoh is a hotbed of paranormal activity.
“From 1943 till the end of the war, the Japanese government did have their headquarters in Perak.
“It’s not surprising then if some of the locations in my school were previously used as execution spots by the army,” he says.

Mavindren claims that his former schoolmates have seen silhouettes of bodies hanging from trees, and screams echoing down empty hallways.
“I’ve experienced the screams myself once, while waiting for my father to pick me up after co-curricular activities.

“Maybe it was a classmate pulling my leg, but there were no other students around and it didn’t sound human...” he says.

 

Many a student will swear to spirits lurking in empty classrooms.

Declaring himself to be a sceptic, Tan Seng Hong says a misunderstanding of history can easily cause rumours to spread.
“Some say that my school was a prison, or that it was built on an ancient tribal burial ground,” says the secondary school student.

“But my school is fairly new, and this area has always been a commercial one! Of course, if I believed the stories to be true, I too would feel scared or see things that aren’t really there.”

Permanent residents
As they tend to be located in isolated surroundings, boarding schools are rife with supernatural anecdotes.

One of the most infamous yarns is that of the boy who wakes up in the middle of the night at his dormitory room.

Upon seeing dark shadows hovering along the beds of his fellow students, the boy pulls up his covers and pretends to be asleep.

 

The abandoned Shih Chung school in Penang is supposedly haunted and the abode of different types of ghosts.

The terrified boy then hears a disembodied voice singing: “The rest are asleep, but one is awake.”

Civil servant Shazliza Ramli thinks that such tales are a way of keeping students in check.
“You can be sure that once a student hears a story like that, he is bound to keep to his bedtime,” she laughs.

Shazliza adds that another common “happening” at her former residential school in Kelantan is the doppelganger effect.
“One story I can account for is when a friend of mine had to go home for the weekend due to an injury. 

"But the night warden claimed to have seen my friend wandering around the corridors late at night, and thought she was rude for not answering the warden’s calls."

 

Sightings of apparitions are often spotted along empty corridors and at disrepaired stairwells in schools.

“Upon learning the truth, the warden subesequently refused to do the night shift again; but I think it was an effective caution for the girls, because after that, none of us loittered around at night!” she says.

Residential school student Azfar Masom meanwhile, thinks that his seniors just take sadistic pleasure in scaring the wits out of younger students.
“This is especially true when we have overnight leadership-building or camping events,” says Azfar.

“The students would do things like sneaking up on unsuspecting individuals who dared venture out to answer the call of nature.

“The teachers have more subtle techniques — when doing the head count at the end of the day, they would add an extra person to make it look like we had an unexpected ‘guest’ sharing our tent for the night.”

Tertiary terror
At higher education institutions that are built around dense jungle areas, the old wives’ tale goes that empty buses were sent from the proposed site to the middle of nowhere.

It is said that this was so that bus drivers could transport unwanted spirits to their new “home”, away from the university.
While the sprawling campuses of some local universities appear spacious in broad daylight, taking a nightly stroll in them can be an unnerving experience for even the bravest of souls.

Economics student Sandra Ooi claims that sightings of a lone woman in white are common at her campus in Selangor.
“When my boyfriend came to pick me up one night, he said he saw a girl dressed in white in the distance.

“Thinking it was a student looking for a lift, he slowed down his car — but as he got closer, she disappeared.

“Several of my male classmates have seen this girl while walking back to their dorms,” she says.

In similar vein, Wong Li Ping is certain that she has personally experienced the urban legend of her former private higher education institution in the Klang Valley.
“I saw a person standing on one of the balconies of the hostel block facing mine,” says the sales executive.

“Suddenly the figure leapt down; I thought I had just witnessed a suicide.

“I immediately started to dial the emergency number, but when I glanced up again, I saw the figure standing there as before.”
Li Peng adds that the scene repeated twice, before the figure completely vanished.

Although there is no concrete validity to the relations above, they do reflect the Malaysian appetite for the supernatural.

As Priya Kulasagaran conclude in this writing, "Whether you are a believer or not, the very least these stories do is plant a small seed of doubt when walking down a lonely corridor."

Science Is So Powerful, Yet It Cannot Explain Everything

A good read for like-minded inquisitive minds of mine - The Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena which remain unexplained by science. 

10. The Body/Mind Connection
Medical science is only beginning to understand the ways in which the mind influences the body. The placebo effect, for example, demonstrates that people can at times cause a relief in medical symptoms or suffering by believing the cures to be effective - whether they actually are or not. Using processes only poorly understood, the body's ability to heal itself is far more amazing than anything modern medicine could create.

9. Psychic powers and ESP
Psychic powers and extra-sensory perception (ESP) rank among the top ten unexplained phenomena if for no other reason than that belief in them is so widespread. Many people believe that intuition (see No.3) is a form of psychic power, a way of accessing arcane or special knowledge about the world or the future.

Researchers have tested people who claim to have psychic powers, though the results under controlled scientific conditions have so far been negative or ambiguous. Some have argued that psychic powers cannot be tested, or for some reason diminish in the presence of skeptics or scientists. If this is true, science will never be able to prove or disprove the existence of psychic powers.

8. Near-Death Experiences and Life After Death
People who were once near death have sometimes reported various mystical experiences (such as going into a tunnel and emerging in a light, being reunited with loved ones, a sense of peace, etc.) that may suggest an existence beyond the grave. While such experiences are profound, no one has returned with proof or verifiable information from "beyond the grave." Skeptics suggest that the experiences are explainable as natural and predictable hallucinations of a traumatized brain, yet there is no way to know with certainty what causes near-death experiences, or if they truly are visions of "the other side."

7. UFOs
There is no doubt that UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) exist - many people see things in the skies that they cannot identify, ranging from aircraft to meteors. Whether or not any of those objects and lights are alien spacecraft is another matter entirely; given the fantastic distances and effort involved in just getting to Earth from across the universe, such a scenario seems unlikely. Still, while careful investigation has revealed known causes for most sighting reports, some UFO incidents will always remain unexplained.

6.Deja vu
Deja vu is a French phrase meaning 'already seen,' referring to the distinct, puzzling, and mysterious feeling of having experienced a specific set of circumstances before. A woman might walk into a building, for example, in a foreign country she'd never visited, and sense that the setting is eerily and intimately familiar. Some attribute deja vu to psychic experiences or unbidden glimpses of previous lives. As with intuition (see #3), research into human psychology can offer more naturalistic explanations, but ultimately the cause and nature of the phenomenon itself remains a mystery.

5. Ghosts
From the Shakespeare play "MacBeth" to the NBC show "Medium," spirits of the dead have long made an appearance in our culture and folklore. Many people have reported seeing apparitions of both shadowy strangers and departed loved ones. Though definitive proof for the existence of ghosts remains elusive, sincere eyewitnesses continue to report seeing, photographing, and even communicating with ghosts. Ghost investigators hope to one day prove that the dead can contact the living, providing a final answer to the mystery.

4. Mysterious disappearances
People disappear for various reasons. Most are runaways, some succumb to accident, a few are abducted or killed, but most are eventually found. Not so with the truly mysterious disappearances. From the crew of the Marie Celeste to Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, and Natalee Holloway, some people seem to have vanished without a trace. When missing persons are found, it is always through police work, confession, or accident never by 'psychic detectives'). But when the evidence is lacking and leads are lost, even police and forensic science can't always solve the crime.

3. Intuition
Whether we call it gut feelings, a 'sixth sense,' or something else, we have all experienced intuition at one time or another. Of course, gut feelings are often wrong (how many times during aircraft turbulence have you been sure your plane was going down?), but they do seem to be right much of the time. Psychologists note that people subconsciously pick up information about the world around us, leading us to seemingly sense or know information without knowing exactly how or why we know it. But cases of intuition are difficult to prove or study, and psychology may only be part of the answer.

2. Bigfoot
For decades, large, hairy, manlike beasts called Bigfoot have occasionally been reported by eyewitnesses across America. Despite the thousands of Bigfoot that must exist for a breeding population, not a single body has been found. Not one has been killed by a hunter, struck dead by a speeding car, or even died of natural causes. In the absence of hard evidence like teeth or bones, support comes down to eyewitness sightings and ambiguous photos and films. Since it is logically impossible to prove a universal negative, science will never be able to prove that creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster do not exist, and it is possible that these mysterious beasts lurk far from prying eyes.

1.The Taos Hum
Some residents and visitors in the small city of Taos, New Mexico, have for years been annoyed and puzzled by a mysterious and faint low-frequency hum in the desert air. Oddly, only about 2 percent of Taos residents report hearing the sound. Some believe it is caused by unusual acoustics; others suspect mass hysteria or some secret, sinister purpose. Whether described as a whir, hum, or buzz and whether psychological, natural, or supernatural no one has yet been able to locate the sound's origin. - livescience.com