nuffnang

Monday, April 23, 2007

Mystery of the Hummock




Hello. It's me again. This time I am going to tell you about a story my uncle related to me while he was young. It happened in the village where my uncle used to live in around 1950's.

There was a middle-aged couple lived at the end of the village. They didn't have any children, so their lives were quite lonely. Let me just call the husband as John and the wife as Mary.

Life in the village were quite boring, with so limited occupations. Everyday, both of them would just do ordinary village jobs and mostly involved farming. John had quite a talent in farming and he decided to expand his land by purchasing one of the neighbour's land.

Fortunately, he managed to buy a cheap land from one of his relatives. He started clearing it but decided to leave a hummock which lumped at the middle section of the land. John thought the hummock would enable mushrooms to grow.

His thought turned out to be true. After a month, button mushroom grew at the top of the hummock and John told Mary to sell them off to the market. It was a huge collect, and they got enormous profit from the sale.

Later that afternoon, Mary stewed the mushroom and served it to John. John was a great fan to mushrooms, especially button mushrooms. So he ate them without even offering to Mary, and coincidently at that time Mary didn't feel like eating. She wanted to visit her next door neighbour to pass some of the stew. So, John was left eating alone.

After consuming three bowls of mushrooms, suddenly John saw the gravy of the mushroom turned into dark red - the exact colour of blood. He was shocked, and he brought the bowl to his nostrils to identify the substance. With horror and disbelief, indeed it was blood!

All of a sudden, John fell sick and was brought to the hospital. The weird thing was, the doctors didn't find any toxin or poison in the mushroom stew. It was not only that weird. All other people who bought the mushroom at the market didn't fall sick neither.

My uncle told me later that John was not ailed until the day of his death. He was hospitalized for more than a month, and his body looked like an empty sack on the day of his death. He was merely skin and bone, with no flesh at all. His face was scary, with both eyes bulged out from their socket.

Nobody knew what caused John to die. It was only John's rumble about the stew being red like blood made the villagers shudder for a moment. People rumoured that some entity from the hummock was angry with John because he had interrupted their place.

That's all for now, friends. I'll be back with another ghost story soon. Have a great reading!