The Haunting of The Unholy Elders
While it has elements that might resemble horror movies involving Ouija boards gone wrong, this story does not contain the dramatic embellishments often found in movies.
What transpired in real life is frightening enough without the need for exaggeration.
Some readers may perceive it as fiction if they find it difficult to believe.
Others may choose to give it the benefit of the doubt.
I’ll label this as Creative Non-fiction; it might be easier for readers to process that way.
Be warned: There’s no elaborate explanations or logic in this narrative.
Photo by Ian Usher on Unsplash
Besides the abuse from her parents, Mio also suffered abuse by a religious figure in a temple during her childhood. They used swords and whips to intimidate her, making horrifying threats like slicing off her tongue or chopping off her legs and forcing some spellbinding concoction made with burnt talisman down her throat.
All of this because her parents considered her a difficult child.
Many years later, she continues to visit different temples, offering prayers for good health and peace of mind. Although she still feels a sense of fear when going to temples, she believes it’s her past trauma that causes this unease. On one occasion, she unintentionally wandered into an area dedicated to ancestral veneration, adorned with hundreds of plaques for the deceased.
The hair on her neck stood up; it was just too scary for her. She fled and never returned again.
What’s happening with him? Sumio’s in a fit of rage, seemingly mad at her for no reason at all. Not that she did anything to upset or offend him.
They’ve just moved into this new place today, and there’s a mountain of tasks to tackle. There’s no time for such nonsense and petty stuff here.
She spent the whole day dealing with his mother’s unreasonable demands, leaving her completely drained.
She just can’t comprehend his sudden change in behavior. He has never acted like this before.
This would be the beginning of the nightmare.
Ancestor veneration involved honoring and remembering deceased family members. It was not considered worship, as the focus was on paying respect and making offerings to them, rather than treating them as gods.
His mother, despite not residing in this house, insisted on installing a shrine here. A shrine to invite the dead into the home of the living.
She insisted that these ancestral spirits would ensure the well-being, and most importantly, the financial fortune of the family. Her specific instruction emphasized the necessity of worship because these departed souls had ascended to the status of gods.
It’s perplexing how good-for-nothing people can ascend as god after their death and be expected to watch over their descendants.
Among these spirits was the deceased patriarch, who had severed connection with this family through abandonment long before his passing. The same could be said, the remaining members of the patriarch’s relatives that disassociated themselves from any involvement, disregarded the abandoned wife and children, who were left destitute and left to fend for themselves.
There was no love or even the slightest act of charity extended from them.
This raises the question of how many new gods are made each day.
Does this mean parents should end their life sooner so that they can become gods and bless their children with wealth and prosperity?
Can one imagine Hitler and his henchmen reincarnated as Gods, tasked with safeguarding all of the living?
Every instruction passed down from his mother seemed to deviate from the book and other general practices. It was almost as if she had created her own pseudo religion.
No one is allowed to ask or challenge it, no matter what.
It is just so wrong.
Mio felt extremely uncomfortable, but it’s not as if she had a choice, even though she’s the one residing there. This is a common issue within the culture here, where generational pressures are forcefully manipulated to ensure obedience.
The atmosphere in the house was undeniably strange since day one. She had been consumed by her business and hadn’t spared much thought for the strange sensation, but the palpable strangeness was hard to overlook.
At times, she would catch movements from the corner of her eye, but she dismissed them as the wind rustling the blinds. It occurred so frequently that it became difficult to disregard.
The dogs would frequently gaze into empty space, occasionally fixating on the area behind her. It was as if there were something invisible, a presence that was real yet intangible. Most of the time there’ll be a dark figure hovering around her.
The couple rented this larger place to set up home offices for their separate businesses. However, the installation of the shrine has thrown everything off the rails, making the entire place feel so eerie as if one has stepped into a horror movie set.
She used to offer beauty services to her friends and regular clients in her home office, but most had stopped coming for no apparent reason. They had previously been very satisfied with the treatment results, and that was truly puzzling.
Later on, they revealed that they felt uncomfortable, with some claiming to have seen shadowy entities lurking around.
No wonder they had been acting strangely.
It wasn’t the first time Mio had heard about this. She had some previous encounters with a Taoist practitioner and a Malay healer. Both had warned her about the unsettling presence in her home. She hadn’t taken their advice seriously.
His mother continued to introduce more and more rituals, which included coffee with a staggering 10 spoons of sugar as part of the daily offering. She even held feast for the dead spirits with a table set up for 10 pax.
Meanwhile, Mio had staunchly declined to partake in any of these rituals. She never agreed to be part of this nor accepted it. She merely tolerated them.
To her dismay, she later realized that Sumio had used the offering water on her plants, including some of her precious herbs. She wouldn’t have touch or consume anything associated with those offerings. She couldn’t help but wondered how long she had been unwittingly consuming those tainted herbs.
Enraged and muttering foul language, she walked upstairs to confront him. As she made her way up, an unseen force suddenly yanked her down the staircase. She struggled to stand up, but the relentless pull dragged her further down the staircase.
She laid there for a long time too terrified to move.
She wasn’t hallucinating; the hovering figure was undeniably real. Her friends had indeed witnessed something, and the spiritual practitioners hadn’t been lying. There was unquestionably a presence in the house.
Photo by Yaya Bihan Wang on Unsplash
Those bruises on her legs took quite a long time to heal.
The atmosphere in the house was growing increasingly unsettling with each passing day. Despite there being only two of them and the dogs, it felt strangely crowded. At times, it seemed as though countless inaudible conversations were occurring all around them.
The tension in the atmosphere was wearing on her nerves, and she decided to speak to him about it. They had even brought up the issue to his mother. When Mio described what she had seen and heard, including vague apparitions of spirits, his mother appeared to be recalling some memories from the back of her mind and asserted that these were not the spirits of their ancestors.
Mio couldn’t comprehend how his mother could be so certain. It seemed implausible to have knowledge of every ancestor spanning several generations. Could she somehow communicate with them to validate that these spirits were not among their ancestors?
All of her doubts were forcefully dismissed with two firm responses: that it was a product of her imagination, and that these entities were not connected to their family’s ancestral spirits. Sumio completely ate up the matriarch’s words.
Generational control can completely brainwash the younger generation to keep them in check. There was no room for reasoning or objection because his mother was always right and questioning her was considered unfilial.
Later, she attempted to attribute it to external spirits, which seemed like a feeble excuse, akin to that of a deceitful politician.
How could a dwelling safeguarded by their own gods permit external spirits to disrupt its dwellers?
This person adamantly refused to remove the shrine. All these unconscionable excuses appeared to be crafted to shut Mio down, allowing his mother to persist in her practices.
Mio felt as though she had become a human sacrifice for some cult, to appease the gods, enduring torments for the gain of his mother.
As she was constantly gaslighted to dismiss her experiences as products of her own imagination, her mental health deteriorated to the point where she ended up in the emergency room.
With no one to vouch for what she had seen and heard, the only explanation given for the things she had witnessed, heard, and encountered was that they were mere manifestations of her own mind. Consequently, she was diagnosed with psychosis, on top of her pre-existing conditions, and subjected to heavy medication.
The antipsychotic medication did not provide any relief and she was wasting away and she struggled greatly with her daily life due to its side effects. The medication didn’t seem to address the root of the issue.
It was unnecessary in the first place.
The couple decided to move to a smaller place as Mio was unable to function properly, rendering her business obsolete. His mother had insisted on maintaining the shrine and among other related things at their new home and even told them that this new place is clean.
On the same evening, Mio saw the shadowy figure of a man walking around the house. Even their newly adopted cat seemed to notice it, raising its head from her bowl and fixated its gaze on the shadow as it passed by.
This seemed contradictory to his mother’s declaration of the place being cleansed, especially as it now hosting so many deceased spirits in such a confined space.
It makes one wonder if it was willful negligence, where things must go their way at all costs, even if it means causing harm to others.
The unsettling sounds and oppressive atmosphere in the house continued to escalate, fueling Mio’s suicidal thoughts. It was no way to live, being tormented like this when she had been made to believe it was all her own issue.
Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash
The house felt ice-cold all the time. She constantly wore thick clothes, even though the temperature inside was 30 degrees Celsius and she didn’t have a fever. Even after extensive tests and bloodwork, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her.
Self-care became increasingly difficult for her. When she finally managed to make it into the bathroom for shower, the water was icy cold no matter how she tried to adjust it. Oddly enough, the water heater seemed to be functioning perfectly, emitting billows of steam from the boiling water. Fortunately, she was alert enough to realize that, preventing herself from getting scalded.
Her condition never improves only worsens, and the haunting sensations continued both before, during, and after undergoing antipsychotic treatment. Convincing her psychiatrist that she wasn’t psychotic required considerable effort and time. She meticulously and logically recounted the entire situation which eventually led to the discontinuation of the antipsychotic treatment.
However, the eerie sensations in the house remained unchanged.
Things got really unhinged for Mio when she was instructed by his mother to stop taking her medication and to cease seeking medical help in an attempt to recruit her into her pseudo religion.
Even Mio’s own sister had shamed her for being weak in mind for succumbing to mental health issues, treating her as if she was a drug addict.
During her episodes, every sound and sensation became intensified, making it impossible to overlook even the slightest noise in her surroundings. Sleep eluded her, and life became exceedingly difficult.
One day, she took matters into her own hands and smashed the shrine and other related things. She wasn’t aware of it immediately, but that moment marked the end of the disturbances. It would take her years to fully recover and regain a sense of normalcy, free from any unsettling occurrences and being able to connect the dots.
It is obvious that something had gone terribly wrong with the rituals. One really shouldn’t attempt to invoke the dead or tamper with otherworldly dark entities for personal gain.
Despite all of this, his mother continued to insist that it was all product of her imagination.
No one gave her the benefit of the doubt until recently, but it wasn’t from the people she expected. She was never given the opportunity to speak about it; instead, she was dismissed and invalidated.
This story is written exactly as she experienced it.
One thing she can do now is to indulge herself in horror entertainment (movie/manga/podcast) without feeling anything because she has experienced true horror and even worse, human inflicted horror.
✍️ Previously published: 17th September 2023
✨ Revised Edition: 25th March 2026
📖 This piece was editorially approved for publication by The Memoirist.
Notes: Looking through my inventory, I've realized I have well over 500 scattered pieces of writing - and that's just the ones I've managed to count! There are still so many more tucked away that I haven't even reached yet.
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©Britt H.
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