Horror Tales

44 Days

There are many local legends involving supernatural. One of the scariest is the scarecrow legend. But in my country, we don't have such legend about a scarecrow being alive at night killing people. The scarecrow here is far from scary, in fact it looks funny. Nothing like the scarerow I've seen in Supernatural Tv series. You know the one that Sam and Dean killed. Scarecrows here are usually put in the middle of the paddy field to scare crows. Same function, but less scary.

Among all of the legends I've heard, there is one that is quite scary. Not for me but at least scary for my mother. She says the rumors spread before she's married, around the 90's. The legend says that there was this young girl teenage girl, who always got picked on for being ugly. So ugly that people acted as if she's invisible when she passed by. It is said that she got so upset and went to a shaman to learn a way on how to make herself pretty.

She desperately involved in a dark ritual in which the shaman asked her to bath in a water from a well in the forest. The bathwater was mixed with 33 types of flowers. And it is also said that the water was mixed with a bowl of a girl's blood. But not anyone's blood. A virgin's blood. It does takes alot to be pretty huh?

Behind every ritual, there's always action that are prohibited for you to do for a specific time. We called it 'pantang'. In this case, the shaman said in order for her to be pretty forever, she was strongly prohibited to see her reflection in the mirror for exactly 44 days. That's it. 44 days without mirror.

Soon after that people in town started noticing her and said she's pretty. And of course she suddenly got this bulging need to take alook at herself. Well, she became so pretty up to the point where people actually walk into the street's lamp when she passed by. How pretty could she be? She needed to see for herself.

That night, she broke the rule of the ritual. It was not even 30 days yet. She could not wait any longer to see her beautiful face that everyone's been talking about. The second she saw her reflection, her face turned bad in a way that she could not even imagined. Uglier than before.

She went to the shaman the same night and asked for a cure. The shaman told her that there was only one cure. She needed to drink blood of 44 virgin's in order to gain her beautiful complexion once again. And there's one specific rule. She needed to consume blood at exactly 3.30 am. Because of her desperation, the legend says that she traveled from town to town in order to fulfil her evil needs. She would go knocking on doors that she chose untill she found what she needed. Also, she would disguised herself by wearing a black scarf on her head in order to cover her face pretending to be in trouble.

They say if someone knock on your door at 3 am in the morning, do not open. She might be standing outside of your door, waiting to kill you and drink your blood. Unless you are a man or a married women or a small child, well..you have nothing to worry about.