Halloween Special: Beware the Night

We wanted to know: what kinds of spirits exist in this area?

Interview with historian Chuck Pishko
As told to Ella Anderson

[Editor's note: Chuck has a lovely relaxed, flowing way of speaking that I hope I've been able to capture here.]

 So in this area, it's jumbies - jumbies are spirits of people who died and didn't "make it across," as they say. So their spirits were set to wander. A lot of them were created by a devastating cholera epidemic, around 1853. An awful disease, terrible. It's water-borne, with a quick onset, and it quickly drains the liquid from your body. You get really dehydrated. But before you died you would go into a coma. And the plantations were so afraid of the disease that they buried people while they were still in the coma-so they buried them alive. They were going to die anyway, but...it wasn't good. And because they were buried so quickly, the elders didn't have time to prep the bodies for burial, the ritual burial according to local customs. The proper burial would have been to wash the body with a lime solution, and then to sit up all night with the body. And, that just didn't happen. And because the spirits didn't have closure, they wandered.

And these people were good. They were mostly good, religious people. Jumbies are not all spirits of bad people. If you were a good person, your relatives would want to bury you near their home, in order to protect the home and the people in it. Sometimes right under a window. In the days of slavery, they would bury them beneath the house, right beneath the floorboards. If you were good in life, they thought you would protect them in death. Good relatives, good jumbies.

But some bad people hung around. One example of bad people and bad jumbies are those who would move your boundary posts, cheating you out of your land.

And there was a Danish soldier named Ottingen, who murdered and captured 14 rebellious slaves at Estate Adrian, after they had been granted amnesty by the governor if they turned themselves in. But Ottingen decided to kill them, shooting their leader, Prince Aquashi, whose head he took back to St. Thomas. Aquashi's followers were either broken on the wheel or died in prison.

And you know Guy Benjamin used to talk of passing people at night, trying to catch up with them, then finding that there was no one there, that he had been following jumbies.

Jumbies are just spirits who had something missing in their transition to the next life (as if slavery wasn't bad enough). If they couldn't go through their death ritual, they would go around looking for a body, look for somebody they could get closure with. Not necessarily people-could be dogs, donkeys. They say the worst of the jumbies would collect in the big trees-the ceiba trees, or kapok - so people were cautious of being around large kapoks at night.

There were also evil people accused of being werewolves-they appeared human, but became werewolves at night. The notion of werewolves probably came from down island. Werewolves would shed their human skin, wander around at night, then come back to their human skin and put it back on. They would attack people at night and then kill them. The worst of the worst. How you catch a werewolf is that you find the human skin they leave behind and salt it. Then they can'tt get back into the skin.

How do you ward off werewolves and jumbies? Well. Just stay away from the places they hang out. Like ruins. Nobody in their right mind should be at a ruin at night. Or strange graves-don't go to a gravesite where you don't know the people buried there. I would say the places to avoid would be Adrian, because of the murders, and Cinnamon Bay, because there were so many cholera burials there. I try not to be at Cinnamon after dark. I respect these beliefs, I really do.

October 2009