Mowabites Worldwide

It all started with village folktales. Of ghosts loitering in the silence of midnight, stalking a wandering stranger or a lone recalcitrant youth returning home late.

As mother lowered the wick of the lantern, the darkness in the room loomed large. I shut my eyes tight, careful to not think about dark tales of the dead sitting up on their graves with searching flaming eyes, scanning for itchy ears eavesdropping on them.

The chirping of crickets in nearby bushes grow louder and louder, as if a deliberate effort to keep us awake till 1am, when all the dogs in the neighborhood would be howling in unison at invisible beings, perhaps on broomsticks, flying past our houses.

A choir of croaking frogs some distance further down the stream joined in the nocturnal chants.

I follow the chirping and croaking into my sleep, dreaming of the recent news buzzing in our village, dreaming of them exactly as they were rumoured…

A woman moves into a new neighborhood and chances on someone she knew many years ago in another town miles away. At first, she thought the resemblance was mere coincidence until she started asking around.

To be sure she wasn’t dreaming, she sent for a relative of hers that also knew the man at the centre of her investigations. Together, they compared notes and disovered it was the same man.

“But how can it be?“ the two women wondered.

For the man was dead a long time ago. They decided to get to the bottom of this mystery by going to the man’s house with his obituary and other proofs from his past…and that was the last time anyone ever set eyes on the man again. He didn’t return from work to his family as usual that day, never called again.

“Usually, when someone from their past recognizes them, they vanish from whichever place it was that they were discovered.” one woman who had witnessed several of such stories explained…

I woke up from my strange dream, sweating and thinking. In church, we are told when people die, they either end up in heaven or hell. But what happened to these individuals that go to new places after their deaths and begin a new life? I found it hard to believe, but the proofs circulating in our little village were too hard to discredit.

I am imagining that such ghosts probably sat in woods, listening to passers-by and emerging from the stem of a tree, tiptoeing behind them in order to know more about their private lives, to know which lives were ripe to be camouflaged into.

I have heard of angry ghosts scattering utensils in their homes the night after their deaths, mad at the sudden termination of a young and promising future.

But the resurfacing of the dead in some other part of the world under different names but same faces? These were indeed strange times.

What do you see # 339- 4th May, 2026