Banana Tree Spirit

 Banana Tree Spirit

There is an old wives tale told in Asia, that if you tied a red string to one end of the ripe flower of a banana tree and the other end to your toe. while you slept, in the middle of the night you would be visited by a spirit.

My friend Gary being something of a joker, thought it would be fun to try this out at home. He had a few banana tree's growing in his garden just 15 feet away from his bedroom window. He figured it was an easy enough experiment to try out.

Grabbing some red thread from his mothers sewing kit, he opened his window and tied one end of the string to the flower of the banana tree and the other to his big toe, finding it a little hard to sleep with a string tied to his toe , the most comfortable position he could find to sleep in, was with him hanging one leg off the side of the bed. ''Some hours later, he doesn't remember exactly how many'' he was startled awake when he felt himself violently pulled off the bed. Scrambling to get himself untangled from his blanket he heard this loud screaming as if a women was in extreme pain.

Still half asleep and panicking he ran towards the door, shouting for his parents to help this women. As soon as he got a few feet away and the thread on his toe snapped off. The screaming stopped. His parents rushed into his room asking what happened. It seems that Gary was the only one who had heard the women screaming.

Gary later found out a little bit more about the legend of the red string. The old tale tells of a women who had committed suicide in a banana tree plantation, her spirit flittering from tree to tree looking for the man who broke her heart. Tying the red string would trap her in that tree and stop her search. While tying the other end to your toe would enable you to see her, or so the legend goes.

There is another version of this legend. This version goes that a female tree spirit haunts banana plantations. Superstitious gamblers in Malaysia stab the tree with nails and tie a string to the banana tree, hoping to bind the spirit to that tree. When the spirit is bound it will come and plead to be let loose. Then the gambler would ask it for a winning lottery number as payment for releasing the spirit.