Sins of the past haunt sickly granny

By Eric Lungai

An elderly woman on her deathbed in Vihiga County started paying for her past sins when she recently started complaining that unknown people armed with crude weapons were surrounding her bed while she slept.

She once woke up and ran out of her house at a speed nobody would expect of a woman her age. Those who witnessed the incident say nobody was following her, although she claimed someone was in hot pursuit with the intention of killing her. Her neighbours had their own worries.

They say that in the evenings, stones could be heard striking her roof and they could not sleep due to the noise. The puzzling thing is that the people throwing the stones were never seen. People feared passing near her house.

Various diseases

These bizarre occurrences forced the woman to expose some long kept dark secrets. She revealed that she used to collect other people’s possessions that she kept in a pot along with her pet snake. When the snake slept on them, the owners suffered various disasters.

She went on to name a long list of the people she had helped to the grave in the village and beyond. "I started by killing my husband," she said.

Sure enough, when the pot was lowered by five strong men from where she had hidden it, there was an assortment of strange items ranging from money to panties, human hair, pieces of clothing, paper and soil.

Similar stories

This came as a bombshell to her pastor and members of her church where she is known to be the devout member.

Some people were moved to tears when they saw the items that came from the pot.

A young man who once worked in Nairobi nearly struck the woman with a machete recalling an instance when the woman borrowed Sh50 from him. When he went back to work, he was apparently sacked for no reason. Since then he has never got another job.

Similar stories were told by other victims.

The woman was forced by angry villagers to burn the items and denounce any spell that she had cast on other people. The angry mob was not mollified and wanted to lynch her on the spot. A few others, however, counselled that she be left to suffer the same fate she had brought down on others.

After she finished burning those items, she stripped naked and started running in the streets. Her daughters had a rough time subdued her and bringing her back home. In two days, she finally went back to her house and did not leave the bed again alive.