Kuala Lumpur Coffin Exhibition

This is the first coffin exhibition I have attended and it was well worth the trip to Malaysia. Nestled in the National Museum the exhibition displayed over 39 'coffins' from Malaysia, Thailand, Borneo, India and the Philippines. There were also displays on burial traditions and rituals.

Any burial box can be referred to as a coffin, which means 'basket'. However many refer to a casket(coined from a the term used for a jewlery box) as having four sides and a coffin as having six sides.

Highlights of the coffin exhibition included a 14-karat gold plated Chinese coffin valued at $AUD 200,000 on loan from the Nirvana Memorial Park. The coffin was not dissimilar to the Carl Williams coffin posted over front pages of Australian newspapers in April.

Other highlights included a series of animal shaped coffins from Borneo. Shapes included full scale buffaloes and crocodiles. The buffalo head is symbolic of bearing burdens of the dead, assisting with the passage to the afterlife. Animal shaped coffins house the body of a man, if the cover has no particular shape, then the coffin houses the body of a woman.

Log coffins from Thailand and parts of Malaysia were also on display and typically stood in cliffs such as Coffin Cave.

Jar coffins and tree coffins were on display from indigenous tribes in Peninsular and East Malaysia.

The Rattan Chair coffin was also interesting, bodies would be seated on the chair and exposed to the elements until they rotted and then could easily be shoved into pottery urns.

Malaysia and surrounding regions are rich in archaelogical finds with the earliest evidence of human occupation in Sarawak an 38,000-year-old skull from the Niah Caves.

Friday 13th, the luckiest day of the year???

Do you suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia, or fear of Friday 13th? The Chinese believe it to be a lucky number, considered to bring good fortune but airlines such as Continental, Air France and KLM don’t share in this belief, often jumping rows from 12 to 14. Hotels and hospitals are superstitious, too. Around the world entire floors and wards skip 13 and many also don’t have a 4th floor. Some have removed room numbers like 666.

In numerology 12 is considered a complete number as reflected by 12 months of the year, Jesus’ 12 apostles, 12 hours of the clock, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 tribes of Israel but the number thirteen has always had superstitious connotations due to its irregularity.

13 has often had negative connotations. Judas was the 13th apostle and in ancient Rome, witches gathered in groups of 12. The 13th was believed to be the devil.

Why Friday?

Friday has been considered an unlucky day since the 14th century's The Canterbury Tales, Jesus was crucified on a Friday and there was a mass arrest of all the Knights Templar in France on Friday, October 13, 1307. Some believe Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit on Friday while others believe Abel was slain by Cain on Friday the 13th.

It’s not all negative press for the number 13 though

In Hinduism a feast is organised on the thirteenth day of death for the peace of the departed soul. In Judaism, 13 signifies the age at which a boy matures and there are 13 players in a rugby league team. But in Formula One, no driver has had the number 13 on his car since 1976.

Living in a Williamstown ghost town

BY GOYA BENNETT
21 Jul, 2010 12:00 AM
AFTER dark, a whole other world emerges in Williamstown. Fresh from visiting a coffin exhibition in Kuala Lumpur, Jacqueline Travaglia of Lantern Ghost Tours is back at her favourite haunts.

Last week, the 'ghost host' gave the Williamstown Advertiser a personal tour of the town's most paranormal places. We met outside the Visitor Information Centre at Commonwealth Reserve.

Ms Travaglia said the lush parkland was a far cry from what it was in the 1850s. Back then, it was swampland filled with trash, mud, rotting meat and offcuts ... sometimes rumoured to be of the human variety.

Ms Travaglia reveals that keepers of the morgue, which still stands today, would also drain blood and empty bodies into the swamp.

We head to Blunt's Boat Builders in Nelson Place which has been in the Blunt family for 150 years. Immediately, strange phenomena start to occur. The Advertiser's photographic equipment is seemingly gripped by an unseen force and tossed into the sea. Could it be the blustery wind or the ghost of founder Arthur Blunt?

Next door, the Australian Navy cadets are convinced they had an encounter with Mr Blunt.

"The sea cadets contacted us to say they had a seance about a year ago," Ms Travaglia said.


"Apparently, they had the glass jar upside down. They were contacting the spirits and all of a sudden the jar went flying across the table.

"They saw a dark silhouette move across the wall and they all screamed and got on their i-Phones and Blackberries and Blueberries and all that and called their parents to pick them up."

She believes it was Mr Blunt telling them to go to bed and behave themselves.


Across the road lies a building that was once a notorious doctor's surgery. Dr Edward Garland Figg was the health officer and port doctor in Williamstown and employed an early form of anaesthetic known as chloroform.


Unfortunately, the good doctor didn't always get the dosage right. "One of his first patients to use it was a young woman. She went in and said, 'I need some stitches in my hand'," Ms Travaglia said. "Edward said, 'No problem, would you like some opium, alcohol or chloroform?' And she said, 'I'll have the chloroform, thank you very much'.

"So she sniffed the handkerchief, fell asleep and he repaired her hand. Problem was, she never woke up."

Part entertainment, part history lesson, the tours attract the sceptics, the curious, believers and even other professional ghost seekers with their electromagnetic field detectors.

One place where the EGMs went wild was The Steampacket Hotel in Cole Street. It's said to be haunted by opera singer John De Haga, who shot himself with a horse pistol after losing his voice.

Other tour sites include the Yacht Club Hotel, Old Royal Hotel, Oriental Hotel, former Prince of Wales hotel and laneways where cheaper 'ladies of the night' sold their trade.

Ms Travaglia believes the most haunted spot in Williamstown is Point Gellibrand where, offshore, prison hulks held more than 6000 convicts and where, on land, a cemetery stood.

http://www.themail.com.au/news/local/news/general/living-in-a-williamstown-ghost-town/1890945.aspx?storypage=2