HmongTales: Blood Oath, You Can Run but You Can’t Hide is based on a true story from California.
When I was around 6 or 7 years old, a distant aunt whom I had never met or heard of came knocking at our door one day, asking to stay with us unexpectedly. I had overheard from my parents that an incident had happened to her, and she was trying to escape from it.
At first, I was very shy and often hid when she tried to talk to me, but after a few days, I grew more comfortable with her and began to spend more time around her.
As I became more comfortable, she began sharing stories of her life and her family with me. I discovered she was a widow in her 50s and had three kids, one of whom was deceased.
Being young and naive, I asked her why she didn’t remarry. She told me it was because she had promised her late husband that she wouldn’t remarry if anything ever happened to him. I remember thinking, “She must have really loved him to make a promise like that.”
One day, after returning from the store with my parents, I saw my aunt snoring and fast asleep on the sofa. Seeing that she was sleeping, I did my best not to make any sound to wake her up and silently walked down the hallway to my room.
As I got to my room, I opened the door and noticed my aunt sleeping on my bed. I remember being confused and wondering, “How did she get here so fast?” I quickly walked to the closet, put my new clothes away, and then walked to the bathroom.
After using the bathroom, I walked into the living room and saw my aunt sitting on the sofa. She saw me and gestured for me to come to her.
She must have known something was wrong because when I sat beside her, she asked me to tell her what I saw.
I remember looking at her and asking, “Aunty, how were you sleeping on the sofa and on my bed at the same time?” She replied, “That wasn’t me sleeping in your bed. That was something pretending to be me. Did you notice that it wasn’t even breathing?” After hearing that, I recalled that the thing on my bed was sleeping motionless as if it wasn’t alive.
My aunt assured me she had never set foot in my bedroom and informed me that I should find her immediately if I saw her sleeping in my bed again.
A few days later, she packed all her belongings and left without saying a word to me. The following night, I overheard my parents talking about her in the living room. I was being nosey, so I pretended to do my homework in the kitchen so I could hear what they were talking about. What I listened to that night from my parents frightened me and gave me chills down my body.
My aunt was being tormented by a “dab” spirit that wouldn’t leave her alone. My aunt had told my parents when she arrived at our house that she was being followed by a spirit and had to seek refuge at our home for a few days. Not long after her arrival, my parents began to notice unusual occurrences in the house, such as the toilet flushing by itself and the sink water running in the bathroom with the door locked. They both expressed their relief that she had left and hoped that whatever followed her would also go with her.
Many people believed that the spirit was probably her deceased ex-husband, with whom she had made a blood oath when they were younger, since this spirit tends to find her wherever she goes. It was thought in the Hmong culture that anyone who made a blood oath (the drinking of each other’s blood) would be bound for a lifetime together. If a person who made an oath died, they wouldn’t be able to reincarnate without the other. This would explain the haunting that she was always going through because her ex-husband needed her to join him in the afterlife so they could both be reincarnated together.
After she left our house, I never saw or heard from her again. It wasn’t until a few years later that the thought of her crossed my mind, so I decided to ask my parents about her. I was told that she had suddenly collapsed and died a couple of years ago, but before that, she had moved from place to place and ended up somewhere in Minnesota. Rumors have it that she eventually grew tired of running and gave up trying to escape her destiny.
This story was submitted to us anonymously.
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