Some of the stories and narrations we hear from our grandmothers may not constitute heritage passed down by generations. They may be narrations about true events they lived at their age, by their familiarity with reality and that ancient time periods were indeed filled with events that today’s mind cannot easily believe.
The narrator says and her name is Asma: We were sitting in our rural home one of the winter nights extremely cold in temperature. The weather was storming severely outside to a truly terrifying degree. During those thunderous storms and this unstable weather, the electrical current suddenly cut off.
My mother brought some candles and lit the place until the electrical current returned again. I sat with her, my sister, and our grandmother secure. We exchanged conversation in the living room, enjoying the warmth of the conversation until the electricity returned. Here, we asked our grandmother to narrate to us something that would relieve us. She said: I will narrate to you the story of the olive tree standing at the end of our village.
The grandmother said that olive tree is a cursed tree inhabited by the ghost of a woman since ancient times. Her name was Hasina. She was a lonely lady living in a small house with a small-sized farm. After her husband’s death, she lived from the production of that farm. She earned from it and was known for piety and good nature.
During that period, the phenomenon of children disappearing emerged among the village’s sons. Children would go out to play, then disappear without returning to their homes again. The child’s family and the rest of the village’s individuals would search for him but without avail, or even reach a trace of him.
The lady Hasina was very annoyed by the children, but she didn’t hate them. They would play and make annoying noise for her and throw stones at the house. She would only scream at them, but she didn’t hate them like she hated the adults.
With the successive disappearances of children, some of the village’s residents thought that Hasina was kidnapping these children, torturing them inside her house, then killing them and disposing of their corpses in a hidden place under that house of hers, or that she also ate their meats in revenge from them.
But Hasina was innocent and did nothing of that matter. The accuser was a person strange to the village’s people called Aziz. He would come to the village disguised as a vegetable or fruit seller. He would exploit the people’s preoccupation with searching for a lost child to lure another child, take him with him outside the village, and sell him as a slave to a person who wants children, obtaining money from that operation.
While the people were in a state of terror and accused Hasina with all those false accusations, the criminal Aziz exploited the opportunity and kidnapped more children, despite police raiding Hasina’s house. They didn’t find anything after the search and investigations.
The village people exploited the police’s preoccupation with investigations and stormed Hasina’s house, tied her to the olive tree at the end of their village, poured fuel on her, and set fire on her until the poor woman died burning.
Several days passed, and the phenomenon of child kidnapping returned. The people then realized they had committed a grave error. Despite their all regretting, the tree withered, and its inhabitant became the ghost of Hasina. Whoever approached the tree would be set ablaze with fire.
It was said that one of the farmers whose son was among the kidnapped children, and he was one of those who doubted the burning of Hasina. He sat to rest at the tree from the fatigue of work. He woke up to find that evening had fallen. He returned to his home to find the house with the farm and livestock and everything that belonged to him set on fire. Here, the people realized that the poor Hasina had become an angry ghost returning to take revenge on all of them.