Have you ever heard of people keeping child spirits? They are called Toyol in malay and Gumantong in thai. In Bugis, temples on waterloo street which is commonly known as Si Ma Lu guanying temples are always crowded by onlookers curious about rituals conducted for multiple statues on table. Most of these statues are accompanied by a small jar which is filled with muddy looking liquid.

So what are the crowds curious about? Most of them are curious about the thing in the jar. It is normally a foetus in it and according to believers, the spirit of the dead foetus continue to live inside this jar. The crowds were drew to the master because they wanted to learn how to keep this baby spirit as a pet. According to belief, these spirits can help you to accomplish many things. Wealth, woman or career, only requirement is to ensure the spirit is happy.

Infact according to chinese superstitious belief, if a person suddenly gets rich without working hard, which means either he must had won money in lottery, that means most likely he would had kept one of this which had helped him to achieve what he wanted.

Now why child spirits? Why not adult or old spirits? According to what i heard, it is because as child in spirit form, because of the fact they are not adult yet, so many things they do will be forgiven by the deity and not looked as a crime in the spiritual world. Therefore humans are eager to exploit this innocent spirits to help them in gaining advantages.

According to a master i spoke to, there are 3 types of child spirits. The first type and the second type are blessed by temple so they take the temple as a refuge instead of becoming wandering spirits and let devotees to worship. Normally they like sweets, toys, milk or any kind of evaporation beverages. When toys ended up in a different location, that is the sign the child spirit is playing.

The 3rd type is consider an evil type which are most of the time, premature infants. They are called Ja la ja yong in thai. These kind of spirits are very dangerous and needed to be handle with care. Most of the time, the owners of them needed to worship them with blood from themselves normally through their toes. The idea is to control, once an owner had gained full control over the child, then it can assign task to the child. These are spirits that are used for bad purposes or to harm people. That is all i know, so if you ever had an urge to own one, make sure you understand them or risk your ownership of them not effective.