Pocong

Indonesia
Java and the Javanese-speaking area; the earliest documented panics in Banyumas and Cilacap (Central Java); spread across the Indonesian archipelago and into Malaysia, where the corresponding figure is called hantu bungkus

Pocong — the dead man wrapped in the Islamic shroud who comes back upright and hopping because nobody undid his ties before burial

Variants and names

Indonesian and Javanese pocong. The Indonesian national dictionary records two separate headwords: 1pocong, marked Jw (Javanese), «berkas (padi) yang diikat menjadi satu», a sheaf of rice tied into one bundle, with the derivative sepocong, «a bundle»; and 2pocong, «mayat yang dibalut kain kafan», the corpse wrapped in the shroud. The verb memocong carries in the sixth edition both senses side by side under the same headword: «membalut jenazah dengan kain kafan» and «mengikat berkas padi menjadi satu ikatan». Binding a corpse and binding a sheaf are, in the language, the same act, and the ghost's name is not a metaphor but the technical word for the bundle.

Two lexical cautions. Pocongan in KBBI VI is not the ghost at all: it is a Sundanese entry for a sacking device used to catch lobster fry. In Indonesian texts before 1980 pocongan regularly means «sheaf, bundle» — of rice in the agricultural surveys of 1974 and 1975, of vegetables in market reports. The use of pocongan for the shape of the shrouded dead appears in fiction from at least 1981.

In Malaysia the figure is called hantu bungkus, «wrapped ghost»; Ismail Hamid in 1985, however, already lists hantu pocong beside hantu golek among the spirits that bring sickness.

What is told

A dead man standing upright inside his own shroud. The white kain kafan binds him from head to foot and is closed with ties, the tali pocong, knotted above the head, at the neck, at the chest or waist, at the knees and at the ankles; the knot above the head leaves a stiff tuft that is the silhouette of the figure. With its legs bound it does not walk: it hops. Indonesian sources have it appear at night near graveyards, empty houses, roads outside the village. It does not speak, and does nothing beyond showing itself.

The reason it is there is single and lies in the rite: the ties were not undone before the body was lowered into the grave, and the dead man cannot leave. Whoever meets him ought to undo them.

In the earliest press description I have read in full — Tempo, 15 December 1984, on the countryside of Cilacap and Purwokerto — it is «a white ghost resembling a corpse wrapped in the shroud», people no longer go out at night, and on top of that it whinnies like a horse.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The figure does not punish the dead: it punishes those who buried him. Washing, shrouding, praying over and burying are a collective duty of the Muslim community, in practice entrusted to the village modin and to a handful of trained people. The pocong is the imaginary penalty for a procedural slip: one knot forgotten, and the deceased is left on the neighbourhood's hands. It serves to make people check twice a job that is done in haste, normally within hours of death, and that nobody does over again.

Second, it polices the night. The pocong turns up where one should not be after dark: graveyards, empty houses, dirt roads. It is the supernatural counterpart of the ronda, the neighbourhood night watch; and the record shows that the two often meet in person, with the results set out in the box below.

Where it is attested

The earliest dated record I have been able to read in full is journalistic: Tempo, 15 December 1984, «Nyupang buat cepat kaya», reported by Slamet Subagyo. The weekly registers the «hantu pocong» as a current belief in the countryside of Cilacap and Purwokerto and recounts its unmasking. The same weekly returns to the subject on 10 January 1987 with «Ditangkap warga», on the three pocong caught in Kemranjen.

Further back one gets only with the cinema. According to the survey by Justito Adiprasetio (Fikom, Universitas Padjadjaran), author of «Deconstructing Pocong, the Indonesian Sacred Ghost» in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, across the whole period 1970-1998 only one film puts the pocong at its centre: Setan Kuburan by Daeng Harris, 1975, where it is the corpse of a moneylender jumped over by a black cat; and it is there, Adiprasetio says, that the pocong is first seen moving by hopping.

On the rite the sources are religious and excellent. NU Online, 27 January 2015, «Hukum Melepas Tali Pocong/Kafan» (Alhafiz Kurniawan), quotes al-Ramlī's Nihāyat al-muḥtāj with al-Shibrāmallisī's gloss; Muslim.or.id, 7 July 2020 (Yulian Purnama), quotes Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī 2/375, the saying of Ibn Masʿūd reported in Kashf al-qināʿ 2/127, and an answer of Ibn Bāz. For the lexicon, the KBBI at pocong, memocong, pocongan.

Caution

Grade B rather than A for one reason only, but a heavy one: I have no first record earlier than the cinema. The oldest text I have read is from 1984; the 1975 of Setan Kuburan I have from a scholar quoted in the press, not from the film nor from the academic article, which I did not open. Above all, the Dutch colonial press — where the word would have to be sought in the spelling potjong — I was unable to question: the Delpher archive was refused to me, and so of the period before the twentieth century I can say neither that the figure is there nor that it is missing. The official KBBI site likewise proved unreachable and I read the entries on a mirror.

The «pre-Islamic» origin taken as settled does not hold. The pocong is unthinkable without the kain kafan and the tali, which are the Islamic funeral rite and nothing else; I have not found a single source that places the figure before the Islamisation of Java and offers evidence for it. Nor does the reverse hold, the notion that it is a superstition Islam fights from outside: the belief is discussed inside Indonesian religious manuals, which name it in order to deny it and call it khurafat.

The fanciful etymologies do not hold. The word is not to be broken apart: pocong is the tied bundle, and memocong means at once «to tie a sheaf» and «to wrap a corpse in the shroud». One last caution, on the hop: that the pocong hops because its feet are bound is a reasonable explanation, but the earliest documentation of the hop I have is on film, in 1975.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.