Those who have returned from the dead

She sat on a thread bare sofa, eyes half-closed in concentration, while smoke from an incense stick danced and coiled around her. When she eventually spoke, she did so at speed and with an authority I hadn’t expected, “I saw your home” she told me, “You live in an old house with lots of water all around. There are marshes and forests and sometimes the area floods. And there can many mosquitoes”. I was stunned. I’d already told her that I lived in France and so I’d expected her to play it safe and say that I lived in Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower. I certainly hadn’t expected her to describe the area around my house with such unnerving accuracy.  But maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Afterall, Phub Zam was a delom, or one who has returned from the dead.

The delom, Phub Zam, describing my house - that she’s never seen - to me.

You don’t need to have been in Bhutan for very long to realise that magic swirls through the air here. Seemingly every monastery or chapel you visit has a story associated with it that seems so full of wonder that it can only – you naively assume – be a fairy tale. But for most Bhutanese these aren’t mere stories. These are the cornerstones of Bhutanese culture and history, and most Bhutanese accept them as fact.

For many people visiting Bhutan getting lost in these legends is a real highlight of their visit. And so, when the owner of a guesthouse  we were staying at while researching our Bhutan journeys happened to mention that living further up the valley was a lady who had died and travelled to the Eight Buddhist Hells before coming back to life a few days later, then I couldn’t help but be intrigued. The guesthouse owner told me how she helped to solve problems in peoples lives and unravel the mysteries as to why certain things were happening to them. “We went to see her once.” he said, “None of us had met her before and she knew nothing about us. I didn’t really believe in what people said about her, but when we sat down and explained our problem, she closed her eyes and after a few minutes described our house and said that buried in the ground just outside the door was a large boulder. She said that it was an unusual black colour and that it was this boulder that was causing us problems. When we came home, we started digging and there was this black boulder exactly as she had described!” Shaking his head in disbelief he continued, “We removed it and then very quickly the problems our family had been facing disappeared”.

Expect the unexpected in Bhutan.

Deciphering what exactly a delom is and their role in society isn’t quite as straight forward as you might expect. The closest word that most of us would be familiar with is a shaman. The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes a shaman as ‘a person believed to achieve various powers through trance or ecstatic religious experience’ and that they are often able to ‘heal the sick, to communicate with the other world, and often to escort the souls of the dead to the otherworld’. While some of these things are true for a delom not all of them are.  A delom does indeed help to cure the sick, offer advice and can communicate with the spirits, but she (and a delom is always a female) is actually considered a direct reincarnation of the very first delom and neither does she escort the souls of the dead to the otherworld.

On our Bhutan tours we dig a little deeper to reveal a side of Bhutan few other tourists get to experience.

“I’m the youngest of four from a farming family and we were always so poor that my family couldn’t afford for me to study”, the delom told us after we’d arrived at her farmhouse with its distinctive mural of a half-human, half-eagle like creature eating a snake. She had seemed totally unsurprised to find a foreigner strolling into her house and had quickly sat me down before launching into her tale.  “I’ve always felt very spiritual and when I was a child, I had unusual visions and feelings. Sometimes as a child I would talk in Tibetan, yet I never learnt the language. Other times I would talk in a strange manner about a person who had been dead for hundreds of years. Sometimes the visions I was having were so strong that I would pass out”. She pauses as if reflecting on her memories of a disturbed childhood. “My parents didn’t know what to do with me!”

Phub Zam goes on to explain that as a child she started making uncannily accurate predictions about  things that would happen in the future.  Telling neighbours in the village that their livestock would die or that sources of holy water would dry up. At first people ignored the little girl, but, little by little, members of her community started to come to her for advice, “Even today, I don’t always tell people all that I can see in my visions because it can be too hurtful for them”.

Life in Bhutan is lived close to the spirit world.

In the end it was her eldest sister who suggested that she be taken to talk to various spiritual masters to try and understand what was happening. And, after much debate and consultation between senior Buddhist clergy, and the examination of clues, it was announced that Phub Zam was a reincarnation of the original delom, Namgay Choezom. As if to prove this Phub Zam holds her hands aloft to me, “Namgay Choezom was burnt and cremated and I myself get burning pains in my hands that make me feel like they are on fire”.  She goes on to explain how she also had to pass certain tests for it to be proven beyond doubt that she was the reincarnation of the first delom. “I told the lamas all about Namgay Choezom’s home and I said where some of her treasures had been hidden. When they searched there, they found the treasures. And, sometimes, when passing a place associated with my previous life, I get a feeling of great sadness” she adds.

A Buddhist ceremony takes place in the Bumthang Valleys, the spiirtual heartland of the nation and the focus of our The Heartland: Central Bhutan journey.

Her role in society today is to advise people of the spiritual path to take when they face problems in their life or face an important decision. It’s a role that seems to be as important to the Bhutanese today as it ever has been with people from all ages and backgrounds going to seek her advice. Indeed, when I finally left her home a mother and her teenage daughter were waiting outside to see her, as well as a weather-worn elderly man.  “When I first meet a person, I get a strong feeling about the atmosphere surrounding them. I can roughly visualise the place they are from and can see where the problem they face comes from and what it is in their environment that causes this. I can feel what they feel. Doing this for people makes me tired and sick but it’s hard for me to say no to helping people”, she says with a chuckle. 

Closing her eyes, the delom tells me that my house has a hidden secret.

Of course, while all that she said was very interesting, it was hardly solid proof of her abilities to see things that others cannot.  And so, I asked her what she could see about me. Closing her eyes long minutes passed and silence hung in the room. Then, opening her eyes she said, “I saw your home”, before describing the countryside around it in magnificent detail. But there was more to come. Things that sent shivers down my spine.

She paused as if considering what she was going to tell me, “It’s very quiet around your house. But there is something wrong. There’s a spirit – a spirit of the water – that isn’t happy”. She looked at me unblinking before continuing “Somebody, perhaps several people, have died in the house. They were not peaceful deaths, and this has disturbed the water spirits” I thought back to throw away comments I’d made to my wife since we’d moved into the house a few years earlier. Comments about the run of bad luck we felt like we’d had since moving in and how, half-jokingly, I’d said to her that maybe the house was cursed. But, I reassured myself, I didn’t know of anyone dying in the house. Even so, that evening I sent a message to my neighbour asking if they knew anything about a death in the house. When the reply came back it turned my blood cold, ‘The husband of the previous owner died of a sudden and violent heart attack in the downstairs bedroom. And one of the people who lived there before them also died in the house. I believe that wasn’t a peaceful death either”….

Enjoyed this story? Then come and search for the mysterious in Bhutan yourself on one of our Bhutan Journeys.