[0:00]Have you ever seen The Exorcist? The film is widely credited with reshaping the horror genre, and the exorcism subgenre in particular. The premise is deceptively simple: a mother's desperate fight to save her young daughter from something she can't explain. Two Catholic priests, a little girl, and a demon that won't let go. But what if I told you that something eerily similar also happened in Indonesia, except this time, there was no demon? Only a tragic, heartbreaking truth hidden behind closed doors? This is the story of Aisyah Latifatul Humairoh, a seven-year-old girl who was exorcised to death, under the supervision of the very people who were supposed to love her the most.
[0:59]On May 16, 2021, a woman reached out to her relatives, asking about her niece. She hadn't seen little Aisyah in a while, and she missed her. When she contacted Aisyah's parents, they brushed it off, "Oh, she's been staying at her grandfather's place for a while," they said. Nothing to worry about. So the aunt went with her husband to visit the grandfather. And he hadn't seen Aisyah in months. So naturally, that single statement set off alarm bells. Together, Aisyah's aunt, uncle, and grandfather made their way to Aisyah's house in search of an explanation. What they found there would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Aisyah was in her bed. She had been there for months, but she wasn't sleeping. She wasn't sick. She was rotting. And when they looked at her parents, her own mother and father, all they got was the bizarre response: "She'll come back soon. It's part of the ritual." Aisyah Latifatul Humairoh lived in Dusun Paponan, a small village in Central Java, Indonesia. It had a tight-knit community. It was the kind of place where nothing was a secret. Everyone knew everyone's name. Everyone knew everyone's business. Everyone looked out for each other. And everyone knew Aisyah. She was seven years old, the daughter of a 42-year-old father named Marsidi, and a 38-year-old mother called Suwartinah. By every account, Aisyah was an absolute joy to be around, the kind of kid who would bring happiness to those around her through her presence alone. She chased butterflies. She screamed with delight. She played pranks on anyone and everyone. She laughed so hard and so freely, and her hair would bounce adorably with every skip she took. The neighbors adored her. She was mischievous, sure, but in that irresistible, charming way that makes everyone smile even when they would normally be annoyed. Aisyah's grandfather spoiled her rotten with hugs and kisses, the way grandparents do. And she adored him. She was, by all accounts, a kind, curious, smart little girl who was growing up exactly the way a healthy child should. But that curiosity, that spark she had, was her parents' biggest concern. Aisyah asked a lot of questions. She got excited easily. She didn't sit still. She pushed back sometimes, did things her own way. To most people, that just sounds like a seven-year-old being a seven-year-old. But to Marsidi and Suwartinah, it meant something was wrong with her. Their daughter was "naughty." She wouldn't listen. She refused to do as she was told. Rather than talking to her, rather than enrolling her in activities that would allow her to channel all that beautiful energy into something new. Rather than consulting a doctor or a child psychologist, they turned to spiritualists. So, in many parts of Indonesia, this isn't unusual. Shamanism is woven into everyday life in ways that can be difficult to understand from the outside. The vast majority of Indonesia's population is Muslim, but many people hold shamanistic beliefs at the same time. When someone falls ill, and the doctors can't immediately explain why, it's not uncommon for a neighbor to say, "just go see Shaman So-and-So," before anyone even considers going to a hospital. If rest and cheap medicine don't fix you, the next suggestion might be ruqyah. Ruqyah is an Islamic method of spiritual healing. In its traditional form, it involves reciting specific Quranic verses and praying for healing and protection. It can be used when someone is sick, but also if someone is believed to have been possessed. It incorporates drinking water that has been blessed by a local religious figure, and having them apply pressure to certain points of the body, typically the nape of the neck and the thumbs. It's something a person can even do for themselves at home. For many people, it's a source of comfort and spiritual grounding. But what happened to Aisyah had nothing to do with comfort. In fact, it didn't even align with typical Islamic or Shamanistic practices. Afraid for their daughter, Marsidi and Suwartinah brought their concerns to two important men in the village: 56-year-old Haryono and 43-year-old Budiono, both of whom were known locally as spiritualists. The exact date is not known, but it's believed to have occurred in late 2020. The men listened to Aisyah's parents, and after hearing about her behavior, the energy, the curiosity, and the so-called disobedience, the two men delivered their diagnosis. They concluded that she was possessed by an entity called a Genderuwo. And according to some accounts, they went even further, claiming that Aisyah wasn't merely possessed, but was herself an incarnation of one. The Genderuwo is one of the most well-known and feared spirits in Javanese mythology. Physically, it resembles something like a Bigfoot, massive, covered in fur, deeply unsettling. In folklore, the Genderuwo is notorious for shapeshifting into the form of a man, often a husband, and sexually assaulting unsuspecting women while they sleep. It is a creature of adult malice and predation. What it doesn't do is possess children. So the question must be asked: If the Genderuwo only possesses adults, how could it have come to possess Aisyah? Haryono and Budiono weren't concerned with this technicality. They told Aisyah's terrified parents that their daughter's behavior was proof that something dark lived inside her, something that needed to be driven out. There was a ritual that could fix everything, they said. However, it would cost 6 million rupiah, around 360 U.S. dollars. First, to understand the value of that, you should know that the monthly minimum wage in Temanggung in 2020 was 1.8 million rupiah. It would take over three months for a working-class person to earn enough to pay their fees. But Marsidi and Suwartinah didn't hesitate. They paid the entire amount. Before the ritual could begin, the shamans said they needed proof that Aisyah was truly possessed. They needed to confirm it beyond a doubt. And their method? They made her eat chillies and mahogany seeds. The logic was simple: if she reacted to the seeds, if she found them bitter, that would serve as confirmation that an evil entity was living inside her. And she found them bitter. Of course she did. She was seven years old. And so, with "proof" established, the ritual began. Later, it was reported that the parents believed this was ruqyah, the Islamic ritual I mentioned before. But it didn't resemble ruqyah at all. It was December 2020. The shamans instructed the family to start with a flower bath, a purification practice rooted in Javanese belief, used to cleanse a person's aura or soul. They filled a large water container, large enough to fit a person, and they dunked Aisyah's small body into it over and over again. The ritual was performed at night. The water was cold, and she shivered uncontrollably, her little body unable to withstand the temperature. But this was only the beginning. The second ritual came in January 2021. This time, they filled a large bathtub with water, and they held Aisyah's head under the surface. And she fought back. She struggled with everything she had, pushing and clawing and twisting. But she was seven years old, and the adults were far stronger. They overpowered her easily. They pushed her head under the water, again and again, holding her down, pulling her up, and then pushing her back down again. The times they pulled her up, she didn't have enough time to catch her breath. She was drowning. And then, she stopped struggling. Her parents looked at the still water, and their daughter's motionless body, and believed with their whole hearts that the spirit had finally left her. The ritual had worked. It was over. They carried her to her bedroom, laid her gently on her bed, and waited for her to wake up. She never did. In the days that followed, Marsidi and Suwartinah took turns sitting at their daughter's bedside. They cleaned her body. They talked to her. They waited. Maybe today, they thought, maybe tomorrow. The shamans had promised she would be revived, and they believed them completely.
[10:16]Days turned to weeks. A foul smell began to creep through the house. Her skin darkened. It shriveled. The warm, plump softness of the child's face gave way to something sunken and unrecognizable. But her parents didn't call for help. They didn't call the police. They didn't call a doctor.
[10:38]They just kept cleaning her. They kept talking to her, and they kept waiting. Budiono, meanwhile, continued visiting the house. From January through March, he came at least twice a week, sitting with the family, cleaning Aisyah's decomposing body, and maintaining the lie that she was simply in a transitional state between death and rebirth. He knew. He almost certainly knew what had happened the moment her body went still in that bathtub. But he said nothing. He let the parents believe. By May, Budiono's visits had slowly tapered off. Suwartinah began cleaning Aisyah's body herself, using tissues, still convinced that one morning she would open her eyes. Four months passed. When neighbors asked where Aisyah was, the answer was always the same: she was visiting her grandfather in the neighboring village. It was believable. It was normal enough. It bought them time and kept curious individuals from digging into it. It was during Eid, the most important holiday in the Islamic calendar, that everything finally unraveled. Eid is a time for visiting family, for reconnecting, for making sure the people you love know you're thinking of them. Aisyah's aunt hadn't seen Aisyah in months, and she missed her terribly. She reached out to the parents and got the same story: Aisyah's at her grandfather's. That's when Aisyah's aunt traveled to the grandfather's house and learned that he hadn't seen her in months either. They needed to know the truth, and headed to Aisyah's parents' house to find it. The house was quiet. Suspiciously, unnervingly quiet. No laughter, no little feet running across the floor, no sound of a child at all. Marsidi answered the door and tried to brush them off, "Aisyah wasn't feeling well, she was resting, she'd be back to playing in no time." But there was a strange smell inside. A smell that certainly didn't belong in anyone's home. He led them to her bedroom. When he opened the door, the sheer strength of the smell hit them first. And then they saw her, on the bed, small, still, dark and shrunken and barely recognizable as the little girl they had known. Her body had been there for months, dried, mummified, transformed by time into something that in no way resembled the laughing, butterfly-chasing child she had once been. Aisyah's aunt couldn't contain her tears. Her grandfather went and alerted the village chief, who quickly gathered other local leaders. They rushed to the scene and were horrified by what they found. The police were called. A formal report was filed at 11:30 p.m. Officers arrived, assessed the scene, and placed Marsidi and Suwartinah under arrest. Aisyah's body was transported to a local hospital for an autopsy. The questioning that followed was one that investigators could barely get through. How does a parent let this happen? How do you watch your child stop breathing and then carry her to bed and wait for four months for her to wake up? The answer, when it came, was devastating in its sincerity. It was for her sake, they said. We just wanted her to be a normal child. From there, the names Haryono and Budiono surfaced quickly. Police were dispatched to arrest both men at their respective homes. The full picture came out in the investigation, including the fact that Budiono had almost certainly known Aisyah was dead from the moment it happened, and had spent months encouraging the parents to believe, rather than alerting anyone. All four, Marsidi, Suwartinah, Haryono, and Budiono, were charged with child abuse under Indonesia's Child Protection Law, with additional charges of domestic violence and physical assault. As for what actually happened in court, what sentences each of them received, that information has never been made publicly available. The case, as far as public records go, ends at the arrest. Tragically, Aisyah's story is not the first such tragedy to occur in Indonesia. In February 2020, in Pekanbaru City, a 38-year-old man named Hermanto killed his three-year-old son, Fadil, after claiming that a voice had whispered in his ear that his son was possessed. The voice told him that to purify the boy, Fadil had to die first. Only then could he be reborn as someone new. Hermanto smothered his son with his bare hands. He then tore pages from the Quran, an act widely considered blasphemous, shoved the torn pages into the toddler's small mouth, and set them on fire.
[15:49]The mother was present in the room for all of it. She watched, and she did nothing. In March 2018, in the Trenggalek Regency, seven adult siblings joined forces at four in the morning to hold down their 51-year-old mother, Tukinem. They forced her to swallow anchovies and water pumped through a pipe for thirty straight minutes, a purification ritual they believed would cure her of an illness no one could explain. When it was over, her lungs were completely filled with water. She died on the floor of her own home, killed by her own children. When cases like these come to light, experts are quick to point to a pattern that runs deep through Indonesian society, particularly in rural communities. Soeprapto, a sociologist from Gadjah Mada University, noted in an interview with iNews that Indonesians have a well-documented tendency to seek out spiritualists, rather than medicine, when they encounter something they cannot explain. And when a trusted local figure, someone embedded in your community, someone you see every day, tells you that your child is possessed, it carries an enormous weight of authority that is very hard to argue against. In Aisyah's case, there was another layer to it. Not only was Budiono a respected figure in the neighborhood, but his children were viewed by the community as obedient, well-behaved, and properly raised. That reputation almost certainly played a role in why Marsidi and Suwartinah trusted him so completely. Here was a man, they thought, who clearly knew something about raising a good child. If he said their daughter was cursed, who were they to question it? But what Aisyah's parents saw as troubling, the curiosity, the boundless energy, the questions, the refusal to simply sit quietly and comply, was actually a sign of a healthy, well-nourished, intellectually thriving child. Developmental experts will tell you that an active, questioning, curious child is not a red flag. It is not a sign of possession. It is not a sign of a curse. It is a sign that a child's nutritional needs are being met, that their brain is developing properly, that they are engaging with the world around them, the way children are supposed to. Aisyah wasn't a child who needed an exorcism. She was a child who needed room to grow. The case shocked the people of Indonesia. It prompted a national conversation about blind faith, the dangers of unregulated spiritual practices, and the terrifying events that can unfold when rituals are taken too far. Looking at this story from the outside, it's tempting to feel only horror. And horror is the right response. But the fuller, more uncomfortable truth is that Marsidi and Suwartinah were not people who wanted their daughter dead. They were parents who believed, with everything in them, that they were saving her. They trusted the wrong people absolutely. And they paid the most unimaginable price any parent can pay for that trust. The real danger here isn't spirituality itself. It's what happens when beliefs go completely unchecked. When faith is weaponized by people who know exactly what they're doing. When a community's trust becomes a tool for manipulation, exploitation, and ultimately, death. Let me know what you think in the comments below. And that's all for today. Thanks for watching.
