It was a mermaid. My village was such that we had no boreholes, and we would visit the river to fetch water. There, we had so many rules and regulations like, do not wear your slippers inside the water, else, the mermaid would get angry, and the water wouldn’t be clean again for the purpose we needed it for.
There was another rule of not turning your water bowl upside down facing the river because it would have the same effect on the mermaid. But did I dare to go against the rules? No. I didn’t have the balls to go against the rules of the water creatures. Now that I think of it, I really wish I had at least tried one that would make the mermaid show up because of the special description they gave her.
According to my village elders, she’s a very beautiful creature with half human and half fish body. Long black hair with a glowing skin. And, Nollywood movies helped me stick a perfect picture of her in my head because all the characters that portrayed mermaids were exactly as my village elders described.
Another one is the Bush baby. It is believed that this creature is very small, dirty and most times, homeless, so it walks around with a tiny mat. The reason this creature got popular was because of the mighty small mat it used to carry. It is believed that the mat has a huge prosperity potential for whoever is bold enough to face the creature and get it. However, there’ll be no peace for the collector of the mat.
Have I seen this creature before? No, but in high school, I had a school father who claimed to have seen it.
My high school boarding facility was in a place that I can say almost in the middle of a forest, and for the boys’ hostel, they lacked the basic amenities like a toilet, so the bush was their solace.
my school father was relieving himself in the bush one evening, when suddenly he ran out half naked, shouting, “baby bush”. He claimed to have seen the baby bush with the mat, and we jokingly asked him if he tried to collect the mat. Lol.
There’s an animal that we were not allowed to hunt at night. According to my village elders, that animal could be human. They said, those animals do not come out in the day to hunt because they are not simply animals and could be caught by humans who could recognize them during the day and could get killed or have them stuck in the human world because of their extraordinary beauty.
There was something that was spectacular to them, according to one of my village elders who was a hunter. He said, he had seen many of them turned to beautiful women in the middle of the night, go to the market to buy food items, and returned home to turn back to an animal.
I don’t know if I should believe them because most times, they say experience is the best teacher, however, I think I’ll choose to learn from other people’s experiences, so I’m not curious at all.
This is my entry to InLeo prompt for the month of February. You can find the details here