"The dingy corridors and gloomy wards of a
long-abandoned Saudi Arabian hospital have drawn hundreds of amateur ghost
hunters who believe it to be haunted by jinn, the malevolent spirits of the
Koran and Arabian mythology. The
macabre fascination with Riyadh's Irqa Hospital, which treated Gulf War
combatants in 1991, began with tweeted rumors and escalated to the point where
hundreds of youths broke into the grounds, smashing windows and starting
fires. "Teenagers
sent text messages calling for an operation against some of the jinn who live in
the hospital, and they broke into the hospital and smashed its facilities and
burned 60 percent of it," Okaz newspaper reported last
week. The rampage prompted
angry press complaints the authorities were allowing the building to fall into
disrepair. Several films have
since been posted on YouTube showing grinning young men exploring the building's
deserted rooms in search of evidence of spectral
activity. One showed blazing
palm trees that had been torched by the ghost
hunters.
Jinn
fever reached the point where the Health Ministry issued a terse statement on
Monday disclaiming responsibility for the decaying building, which it said was
privately owned and too decrepit to be revived as a working
hospital. A
columnist in the English-language Saudi Gazette daily on Tuesday recommended
that authorities form "a committee for the jinn" to help the owners of possessed
houses. "It
would be no understatement to say we are sick and tired of evil sorcerers," said
the article."
