Ghosts Of Nigerian Air Crash Haunt Village

By James Donahue

After it happened on October 22, 2005, residents of a small village of Lissa, Nigeria, say they were terrified by the ghosts of the 117 people who perished in a fiery crash of a commercial jet liner near their town.

Not only were the villagers seeing ghosts, they said they were hearing their cries in the night and that their lives were disrupted because the aircraft and all of the bodies of the people in it disintegrated on impact, polluting the nearby river where the people get their drinking water. They said the crash closed the only road to the fields where they get their food.

There is an indication that the disaster also cut off electric power to the village, which remains shut off as authorities comb the crash site, collecting bodies, debris and information as to the cause of the accident.

“It is no longer the issue of not having potable water for domestic use, no electricity, no good roads and others, but we now live in fear when it gets dark because the spirits of the victims in the place crash keep roaming the whole village,” one town spokesman was quoted as saying.

Because of the stories many villagers no longer sleep in their homes, the report said. They seek refuge at night in the homes of relatives in neighboring villages.

The search for the decomposing body parts by authorities continued for days. The Red Cross prohibited people from drinking from the Osun River due to contamination, so they walked almost two kilometers to get water from another source.

The town also was fumigated in an effort to prevent sickness, especially cholera, reports say.

The problems in the village were compounded when the local Chief, Sadiku Odugbemi, was arrested on rumors that he led villagers in the looting of the bodies at the crash site. Odugberni has since exonerated himself and has been released on bail. He claims the charges are baseless and unfounded.

But now they are seeing strangers walking the streets of the town in the night, and hearing their cries, and it has the people terrified.

The town sought money from the airline to pay for the exorcisms of the haunted spirits from the community and conduct a spiritual cleansing. The villagers also asked for compensation for damage to their crops and farmlands.

The Bellview Airlines flight 210 crashed shortly after taking off from Lagos on a flight to the Nigerian capital Abuja, during a storm. The pilot had time to send a distress signal before the plane disappeared.

The wreckage was found in a swamp near Lissa in Ogun state, about 30 miles from Lagos. The site was a grisly scene of mangled bodies, twisted chunks of metal and ripped luggage.

Authorities said the plane crashed and burst into flames. There were no survivors