Two Suns in the Sky

Mount Merapi in Java, Indonesia rises an imposing 9,738ft above sea-level. It is an active volcano, and wispy smoke can often be seen slithering from its summit. Much like these spidery threads of smoke, a web of confusion quickly descended upon a group of students who had decided to undertake a likely small-scale expedition to climb the mountain. Once they were sufficiently disoriented, it seems as if at least one of them ended up staring down at a landscape from another dimension...

## The Merapi Mystery

As everyone should've learnt not to do from *Scooby-Doo*, the bewildered and likely panicked students split up and traveled back to their basecamp in small groups of twos and threes. Rescue services would eventually have to be sent out to collect the stragglers of this ill-advised mission. Once the group was all together again and back to civilisation, one member of the hapless student posse had an astoundingly bizarre story to tell. He said that he had looked up at the sun in an attempt to get his bearings - but that this action had actually achieved the opposite result when he realised that he was looking at two suns floating there in the blue sky. Likely stumbling about in bewilderment at this point, he also became aware of the presence of a bizarre palace-like building accompanied by two soldiers '*in uniforms of a previous age*'.

## A Folkloric Connection

If you've been reading this website for any length of time, you will know full well how much I love folklore and the weird little titbits of information it so often contains. According to Javanese belief, the earth is not only inhabited by humans, but also by innumerable spirits collectively known as the Makhluk Halus. Some legends attest to the presence of a palace (also known as a kraton) belonging to the rulers of the spirit world - known as Empu Rama and Empu Permadi. This palace is apparently a perfect mirror of a luxurious human palace, and is specified to have roads, domesticated animals and - get this - soldiers. Ancestral spirits live in this palace as well, and will sometimes be allowed to visit their ancestors in dreams to provide dire warnings. To summarise, it seems as if we have a folkloric attestation to the presence of a supernatural palace inside this mountain.

## A Timeslip?

John and Anne Spencer speculate in their *Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits* that perhaps the unnamed witness experienced some kind of highly complex time-slip. They suggested that perhaps a palace with guards had existed there at some point in history, or perhaps would come to exist in the future, and that the dual suns could be explained by the ghostly landscape being effectively overlaid onto our world - and so the position of the sun during the timeslip would be visible alongside the sun of the present day - meaning that two suns would be visible in the sky at the same time. They admit that this is a stretch, and if I am not mistaken it has never been reported in any other timeslip reports before, but it is certainly an interesting prospect to ponder.

## Sources

'Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits' by John and Anne Spencer. This book is rather poorly sourced, but they attribute this story to the works of a researcher by the name of Joan Forman. They do not specify which book exactly this story is meant to appear in - but I would guess that it is probably 'Mask of Time' due to the topic it covers. My source for the folkloric mountain palace tale is Wikipedia's great article on the mountain in question.