**6. The "haunted" house story**

I spent almost 6 years with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Mozambique, first before the war (1979–1981) and later during the dreadful civil war (1989–1993). Due to the demanding situation in the country, there was hardly any time to think about owls or owl beliefs when trying to find the fastest and best ways to feed hungry people. However, Mozambique gave us some owl experiences that prove that extreme superstitions exist in that country as well.

During work travel to Nampula, I saw a young Southern White-faced Owl (*Ptilopsis granti*) that had to be saved from the street market. That owl spent exceptionally long time with our family, often also traveling with us as we could not leave it alone in the house. So, it became an accustomed air traveler in an African basket made for it.

In the hotels, it was often free in the room and liked to sit at any higher point of the room (**Figure 4**). The only problem was that the cleaners panicked if they found an owl in the room, so during the cleaning, we had to hide it to avoid such occasions.

Being a VIP traveler, I was not normally forced to pass the security checks at the airport when entering the plane directly from the VIP lounge. Once, however, I went through the normal line at Maputo airport on our way to Swaziland (renamed Eswatini now), which was also a part of my FAO representation. The owl was passed in its basket through the security X-ray. The airport officer only saw the white bones

#### **Figure 4.**

*Southern White-faced Owl (*Ptilopsis granti*) on the window frame in Mozambique. This small, playful owl living on the balcony made the entire house haunted for the local people. Photo: Heimo Mikkola.*

#### *Owls Used as Food and Medicine and for Witchcraft in Africa DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108913*

of the owl on his monitor. Soon, this worried and blank-faced Black officer came to ask: "Are you a Diplomat?" I said "Yes," and the officer hushed us to go quickly to the plane. I still wonder what the security officer thought this "monster" to be or if he was able to recognize that it was a live owl.

On one of my family's regular Swaziland flights, my wife, Anita, realized that the owl had left the basket and was sitting on top of it. If anybody else would have seen the live owl, it could have caused a real panic inside the plane.

But this lovely little owl, the most talkative of any of the family's rehabilitated owl species thus far, caused a huge disaster after we safely returned it to nature in a wildlife park in Swaziland when we left Mozambique for a new duty station in Malawi. My successor took the same house in Maputo, where the owl had been kept in a large backhouse balcony where it was able to fly freely.

Dreadfully, this successor soon got ill after moving to Maputo and did not survive a tumor in his head. He was married to a local lady, who started to say that the house they had taken after our family was haunted because we had kept the owl in it. And that this was why her husband died. Luckily, we were safely out of the country, but this left an awfully bad feeling for the entire family. The lady refused to enter the house after the death of her husband, and other people were forced to move their furniture out from that allegedly haunted house.

We have never been to Mozambique after this but heard that the haunted house story came up again when the next successor took the house over and was seriously attacked at the gate of the house. During our time, we never had any housebreaking or larger robberies, but this could be because we had two dogs and one owl living with us. Weinstein also concluded that owls may be the cause of houses being described as "haunted" [1].
