The Moving Prayer Barriers of the Tedong Mosque

Tedong is a mukim of Jasin District, in the Malaysian state of Melaka. Its mosque appears in reports as Masjid Jamek Tedong and as Masjid Baru Tedong, placed at Serkam and, in later coverage, at Merlimau. Like many mosques, it divides its prayer space with free-standing wooden barriers. These ones sit on wheels. The mosque chairman, Datuk Akhbar Ali, described them as fairly heavy.

Late May 2016. The small hours. Nobody was inside the building, but the CCTV system kept watch. On the footage found afterwards, two wooden barriers move across the floor. No person appears in the frame. One account says they travelled a few metres. They started behind the door of the women's prayer room. They ended up at the side of the mosque. A Thai headline would later describe a barrier sliding back and forth by itself.

The recording runs about 1 minute 48 seconds. Even its date is uncertain. Datuk Akhbar Ali gave 28 May, about 3.20 a.m. The caretaker, Zakaria Lani, gave 25 May, about 2.30 a.m. No account mentions any sound, light or figure. Only the barriers, moving.

Datuk Akhbar Ali posted the footage on Facebook and appealed for answers. "Jika ada pihak yang bersedia menghubungi kami untuk kita berbagi hasil kajian itu," he said, asking anyone who studied the clip to share what they found.

By June the clip was everywhere. Berita Harian, Kosmo!, Astro Awani and ERA fm covered it at home. The Independent in Singapore picked it up from Reddit, describing "two wooden screens, commonly used as barriers for prayer space being moved around without any human manipulation." Dream.co.id carried it in Indonesia. The title of one Dailymotion upload suggests that many young people began coming to the mosque.

According to Berita Harian's headline, the Chief Minister of Melaka ordered a probe. It fell to the Melaka Islamic Religious Affairs Department, JAIM. No police or scientific inquiry is on record. JAIM's finding was physical. "Kami mendapati pembatas kayu itu bisa bergerak sendiri karena angin kuat kerana mempunyai roda," the department said. The wooden partition could move by itself in strong wind, because it has wheels. The slippery floor surface was also a main factor.

Then came the remark that kept the story alive. JAIM official Rahimi Bani did not rule out the supernatural. "Terdapat golongan jin yang bisa menggerakkan barang yaitu jin Ifrit," he said. There is a class of jinn that can move objects, namely the Ifrit.

The chairman was not convinced. He said the wind that night was not very strong, and that the barriers are heavy. No source has checked his account against weather records. The conventional reading is JAIM's own: wheeled, free-standing partitions on a smooth floor in an open hall. No one has alleged that the footage was faked or staged.

The case resurfaced in Thai Rath on 21 June 2017, a year after it first spread. It now sits in Wikipedia's list of reportedly haunted locations, described as "two wooden boards that moved themselves as if a poltergeist was manipulating them." In 2022 a heavy wooden, wheeled prayer-row divider was filmed sliding by itself at a mosque in Grabag, Magelang, in Central Java. There, the mosque secretary suggested wind from the south.