Almost the entire world is on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, encouraging everyone to stay indoors and to stop the further spread of COVID-19, but unfortunately, many are still not taking the pandemic seriously and have been disobeying self-isolation orders.
Nevertheless, two Indonesians who disobeyed their local quarantine orders are now in for the biggest scare of their lives--and no, it's not because they caught coronavirus.
Trying to Stop COVID-19 from Spreading
In a report by Coconuts Jakarta, two residents of the Plupuh village are quarantined in an abandoned haunted house after they disobeyed the stay-at-home and self-isolation orders of the head of the Sragen regency in Central Java.
According to the report, many Sragen citizens were forced to return to their villages from the cities in fear of being locked down.
However, anyone who went home to their villages should follow the strict coronavirus self-isolation that is now in place, requiring them to stay indoors and avoid contact with anyone, even their families, for 14 days.
This is even more important for people that are on the watchlist of the regency's health authorities for possible COVID-19 infections.
The head of the Sragen regency, Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukowati, has issued a warning to these groups in the event they don't follow the orders.
"If they disobey self-isolation [orders], several villages have asked for my permission to quarantine them in an abandoned elementary school or abandoned houses," the regent said last week.
Kusdinar gave her permission to the villages and even said that if need be, anyone caught disobeying "should be locked inside--in a haunted house if necessary."
Nevertheless, she promised that they would be monitored and fed.
What Disobeying Isolation Orders Mean in Sragen
However, it seems like two Indonesians did not heed the warning and possibly thought that they won't be caught or that the regent was joking, but they had to learn the hard way that she was not.
"Two Plupuh residents agreed to self-isolate, but they violated the order. So they were locked inside an abandoned haunted house. Had they obeyed their order, they wouldn't have been locked in there," Kusdinar said in an Indonesian news outlet.
The regent added that the abandoned house is in the middle of a rice paddy, meaning there are no nearby houses and neighbors that could contract the dreadful COVID-19, in the event both residents acquired it.
Unfortunately, it also meant that they had to face the horrors of isolation on their own, in a property that was locally popular as haunted.
Sragen regent Kusdinar did not say how long they will be isolated in the haunted house, but since there are no quarantine facilities in the region, it seems like they'll have to stay the full length of their self-isolation in these abandoned properties and schools.
In the region, there are currently five confirmed coronavirus cases, including one death.
Indonesian Zombies Will Keep You Safe
This was not the first time Indonesian authorities used the supernatural to spook their constituents to stay at home.
Previously, men dressed as "pocong," or Indonesian zombies, were stationed at the village's main entrance to scare the locals into going out, and to encourage them to obey the curfew and the isolation orders.
