Boris talks about evil spirits (shulmus) and his experience of encountering them: Shulmus can take the form of naked girls and cause trouble to people. In such a form they appeared in a place called Darma Sala. Old people contended that they were shulmus and not what they looked like, because they did not have philtrum (a vertical indentation over the upper lip). I also heard from elders that female shulmus appear with naked breasts. Zodva lama told me that in the past, shulmus cause trouble to night travellers. They led them astray around the steppe or tied their horses’ legs. When I asked him, ‘Where are shulmus now?’, he replied that they have penetrated into people. I asked then, ‘How did they do it?’ Zodva said, ‘If a person drinks vodka, lies, smokes, then shulmus can penetrate into that person easily and make his/her body its home’. If you look around, today there are indeed many such people. I also saw shulmus. They appeared to me with long faces, resembling the head of a horse, a sheep or a goat. Their hands and feet had cloven hooves, their knees were half-bent. I will tell you about this later. There are also evil spirits called dogam. In the olden days, there lived an old man, who practiced Buddhism. People asked him to drive evil spirits out of their homes. One day, he came to such a house, opened the door and began to read prayers loudly while shouting, ‘Get out, get out and go away!’ Then he grabbed a knife and began to wave with it. Cups and things were flying in the house. Suddenly, a huge, hairy and ugly evil spirit (dogam) jumped out of the house and disappeared into the night. Once, when I lived in a village I had already been reading prayers and knew many Buddhist practices. I even helped the locals turn a former village council house into a prayer house. One day, I was called into a house where a small girl had constantly been crying, unable to sleep for a couple of weeks. Neither doctors, nor folk healers could help her. I came there, lit incenses and began to read prayers. When I was going around the rooms, I came across a creature resembling a bat, but with one eye on its forehead and a long beak. Only the girl and I could see it. As I started to drive this creature out, it was attacking me and squeaking. I got scared. Then I recalled a story about that old man, who used a knife to drive evil spirits out. So, I grabbed a knife and began to wave with it, muttering prayers. After a while, I noticed that the creature was beating itself against the window. The girl’s parents started to laugh at me, for they could not see it. I opened the window and let the spirit out. Afterwards, the girl calmed down. I said to her parents that she would sleep for two days in a go, because she was exhausted by that spirit. As I said, she slept for two days. Today that girl has grown up. She greets me whenever she sees me.