Singapore: City of Restless Spirits

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2010-02-26 16:33
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Much of the modern city of Singapore is built over countless cemeteries and this, say the residents, is why it is so haunted. MAREK LENARCIK is taken on a tour of Singapore’s most haunted sites by a local ghost investigation team, whose methods are quite different to those of ghost hunters in the West. Surnames have been repressed at the request of the investigators.

Much later, standing alone among the graves, armed only with a humidity meter. I swallow hard then call out into the darkness: "If you are here move my meter. If you are here show yourself. If you are here give me a sign." I keep repeating this for half an hour. In the second minute of the experiment, the humidity meter shows a drop in value by 10%. At the same moment thousands of crickets which had been singing in the nearby bushes fall silent. Exactly 10 minutes later the crickets resume their concert and the level of humidity returns to its previous level.

When the team come to fetch me sometime later I ask Carol if my experience had any significance. - Usually when the sounds of nature, like singing crickets, disappear, it is something to watch out for - she said. - The humidity meter is still being tested. We are having single cases and we are trying to correlate it with other data. -

Echoes of bloodshed

We have one more location to visit, another place made haunted by the horrors of war. This is a former military camp in the Sarimbun area, from which the Japanese began their offensive of Singapore. SPI has received lots of reports from witnesses who have seen the marching ghosts of Japanese soldiers or heard ‘terrible howling’.

On a small field surrounded by trees SPI places two piles of scraps of paper bearing Chinese symbols: an offering for the ghosts. We set one stack on fire. "If the ghosts accept the offering, the second pile will set on fire by itself - explains Carol. But we are unsuccessful. The fire dies out after few minutes and the second stack remains untouched. Undaunted, we move to another part of the former camp, where the team leave an offering of glasses, coloured red, containing Japanese Sake and white wine. The idea is that if the ghosts are thirsty, the levels of the drinks will be found to have gone down. After a patient wait, though, we find nothing has changed. They’ve not even taken a sip.

SPI tries one last experiment in the camp. They ask two new volunteers, Serene and Meisi, sociology students from the local university, to help them. The girls seem terrified and reluctant to take part. They had expected to be spending just the day with SPI but their professor insisted they join in with all the experiments – including those taking place after dark. Surrounded by SPI’s gadgets, Serene and Meisi have been asked to sit down facing a belt of trees pointed out by Ridwin.

A small yellow ball is resting in front of them. Quaveringly, Serene calls out: - If you are here, move the ball. If you are here give us a sign. If you are here show yourself. - Perhaps to the girls’ relief, nothing happens; the yellow ball remains in place and the gadgets stay quiet. Neverthless, Ridwin is sure the ghosts were present. - I felt their presence in the trees - he said. - It was like some energy was pushing towards me. -

Although these experiments have proved unsuccessful, this is not always the case, SPI assures me. Sometimes their activities can attract very negative energies indeed. - We can be possessed - Ariffin tells me. - Or sometimes the ghosts will follow us home. To avoid this we never go straight back home after the research. We take detours. - With this unnerving thought, SPI drops me at the nearest taxi rank. It occurs to me that changing cars from SPI’s to a taxi might count as "not going straight back home". I hope so, but I feel uneasy after my adventures. I wake up several times during the rest of the night. I keep looking around my room, feeling that something is there every time I close my eyes. It’s probably just my brain playing tricks on me – but can I be sure?

Marek Lenarcik
The article appeared in the http://www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk
http://lenarcik.blogspot.com/

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