Nenek In Her Mystery World

Seeing Japanese soldiers around Nenek's house in Kempas was a usual sight during Japanese Occupation as these soldiers used to ask her ( Nenek's ) mother, to cook for them.

But there was once, when one of these soldiers while walking past Nenek's house, he saw a Chinese woman, into her late pregnancy.
One of the Japanese soldier caught the woman, tied both her hands to her back.
Both her legs were tied too.

Then, without showing any sympathy, the Japanese soldier thrust his long sword into the woman's big belly...

Nenek pre-schooling age then, ran into her house.
She told her mother of what she had just saw: The Chinese woman's belly oozing blood...

Her mother without further delay, quickly bundled her.
They ran further into the deeper jungle of Kempas, to Lukud.
Lukud was the third place of residence for the family of two in Johor Bahru, since Japanese landed in Tanah Melayu, Malaya.

Before, they were staying in Stulang Darat.
Their house was bombed by the invading force.
The only house in the village that escaped the bombing, despite all surrounding houses flattened and on fire, was that belonged to Haji Rashid's.
But that was with his family's rituals safeguarding it.

Often, the young Nenek saw Haji Rashid with his children would sit around the house.
Then ritual prayers were recited.

When Nenek could feel the earth trembling and wobbling, she knew that the very big and very tall giant guard that looked after Haji Rashid's house, was walking around his compound.

****** 

For the past few nights, the Japanese soldier who strike the pregnant Chinese woman's belly with his long sharp sword appeared in Nenek's sleep.
He brought along the woman with him.

He went to Nenek, asking for rice for him to eat. 

"Tak mau, tak mau kasi engkau. Engkau setan."

Nenek refused to give him any food.
He was a satan to her.

Both the soldier and the woman appeared in Nenek's sleep for a few nights, before Nenek prepared a handful of rice grains mixed with turmeric and rock salt.
She mixed them together and throw it around her house.
Then the dream stopped.

****** 

That was what was being said by Nenek when my daughter and I visited her in her new house in Kempas.

The girl was very close to her Nenek.
The grandmother used to be our next door neighbour.
She treated my daughter as her own grandchild, always showed the girl her greatest concern, always preparing her favourite asam pedas kepala ikan sembilang, whenever the girl was around.
The grandmother was forever willing to stretch her limited finance that she had, for her granddaughter.

I knew that Kempas used to be a black area.
It is only recently that housing development in Kempas took place.

I had heard of communist activity in Kempas area.
One of my husband's friend, his brother disappeared for good in the jungle.
Until today, there is still no trace to his alive or dead body.

My husband's cousin was caught, beaten and thrown into jail.
All of my husband's siblings and relatives, except him, went to Chinese school.
The cousin was suspected to be a communist as one of his friend had vaguely linked to the jungle party.

My husband said, being Chinese and staying not far from forested area, they easy fall prey into becoming one.
So, any Chinese then, could be suspected to be a communist.

The cousin however, was freed from jail.
Alive and kicking today, thriving in his automobile business.

****** 

It was only yesterday that I knew Kempas had its own story of Japanese Occupation to tell.

Life has almost comes to a complete circle for Nenek.
Her house she lives in, today, is around the place where she fled after seeing the Japanese soldier with the pregnant Chinese woman.

The peaceful river in front of Nenek's house, with spring water flowing down stream, she said yesterday, its water used to be red.
It was where can easily be found, many Chinese heads and bodies... separated.

In the meantime, Nenek is till mixing a handful of rice grains with turmeric and rock salt.
She is still placing the mixture all around her house.

Paranormal Sighting In Learning Institutions With The Star

Does accounts of supernatural activities in schools are very much alive and well in this modern day and age?

Does sightings of apparitions and unexplained occurences are popular shared topics of conversations for current and former students of their eerie experiences?

About 3 months ago, StarEducation sent a callout asking students to write in their personal accounts of mysterious happenings in their schools or universities.

Based on The Sunday Star report on May 9, students walked down their journey doing their rounds in the local learning institutions looking at the creepy tales.

Colonial era schools such as this one in Kuala Lumpur tend to have more than their fair share of creepy stories.

Historic haunts
Invented or real histories of schools are a common starting ground for terrifying tales.

At the more historic schools around the country, it would seem that some of the troops who arrived in Malaya during the Japanese Occupation of the early 1940s have never left.
Tales of schools being former Japanese torture camps are a particularly popular explanation for apparitions of headless corpses and sounds of marching soldiers in the dead of night.

Perhaps the strangest tale in circulation at the moment are sightings of beheaded nuns in a well-known girls’ school in Kuala Lumpur.

 

While the school canteen may be the focal point for students during recess, it can at other times, turn out to be an eerie place where one can hear mysterious sounds and witness strange happenings.

 Although the brutalities committed during that era cannot be denied, conclusive proof of all the exact spots where the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police) murdered their victims is hard to find.

Consultant Mavindren Naidu however, believes that his former school in Ipoh is a hotbed of paranormal activity.
“From 1943 till the end of the war, the Japanese government did have their headquarters in Perak.
“It’s not surprising then if some of the locations in my school were previously used as execution spots by the army,” he says.

Mavindren claims that his former schoolmates have seen silhouettes of bodies hanging from trees, and screams echoing down empty hallways.
“I’ve experienced the screams myself once, while waiting for my father to pick me up after co-curricular activities.

“Maybe it was a classmate pulling my leg, but there were no other students around and it didn’t sound human...” he says.

 

Many a student will swear to spirits lurking in empty classrooms.

Declaring himself to be a sceptic, Tan Seng Hong says a misunderstanding of history can easily cause rumours to spread.
“Some say that my school was a prison, or that it was built on an ancient tribal burial ground,” says the secondary school student.

“But my school is fairly new, and this area has always been a commercial one! Of course, if I believed the stories to be true, I too would feel scared or see things that aren’t really there.”

Permanent residents
As they tend to be located in isolated surroundings, boarding schools are rife with supernatural anecdotes.

One of the most infamous yarns is that of the boy who wakes up in the middle of the night at his dormitory room.

Upon seeing dark shadows hovering along the beds of his fellow students, the boy pulls up his covers and pretends to be asleep.

 

The abandoned Shih Chung school in Penang is supposedly haunted and the abode of different types of ghosts.

The terrified boy then hears a disembodied voice singing: “The rest are asleep, but one is awake.”

Civil servant Shazliza Ramli thinks that such tales are a way of keeping students in check.
“You can be sure that once a student hears a story like that, he is bound to keep to his bedtime,” she laughs.

Shazliza adds that another common “happening” at her former residential school in Kelantan is the doppelganger effect.
“One story I can account for is when a friend of mine had to go home for the weekend due to an injury. 

"But the night warden claimed to have seen my friend wandering around the corridors late at night, and thought she was rude for not answering the warden’s calls."

 

Sightings of apparitions are often spotted along empty corridors and at disrepaired stairwells in schools.

“Upon learning the truth, the warden subesequently refused to do the night shift again; but I think it was an effective caution for the girls, because after that, none of us loittered around at night!” she says.

Residential school student Azfar Masom meanwhile, thinks that his seniors just take sadistic pleasure in scaring the wits out of younger students.
“This is especially true when we have overnight leadership-building or camping events,” says Azfar.

“The students would do things like sneaking up on unsuspecting individuals who dared venture out to answer the call of nature.

“The teachers have more subtle techniques — when doing the head count at the end of the day, they would add an extra person to make it look like we had an unexpected ‘guest’ sharing our tent for the night.”

Tertiary terror
At higher education institutions that are built around dense jungle areas, the old wives’ tale goes that empty buses were sent from the proposed site to the middle of nowhere.

It is said that this was so that bus drivers could transport unwanted spirits to their new “home”, away from the university.
While the sprawling campuses of some local universities appear spacious in broad daylight, taking a nightly stroll in them can be an unnerving experience for even the bravest of souls.

Economics student Sandra Ooi claims that sightings of a lone woman in white are common at her campus in Selangor.
“When my boyfriend came to pick me up one night, he said he saw a girl dressed in white in the distance.

“Thinking it was a student looking for a lift, he slowed down his car — but as he got closer, she disappeared.

“Several of my male classmates have seen this girl while walking back to their dorms,” she says.

In similar vein, Wong Li Ping is certain that she has personally experienced the urban legend of her former private higher education institution in the Klang Valley.
“I saw a person standing on one of the balconies of the hostel block facing mine,” says the sales executive.

“Suddenly the figure leapt down; I thought I had just witnessed a suicide.

“I immediately started to dial the emergency number, but when I glanced up again, I saw the figure standing there as before.”
Li Peng adds that the scene repeated twice, before the figure completely vanished.

Although there is no concrete validity to the relations above, they do reflect the Malaysian appetite for the supernatural.

As Priya Kulasagaran conclude in this writing, "Whether you are a believer or not, the very least these stories do is plant a small seed of doubt when walking down a lonely corridor."