TW: Ghost stories!
My family is obsessed with ghosts.
Ever since I was young, I was subjected to both of my uncles' constant stories of the horrors and ghosts they encountered while attending national service. My grandma's second child, my first uncle, has always been cheeky and incredibly expressive—he would tell his stories with a flashlight harshly lighting the underside of his chin and a mischievous tone that left us kids screeching in anticipation. We would be immersed in stories of civet cats that pounced even after being shot, people who disappeared into the jungle and came back as limbs, and beautiful dead women who left their lingering frangipani scent in the back of unknowing taxi drivers’ cabs.
As a child, my mom had several encounters with ghosts too. She grew up in a house right next to a 'haunted house' and claimed to have seen a woman in white numerous times, following her to the bathroom a floor down from her childhood bedroom. Some of my earliest memories were of my mother saying she felt reassuringly safe, and that ghosts can be both kind-hearted or mean, just like living people. My dad, unlike the Singaporean-Chinese side of my family, has never seen one with his own eyes, but has spent years of his life obsessing over spirits in Singapore. He researched countless ghost stories and wrote the book Spectropolis (an academic study examining the intersection between urbanisation and Singapore's spectral beliefs and practices), after having written Horror in Architecture with my mom.
As a kid, the best thing that could happen at our Sunday 团圆饭 was when my uncle cracked into his booming ghost stories. Excuse me, for I can never quote him (or anyone) verbatim on the matter of ghost stories; part of their charm is their Chinese-whisper nature: they are often hyperbolic, and no one can remember the exact way they were told the last time.
“Moomin (his nickname for me), this one is scary!” my uncle would say. My brother Leo, our cousin, and I would exchange grins. We were always graced with one of these stories:
1. There was this man at camp. He was ostracised for abnormal behaviour, and had a red cross painted on his cabin door. One night, while he was on jungle watch, he disappeared. They looked for him for days. One day, someone decided to clear out his cabin and, to their dread, found his organs in his bathroom cabinet—arranged in alphabetical order!!
2. There was a soldier who shot a civet cat one night. He heard the thud of its feline body hitting the floor, but there it remained, staring down at him. Until suddenly, it pounced, and everything went black!
3. My mom would tell this one. She'd say: one day, your uncle brought home a mini terracotta warrior. Every night, the woman who worked in the house would wake up with bruises on her face. We called a medium in to examine the house, who said the spirit was inside the terracotta warrior. To fix the problem, we had to bury it under a tree!
4. My grandpa worked in a hospital where soldiers were taken during the Singapore-Japan “Battle of Singapore.” At night, ghosts would rearrange all the beds. The workers at the hospital had to get used to waking up in different orientations every morning.
5. A woman had a ghost in her house, and it was always pinching her arms. She asked a priest, who told her that she had to make offerings and feed the ghost. So she did, for nearly a decade, but the ghost kept causing trouble. Years later, she told a bomoh (a Malay spirit medium) about it, and the bomoh visited her house. She asked if she had been feeding the ghost, and the house owner said yes. The bomoh then asked what she had been feeding it, to which she responded: “What we eat: roast pork, duck, rice…” The bomoh said: the ghost is Muslim! You have to feed it halal food!
As I grew into my teenage years, I became obsessed with ghost stories too. I read all the books my dad had bought and left around the house. Admittedly, I read them until I couldn’t sleep at night. I had to spend nights curled up in my brother’s room. But it was never purely fear.
In East and Southeast Asia, every August was a month dedicated to honouring deceased ancestors and wandering spirits during the Hungry Ghost Festival. My mom would warn my brother and me not to go out alone at night, and to make sure we didn’t step on ghost offerings. If we did accidentally step on them, we were always taught to apologise and show respect. But our belief in ghosts was never rooted in fear. Instead, it was a respectful sense of caution—a quiet understanding that, just as we must be mindful and kind to other human beings, we have to treat ghosts the same. I mean, imagine how grumpy and hungry they must be! They only get to eat every August. And you never know how they could've died!
Looking back, I am so lucky to have grown up in an environment with an unwavering belief in ghosts. Not only did it teach me respect, but also the beauty of narrative and its role in culture. I recently read a book called A Short History of Myth, where the author Karen Armstrong argues that mythology, before being deemed “imaginary” and “allegorical,” was a display of an archetypal way of life. A life ornamented by spirits, immortal beings, and moral lessons was a life that felt irrevocably true.
In a way, this notion is paralleled in growing up surrounded by ghosts. As a child, I learned the beauty of emotionally evocative narrative and belief. Stories were a point of connection in my family, something that erased the years between adults and children. Everyone was a sucker for a well-told ghost story. Likewise, growing up without questioning the existence of ghosts taught me to believe in what others might quickly dismiss as too imaginary to be true. That was just never the case here. I would have never batted an eye at a claimed ghost sighting—the only things that taught me ghosts were fictitious were Western comic books and TV shows.
Having grown up surrounded by such narratives is something I am forever grateful for. I have no doubt this influenced my creative process and my enduring love for storytelling as I grew up.
Ghastly yours,
Mila Bea
