It was a small, nondescript terrace house, tucked neatly among many other apartments. If you weren't 'in the know', you probably wouldn't bother giving this apartment another glance. Visitors to this house have a purpose, a motive. They have come here to seek enlightenment.
There are two things I notice about this house the moment I step in.
One. It is surrounded by shreds of broken wine glasses embedded in solid granite rock, whose purpose I can only guess, is to serve as an amulet against trespassers.
Two. The owner is a lover of cats. It is evident that the cats are well-fed, pampered creatures. At first, I noticed one lone cat, curled up lazily under the table in a fetal position. Then, a second one appears, a black cat with long whiskers. And, by the time I left, I saw five to six cats wandering around the apartment with unbridled freedom.
When the owner finally emerges from within the confines of her apartment, she immediately stands out. Sporting a short crop of scarlet red hair, she is clothed in a cheerful and conspicuous mandarin-orange ensemble from head to toe.
She invites us in, into a small room. But, there is nothing ordinary about this room. It's nothing like your average home. The copious amount of gold assaults me, and what enters my vision is a sea of golden and bronzed Buddha statures. There are all sorts, minutiae ones, human-sized ones.
There is something oddly calming about this room. It's almost as though I can sense the 'divine presence'.
Yes, it's what my family and I have travelled half of Singapore to come to. To seek divine help. To seek divine interpretation for the disturbance caused the night before.
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Knock, knock.
Knock, knock, knock.
As, I lay in bed, listening to the above sounds, I was calm. This was something my ears were accustomed to. Nothing out of the ordinary. I had drawn the curtains, having enough courage finally to sleep in a pitch-dark room again.
20 minutes has lapsed, and the knocking sounds IN my room continues. My heart flutters a little at each knock, but my mood is relatively calm. I try convincing myself that it is all part of my imagination.
Knock.
It was this knock that really paralyzed me with fear. It was so real, so undeniable, just inches away from me, so unmistakable. The sound of a human fist meeting the acquaintance of something hard and solid. Only the combination of the above two could produce some acoustics. My ears were not playing tricks on me.
My hand automatically leapt to the nearest switch and flipped the lights on. With rising terror, I shook my sister awake with a frenzied energy.
"Wake up! Wake up NOW!" My sister's eyes sprang open to reveal a pair of sleep-laden peepers. "Did you hear THAT?!!" The eyes that were still staring at me were suddenly drained of all sleep and they quickly turned terrified.
Knock.
AGAIN. An unmistakable knock just inches away from me. In the case that I was hallucinating, I had an extra pair of ears for verification. My sister heard it too. An unmistakable knock on our table.
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Now, as we sat in front of the woman ghostbuster, my heart was calm. There was another family in the room, apart from ours. She began regaling us with tales of her ghostly encounters, even going so far as to name the apartment name and unit number.
The tale of a family whose toddler couldn't stop crying for a week after they moved into a new home. When she went over to check out the house, she was 'shocked by the amount of spirits lingering about the apartment'. The sight that greeted her was this: four women spirits sitting in a row outside a room, a grandpa, and four other gentlemen.
"Children are very pure," the woman states simply, "They are able to see unclean things."
She spoke of another woman who frequently saw a pair of legs wandering about in the kitchen. What was most chilling is that the appendages had no body or head attached to it.
All these households, according to the woman, now enjoyed peace.
"More and more people are witnessing supernatural encounters. The world today is in a state of unrest, very unpeaceful. Open the newspapers and look at the amount of people that die every day, being reflected in the obituaries column. And, what about the tsunami? Those people that lost their lives are ordinary people, just like you and me. And, they were suddenly ripped apart from the human world. Where have they gone to? They are on this earth, lingering about, waiting for a time where they are ready to go to a place and find peace. That is why more and more people nowadays are encountering such things. The dead are roaming the earth."
I have to agree with her that the increasing occurrences of natural (eg. Tsunami) and man-made (eg. Iraq War) calamities has caused many of the dead to roam the living earth. And, such disasters means that the body may not be a complete anatomy, but different body parts detached.
My maid's friend was living in Iraq. After the war, she was showering one day when she felt something touching her behind her back. When, she turned, she screamed until she fainted. It turned out that there was a man's arm (ONLY THE ARM!) scrubbing her back. That was because during the war explosion, the victim's body was split into many pieces, causing appendages to be all over the place. That explains why some ghostly encounters only involves the limbs.
My mood was now relatively disturbed, my previously calm mood like an undisturbed water now rippling with increasing dis-settlement.
The other family that came had a toddler less than two years old that the mother cradled protectively in her arms. After we spoke of our dire situation, they spoke of theirs.
What happened was that once, the grandmother and the baby were alone in the house, but in separate rooms. Suddenly, the grandmother heard the baby crying and wailing, and when she rushed into the room, the baby had been stripped of her diapers and pants. And, she was fast asleep.
The little girl fell ill immediately after that incident, and haven't recovered a week since. She kept on vomiting, and had to avoid solid foods. The parents, in their desperate attempt to cure her, brought her to this lady.
The woman digested all this, asked more questions, and then stopped talking altogether.
"Let's start," she says, and she turned so that her back was facing us. She began chanting, reciting from the Buddha scriptures, and didn't stop for the next five minutes.
By the time she turned round to face us again, she had already 'taken on the form' of the Lord Buddha, and every word that spilled out of her mouth was spoken by the omnipresent deity.
The frequent knockings in the graveyard silence of the night, the sound of the door-knob turning, the sound of someone entering our room.
Finally, the mystery was unveiled. As this woman turned to look at us, what she was to say next, the words that were to come out of her mouth, I wasn't ready for any of it.
She begins by saying that there is a male spirit in our room. A tall man, whose previous occupation was a physician. He is always decked out in a white coat, like those physicians in the olden times, or like those you watch in drama serials.
In 1951, where our room is now, it used to be his practising room as a physician. And, where our bed is now located, it used to be the table where he can be seen administering his patients, treating them.
The noises and the knockings that we hear in the middle of the night was of him going about his daily routine as a physician.
His spirit rose in our room 7 years ago, and the explanation for why we only began hearing those weird noises about two to three years back, was that we were still young, and while those noises were present, we couldn't be bothered with them. Now, that we have grown up, we are able to discern those acoustics.
Great. I love hearing things like these. It puts my heart at COMPLETE ease, KNOWING that I have been SHARING a room with a spirit of the opposite gender, and now, I can even put an OCCUPATION to this spirit, GREAT, my heart now is completely at ease. No worries.
THIS IS GREAT. YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE I'M SUCH A HOSPITABLE HOST, AND I LOVE INVITING PEOPLE OVER TO MY HOUSE. BUT, I DIDN'T REALIZE THAT MY HOUSE IS SO POPULAR THAT EVEN MY GOOD FRIENDS FROM THE NETHER WORLD ALSO ENJOY THE FACILITIES IN MY HOUSE. I CANNOT TELL YOU JUST HOW HAPPY I AM TO KNOW THIS.
The woman goes on to say that sometimes people hear noises because they are hallucinating, but IN MY CASE, I have been unwittingly sharing room space with a male physician who has since died. She then added that 30% of the 'noise' that I hear are due to my imagination, while the other 70% is due to the male spiritual existence in my room.
While the spirit means no harm, and is probably just minding his own business while I'm minding mine IN THE SAME ROOM, the collision of yin and yang does not share a peaceful co-existence, and our personal luck will be dragged down by HIM. (IT IS SO NICE FINALLY TO BE ABLE TO PUT A GENDER TO THE GHOST RESIDING IN MY ROOM.)
As though, I'm not spooked enough that I now can put the SEX, OCCUPATION and EVEN WHAT HE WEARS to the 'presence in my room', what come out of the lady's mouth next (or rather, the Lord Buddha), has caused irreparable psychological harm on my well-being.
While humans and ghosts are different species separated by flesh and meat, they do have something in common. That is, they both have their own paths to take. Humans have their own path to take. So, do ghosts.
AND, APPARENTLY, OUR ROOM IS THE PATH THAT GHOSTS TAKE FROM TIME TO TIME.
The Lord Buddha continues, "There is a Chinese saying. Humans have human paths. Ghosts have ghost paths. Apparently, the location of your room is such that spirits will pass by from time to time to get to where they belong. This is UNAVOIDABLE, and cannot be prevented. What I suggest you to do is NEVER to leave your room in pitch darkness when you sleep at night, leave a small light by your bedside."
GREAT. I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN TO ENUNCIATE TO ANYONE READING THIS HOW MUCH I LOVE MY HOUSE. IN FACT, I LOVE IT SO MUCH, THAT IF YOU WERE TO PAY ME A BILLION DOLLARS TO LEAVE IT, I WOULDN'T. YOU COULD HIRE A BULLDOZER TO DRAG ME AWAY FROM MY HOUSE AND DROP ME OFF A MILLION KILOMETERS AWAY, AND I WILL STILL FIND MY WAY BACK TO THIS HOUSE. BECAUSE I LOVE IT SO MUCH. SO MUCH. GET IT?
Of course, like anyone reading this, you probably have your doubts. I did have my doubts at first, but there are a couple of things that made me believe that the Lord Buddha really CAN see, and DO see, and what the lady says on behalf of him is REALLY TRUE.
One. The Lord Buddha goes on to give us a character analysis, that is so damn ACCURATE, that someone (the lady herself) seeing us for the first time could never decipher. All the character traits mentioned were deeply-rooted, and shockingly spot-on.
Two. The lady speaks in a monotone, and has this glazed expression during the whole time she is speaking, she really does LOOK and SOUND like someone possessed by the Lord Buddha's spirit. And, halfway through her verbal diarrhoea, she suddenly mentioned out of the blue, "..................I can't stop talking, it's the Lord Buddha speaking.....and whatever the Lord Buddha sees, he will just say it out........................." All said without emotions, expressions and in the same monotone you get from a robot.
Three. The lady used to be a Catholic, but apparently, the Lord Buddha CHOSE her to carry out his legacy. Remember that I mentioned that there were Buddha statues all over the room, including a life-sized one? Apparently, when she first set up shop, she choose the minutiae Buddha statues and the Lord Buddha came to her in her dreams and told her that He wasn't satisfied with the small statues, and informed her to get a human-sized one.
At the end of the ordeal, we went through a blessing session. As the lady pointed her fingers at our foreheads, she spoke loud and clear, "Please get the male spirit out of these two girls' bedroom."
That night, I lay in bed with my eyes wide open like saucers, heart thumping against my chest. Every single sound was magnified tenfold by my fear. I fell in and out of sleep, terror snaking its way into my veins each time I startled awake. In the morning, I couldn't last ten seconds in the toilet without turning my head round just to check if the male spirit was looking at me. When I closed my eyes, the image of a man in all-white get-up, staring indignantly at me and chiding me angrily for chasing him out, haunted me.
A trip to the ghostbuster hadn't ended it all. It was just the beginning of my nightmarish dream.
I had come to find peace, not additional disturbance. I had come to hear that my room was clean and that everything was conceived solely out of my highly imaginative mind, not put a face and gender to the spirit(s) lurking in my room. I had come so I could sleep peacefully at night, not to be rewarded by paralyzing terror even worse than before.
I've been living in this house all my life. I had always been aware of other presences in my household, that clearly wasn't human.
As children, my cousins and I used to joked that our backyard was like a cemetery. It was true. The dark, creepy forested trees and foliage cemented our impression of our backyard as a graveyard. I often heard my cousins joking that if we were to unearth our backyard, we would find dead people laying beneath all that soil.
If it is indeed true that a child's heart is the purest and they can 'see', then my house wasn't devoid of ghostly encounters. As a child, I would walk into the room innocently playing hide-and-seek, and get the hair-standing feeling that I wasn't alone.
I think what I was seeking for was a white lie, not the earth-shattering bombshell that had been dropped.
I can't find a better situation to say this now.
Some things are better left unsaid.
