I had my first few ghostly experiences while staying in a cluster terrace somewhere in Yishun. It was a new condo back then and was very ulu. From my unit, you can actually see the Orchid Country Club golf course. Back then, the condo was surrounded by vast empty fields and uncleared forests… My room faces one of the fields as my unit was all the way at the corner.
After our 2nd year there, my grandmother passed away… The previous year before it happened during the seventh month, there were repetitive knocks on my window which I complaint about to my dad who was a tangki and supposedly had the third eye. He brushed it off as a tree bunch knocking against the window, or just wind. Being naïve, I learnt to ignore the knocking sounds… I started to leave my curtains open then since I bought a stained glass decal that looked quite pretty at night. One night while reading a book, the knocking started again and I realised that there were no trees near my window (my room was on the second floor and the tallest tree then didn’t even reach past the first) and it wasn’t a windy night (the plants weren’t moving). Out of curiousity, I asked “who is it?”; Surprisingly somebody replied “hello”. I flipped my **** and ran to my parents’ room and I started sleeping on a tilam next to their bed for the next few months.
One night a month or two later, I was reading a True SG ghost stories book ( the Russell Lee one) and that particular chapter was talking about the devil’s number 666. I started to think about the number in my head and why it was related to the devil in the beginning. Before I shut my eyes, I glanced at my Nokia which displayed 11:59 on the screen, and once my eyelids were shut, I felt myself being pulled down by a force machiam I was on a roller coaster… I felt burning and the screams of people in agony all around me… I am not particularly religious or anything but at that point in time, I called out GuanYin, duayapek and a few other names of the deities that my family has at home… It felt like forever before i had the feeling of being sprung back to my bed… I immediately burst into tears and like a little girl, squeezed into the middle of my parents’ queen sized bed with them. My parents still brushed my assumptions aside and told me that I read too much ghost stories. It was not only until December that year when my mother was convinced what I said was true.
At the end of every year, my family will host an birthday sort of event for my dad’s now defunct tua and he will “invite” the resident deity tuayapek to possess him. The variation of this tuayapek we had was an old man with a limp… Ever since my dad stopped public tua sessions or what people call “救世”, tuayapek stopped going out for walks entirely. That year, he specially requested to go for a walk… First, he made his descent down four stories to my grandmother’s room (she had a bad leg herself and was quite sickly so she wasn’t able to make her way to the prayer room which was up on the roof), he spoke to her and gave her some amulets to be ingested. I am convinced that he knew her time was coming up and gave her the amulets to sort of safekeep her till her time was up. Next, he made his way slowly out of my unit to the field that was outside of my room. He made sure to tell the helpers to prepare some extra “hell money” before we made our way out. He started conducting a sort of ritual before we started burning he usual pile of offerings that we prepared for the deities every year and he told us to burn the extra hell money seperately. I was puzzled by this act and I only discovered much later from my mother that there were indeed two wandering spirits residing in the field disturbing me since their graves were not exhumed properly. Tuayapek helped them cross over by conducting the ritual. Ever since then, I moved my sleeping quarters back to that bedroom with no interference; until I moved out of that house that is.
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