Of Ghost, Ghouls, and Goblins
October is the month where everything ghostly, ghoulish, otherworldly, and paranormal crosses over into our world (other than the Hungry Ghost Festival, of course). Strange things can and do happen to anyone, anywhere, but… only at night.
Here are 3 tales of supernatural Malaysian encounters that took place on Halloween Night.
1. My housemates and I were haunted by the same ghost
I was a college student, living on my own with a few friends. We were all staying near the KDU PJ Campus, studying our A-Levels there. When I moved, I brought my two cats with me.
We’d been there only a few weeks and my cats didn’t really like the place for some reason. But I figured that after a month or two, they would settle down. I mean, cats are creatures of habit and routine.
I was asleep, and then suddenly, something woke me. I woke up and saw her. A woman, matted, messy black hair. She was sitting at the foot of my bed and smiling at me.
The smile was… creepy, and there was nothing nice about it. It was all teeth, and those teeth were yellow and black with streaks of red.
She raised her hands, and they were grotesque. They were covered in scars and the worst of burns covered in pus weeping sores.
Then she just vanished. Like she was never there. Like a figment of my imagination. Or the remnant of a nightmare.
It wasn’t just me though
I thought it was just a bad dream until a few nights later when my housemate woke up screaming in fear. I remember charging into Faizal’s rooms with Mikhail just behind me.
He was screaming “Get away from me!” and when I asked who Faizal was screaming at, he said, “The woman with the burnt hands and bloody smile!”
I never told my housemates about my own nightmare.
Then I turned to Mikhail and he looked like he had seen a ghost – because he literally had.
She would show up at least once a week in somebody’s room. Always the same thing. Standing at the foot of the bed or sitting there. She would smile then reach out with her grotesque hands.
We… kinda got used to it. We didn’t know what else to do. We slept with the doors open so we could wake each other but the lack of sleep was steadily getting to all 3 of us in that house. I was sleeping with the lights on. Faizal was sleeping on the sofa.
Initially, my cats had been locked out of my room so they could get used to the common areas. One night I let them into my room, and they promptly settled at my feet – just like they would at home and went to sleep.
Then, suddenly, in the middle of that first night, both of my cats, literally, lost. Their. Minds. I woke up to both of them, standing on me, hackles raised, tails puffy, and both of them were angry. They stood side by side in a threatening pose, and then let loose growls that absolutely thundered across the room, snarling and hissing like mad.
And I saw her. She was back, at the foot of the bed, the same red smile, with her hands reaching out towards me again. Talk about pure pants-shitting terror for what felt like a thousand years, which was probably just a handful of seconds.
Then suddenly my cats started battering at her hands. I guess my cats’ paws hit something, and their claws did it some sort of injury. She just recoiled and disappeared.
After that night… I never saw her again, and neither did my housemates. I moved out three weeks later and let my cats sleep curled up with me from the first night in my new place.
No nightmares so far. More importantly, no sign of her hair, hands, or smile either.
2. Security guards and the terrors of the night shift
I worked as the Head of Security at an international school, which opened its new campus a few years ago. Even though I was the Head of Security, we were a little shorthanded just after opening and I wound up working a few night shifts.
The school has one building, broken up into several different blocks and wings, but everything was interconnected. Patrol was basically a few pairs of guards walking the perimeter, checking that doors are locked, and looking out for anything suspicious.
Suspicious Suspicions
Someone was sick and I had to cover their absence. I was on patrol when we got called to an alarm triggered in the elementary wing. We went in and checked the building, pulled the doors, and everything was locked. The systems were new, so there were still some small issues.
But everything was locked tight and we had had false alarms before. So, we called in a false alarm and continued our patrol.
Ten minutes later, another alarm: an exterior maintenance door that leads to the basement storage. Again we checked and there was nothing.
Ten more minutes, a third alarm, but this time, from an interior door. Meaning someone was INSIDE the building. The school, being new and a prestigious international school, had all sorts of expensive hardware – from desktop computers to chemistry laboratory equipment to projectors.
It was about 3 am and because it was an interior door, this kicked things into high gear. Three guards and I entered the building from different directions. We were doing a full security walkthrough. The whole building felt… cold… like someone had left the aircons running. We reported that, and security confirmed that everything was shut down like it was programmed. So the cold made no sense at all.
We checked each classroom, maintenance closets, and interior door. Everything was locked. Then suddenly, we spot it: – one of the janitorial supply closets. The door was hanging half-open, swinging back and forth in a non-existent breeze, with the lights on.
Tiny Footprints
The only sound besides our breathing was the squeak of the door as it swung back and forth in the windless air.
We closed it, and the door locked automatically. That was when we found them, behind the door, across the floor – small footprints, in water, going UP the wall.
No one had left, no one had entered, and we had checked every inch of the place that we could see. I heard one of the guards whisper, urgently, forcefully, “DO NOT look up!”
We agreed. And we got the hell out of there!
I made sure to hire more guards and double the number on patrol. I got all the door sensors serviced as well and never did a foot patrol ever again.
3. Surprise in the 5-star hotel room where someone died in
Back in 2001, I was working as an intern at a 5-star hotel in housekeeping operations. It was the night shift – quiet, and probably a little past 2 am. I was walking past the security control room when one of the security guards came out and asked if I could help. He showed me the fire alarm panel and it displayed that there was an alarm in room 1611.
Now here’s the thing:- Room 1611 was a room that a flight attendant had died in about four months ago due to some sort of undiagnosed heart defect.
Orders from the General Manager saw the room cleaned and stripped and blacklisted, never to be occupied again.
Help Me
The two of us got to the corridor on the 16th floor and after rounding the corner, we found a piece of paper lying on the carpet, the edge of it still stuck under the door of room 11.
Written on it were two words in red marker: Help Me.
The security guard was looking at that sign, and his hand was shaking as he fit his master key into the slot. The lock chimed and the door creaked open. The room is pitch black. No lights, no access card in the power slot. Then we heard it, a voice, “Thank god you’re here!”
We both instinctively jumped back as a man-shaped silhouette appeared. He was wearing a maintenance uniform.
Room 1611 had been stripped and was repurposed as a storeroom. Our maintenance man had locked himself in there by accident as the door handle on the inside had been broken for weeks.
There were no lights or phones in the room, so he had held his lighter up to the fire alarm. He had gotten locked in while trying to replace the door lock and handle.
Okay, this may not have been a real haunting, but you can imagine we were scared out of our minds that a hantu was going to appear!
The Truth of Halloween
Ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and other things of chaos run free on Halloween. Fortunately, once in a while, there is a normal, mundane explanation for some of those things.
And maybe it’s not whether you believe in these things, but whether or not they believe in you.
For more stories like this, read: I Used To Work In A Haunted Hospital, Here’s What Happens Late At Night, I Used To Live In A Haunted House At Happy Garden In Klang, Here’s What Happened and I Met An ‘Entity’ In A Cemetery As A Teenager. Then, My Friend Mysteriously Passed Away
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