Thought of the day

I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul. / I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul. ~William Ernest Henley, Invictus

Government's promises are like the Ringgit, they depreciate with time.



Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Apparition (Warning: Graphic Content)

Was eating with my lunch buddies, Gibson and Kiat An, and the topic of discussion today is: Ghost - always the all time favourite for anyone during a chat session and everyone has always some "encounter" to share...

One from Gibson is the ghostly figure in Michael and Victor's MTV (光良品冠:掌心).

This is what triggered the entire conversation. And I went to Youtube and did a search on "Pontianak" and was chagrin that there is a considerable amount of footage published. Uncontented with the video clips, I digged deeper so as to understand this infamous Malay folklore and came across the SPI (Singapore Paranormal Investigators) website with paramount info and accounts suffice to quench my curiosity. Below is one of the story I shared with the gang during lunch today.

Highway Nightmare - 8 September 1997
This is an interesting version of an old urban legend. At least I though it was interesting. Along the North-South highway in Malaysia, there are various spots marked with sign alerting drivers of crosswind. The dual carriageway is one of the world's most advance expressway and hence, when designing it, one would assume that the planners would not have built it with crosswind sections. The expressway is open for 24 hours and thousands of vehicles use it everyday. However, there is hardly anyone who has seen the wind indicator marking the presence of such claimed crosswind. I found out later that these sections are actually black spots for 'mystery accidents'. As all these sections are neither winding nor slippery, the authorities could not find any explanation of those accidents. A study revealed that those areas are either cemetery sites of the local tribe before the highway was built, or they were the so-called 'dark' areas by the local tribes. Therefore, those crosswind warnings were put up just to warn drivers so that they are more alert and careful as they were driving along those stretches, especially at night since the highway is not lighted. None of the accidents are, however, worth mentioning here. No one has ever reported seeing a ghost or spirit driving them away from their senses or any sort of unexplained phenomena happening there.

Nevertheless, there is an incident that happened on the highway that has caught the attention of a lot of people. This incident does not happen along any of those crosswind sections but, instead, near the tunnel on the northern section of the highway. Before approaching the tunnel, drivers will go through highly areas with the hill on one side and a sharp cliff on the other. The sharp bends caused the authorities to put the speed limit down to 80kmph (110kmph for most of the highway). This story went public the first time when someone called in to the radio during a ghost story programme. What make this story even more interesting are the several calls later from witnesses and relatives to verify that the story is true. The incident happened on a Malay couple with a small baby. They were driving along the expressway on a late night. It must have been past 2am then and there aren't many private cars at those hours. As they got near the tunnel, their car broke down. Perhaps it is the hilly road, which put a lot of stress on the car, that caused the car to broke down more than anything else. The man stopped his car along the emergency lane and got off the car to see if there was anything he could do. His wife was sitting at the back of the car with their baby then. He got off the car, opened up the engine and apparently was doing something there. The wife just waited in the car with their baby since she is the type of people who has the slightest idea about cars. As the engine cover was turned up, the lady could not see what her husband was doing in front.

Then, there was no noise at all. She started to get worried. Perhaps more worried about not being able to get out of there than if there would be anything wrong with her husband. Then the baby started crying. She carried her up and tried to calm her down. However, the baby kept crying and crying. Afterwards, she noticed two police cars drove by. They slowed down as they past her. As she thought they would stop, the police cars suddenly sped off. Then she heard a shrieking break of the police cars ahead. Apparently, the police stopped their cars under the lights of the tunnel about 100 metres ahead. Then, she started hearing the policemen shouting at her. They shouted at her and asked her to get out of the car and run towards them. She got panic upon hearing that. Then, worry about her baby's and her own safety, she grabbed her baby, got out of the car and started running as fast as she could towards the policemen. As she was running, they kept shouting at her to hurry and asked her not to look back. As she almost got to where the policemen were, she suddenly thought of her husband. She turn her head back to take a look while continued running. To her horror, she saw three 'pontianak' with lots of blood on their mouth. She saw one of them holding her husband's head and licking off the dripping blood while two others were busy sucking the blood from the man's body. Two policemen, fearing that she may stop running upon seeing that, rushed to her and dragged her into one of the police car. They shot off as fast as they could after that. Seven policemen witnessed this incident. When the police got there, the man was lying there headless and 'bloodless'. The police, after interviewing the widow and the seven policemen who witnessed the incident, decided to close the case.

The next account was a personal encounter of my hometown friend who was studying in one of the JCs in Singapore few years back. He was fortunate to lease a room with unimaginable cheap rent, the catch is, he had to share the room with the owner's son, who happened to be a JC student as well. So there was this double decker in the room and my friend was occupying the lower deck. One night while my friend is asleep, the bed started to quiver. My friend was startled by the judder but was afraid to move an inch. The alarm clock on the study desk showed half past two in the morning. Although the tremor is subtle at the beginning, the magnitude eventually step-up and the double decker started to shudder vigorously. Now, he was pretty sure that someone or something on the upper deck was causing the shake, but wondered why his roommate was oblivious to the tremor as though he did not feel anything. An image from the notorius movie Ju-On flashed through his mind - remember the bloody woman under the blanket?


Too frightened by the paranormal activity, he took a peek at the mirror hanging on the wall at the end of the bed to check what's going on at the upper deck and from the reflection...guess what?


His roommate was busy shagging on the upper deck. Wtf.

2 comments:

gibson said...

all the ghost stories make my hair stand.. eerie..

Gnu said...

Yalar, and I have to walk back late at night somemore...
Change topic, today we talk about Geylang..hehe