Apparition and Insecure Space

Ghost Month and the Insecure Public Realm

It is difficult to overstate the apparent ubiquity of ghosts in Singaporeans’ perceptions. My interlocutors noted this fact, matter-of-factly, as one might point out the humidity. Winnie, an expatriate from Hong Kong, was surprised to find something like a “year-round Ghost Month.”1 In other Chinese societies, she had witnessed ancestral offerings and other practices only in the seventh month and Qing Ming or on significant dates like death anniversaries and birthdays. Similarly, oral surgeon Charles marveled at the local intensity of such concerns, noting (debatably) that they “do not worry about ghosts in China. That’s a Singapore thing.”2 While certain older areas with tortured histories were mentioned repeatedly during interviews, very few areas of the city remain unmarked by spectral allegations. A series of ghost-tale compendia by author Russell Lee, the all-time highest-selling book series in the nation’s history and its receptacle of local lore, recounts tales from nearly all neighborhoods and spaces.3

The pervasiveness of ghosts implies a need to be “respectful.” This was the most common opinion in the construction industry, where shows of disbelief were seen to invite reprisal from the spirit realm. Johnny, a project manager for a large contractor, noted, “[The workers], even if they don’t really believe, they try to believe, so they will not offend them. They say, during this month you should not do this, because the ghosts are around, nearby, you will easily upset them. Try not to go against the tradition.” The ghosts are close at hand and would catch any discourteous behavior, especially by Christians or other doubters.

Statements about the ubiquity of ghosts were even voiced, unexpectedly, by those who also admitted skepticism about their existence. In several cases, disbelief was put to the test by inexplicable personal experiences.4 After flatly observing that he “does not believe in such things,” Dr. Ong—a surgeon in his seventies, a self-described “atheist” and “rational person”—related frightening happenings during his medical residency at the National University Hospital (NUH). He recounted that it “was a place where there were a lot of strange things. Because this is where the Japanese used to execute Chinese. Educated Chinese, professionals.” During his residency, Dr. Ong slept alongside a few others in an empty ward, on the top floor of an NUH wing that was rumored to be haunted. He was astonished to wake from a nap to find that his bed, and those of several others, had been shifted several hundred feet to the far end of the ward. “I don’t believe,” he said, “but it happened; I could not explain this in any other way.”5 Andrew, an executive with Singapore’s largest government-linked developer, was forced to adopt a similarly equivocal position after a collapsing beam killed two construction workers at one of his projects. This was a technologically advanced high-rise designed by Kisho Kurokawa. A cell phone video was passed around, purportedly showing a ghost moving through a wall in the basement parking level. Andrew’s team investigated the CCTV feeds and concluded that it was “likely a hoax.”6 Regardless, ceremonial offerings were placed throughout the new megastructure, as “the ghosts can be anywhere.”

Evidence of pragmatic caution can be found throughout the city, where ash and smoldering offerings are frequently visible. These appear throughout the year on curbs and corners, in parking garage spirals and food courts.7 Some are made on the sites of former burial grounds disinterred or partially excised, in Chinatown and Tiong Bahru, downtown, and in the city’s historic neighborhoods.8 They are also positioned near homes and places of business and work, along streets and the open spaces of HDB estates. They are a commonplace of life in Singapore.

Such rites are performed far more frequently during Ghost Month, however, and take on a different affective coloring. They are made primarily for unknown ghosts, as opposed to familiar ancestral spirits or gods. The opening of the “gates of hell” allows an anonymous rabble to return in search of places and people, to drift, or to emphasize claims for what is rightly theirs. But also simply to drift, as many ghosts are thought to have been neglected to the point that they have forgotten their own identities and wander in a half-blind state of confusion and anger or dismay. As a result, they frequently join victims of violent death along roads, near bodies of water, or in other “attractive” zones of yin or energetic disarray—or follow their dim senses toward the heat, smoke, and light of the festival burnings.

Ghost Month is unarguably a time of fear, or at least of prudent caution. Few weddings are performed. Doctors and surgeons rarely see voluntary patients or perform elective procedures. Many business ventures are postponed until it is over. However, this period also incorporates an element of carnival, with outré performances and moments of public release. Getai (song stage) performances are held on makeshift grandstands, with scantily clad female singers pouring their hearts into sentimental Mandarin tunes.9 These events are described as being for the benefit of the returning ghosts, and the first rows of seating are always kept empty for them. Regardless, these are important practices in the ritual vocabulary of the living, who integrate offerings and blessings amid the pageantry.10

Offerings made during the seventh month must be understood differently to those Qing Ming rites mentioned by Mei Zhen Jie and Mrs. Tan. The latter are understood as filial obligation, as remembrance. They are also considered a form of self-protection, as ancestral spirits that are uncared for become hungry and ghostly. While propitiating one’s own predecessors may result in their favor, failing to do so will likely result in economic disaster of some sort. Sacrifices to hungry ghosts, by contrast, are attempts to provide them with what is missing in their painful, wasted existence. This, too, is an act of social insurance, as they are figures of some anxiety. But this is also understood to be a speculative, as well as protective, gesture—and the activities of the seventh month are characterized by “respectful” practices that are also understood to be at least partly gainful (see chapter 1). Importantly, such offerings have a different locational character—occurring in those edges, infrastructural corridors, and ambiguous zones that are the spatial analogue of this figure’s existential condition. Whereas ancestors are situated and venerated at home shrines or in the temple, ghosts are typically associated with public spaces, the nonplaces of infrastructural limen and terrain vague.

While gui are frequently sighted in “protected” places (see later), and are known to trespass, they assert their own, alternate modes of territorialization. They produce their own spectral boundaries, carefully observed by believers. As a result, their peculiar agency is not asserted only in the rejection of securitized perimeters, and official internal borders. Ghostly confines are shifting and ambiguously demarcated, and a litany of practices exists for negotiating or avoiding them. As in the jungle, harsh penalties are said to await those who overstep or tread on offering sites. This understanding of the city involves unseen and ephemeral zones of danger, conjured into being through ritual.11 The resulting alterations of movement are significant in this social context, in which uncommon value is placed on the logistical and the timely.12 The state, like the proverbial Christian God, would make its roads straight—at least in their rational and unambiguous operation.13 The city’s spectral logics very often work contrariwise, however: slowing down time and increasing serendipity and detour. This occurs along two principal axes. The first is spatial and involves the impeding or redirecting of paths and passages. The second is temporal, whereby elasticity and arrhythmia appear in the time required for movements, communications, transactions, and deliveries. The resulting disruptions are productive as well as prohibitive. The blocking of a route causes a new one to come into being, like the “desire lines” of parks and gardens. These may be abbreviated: a short-cut or a jaywalking path.14 Often they are longer or indirect.

Offerings to gui, though commonplace, are a pervasive source of dysregulation. These behave like expansions or contractions in the fabric of urban space, invisible but keenly felt. Whereas sacrifices of food and liquor with joss sticks tend to be constrained within small altars, more substantial burnings of kimzua money and commodities create considerable volumes of smoke that can saturate their surrounding areas. These are set alight in large metal drums that stand at strategic points near housing blocks and workplaces. These “incense burners” are placed by the state’s town councils but are frequently moved by residents to alternate locations. Large quantities of paper are immolated in sessions lasting up to an hour, and the open-top charnels will billow heat, ash, and pungent smoke. Fires on one side of the street will typically impel passersby to cross over, where discomfort will still have them cover their mouths or shield their faces.15

The issue is more than discomfort, however. There is a long-standing belief that anyone other than the burning party should avoid contact with any aspect of the offering, which, strictly speaking, includes the ash as well. The cylindrical form of the drum creates a significant updraft, resulting in charred matter being buffeted around a street corridor or open space. Although many admitted that the cinders are nearly impossible to avoid completely, it is nonetheless seen as essential that one’s feet not step on or kick them—a sign of clear and provocative disrespect.

This can have serious consequences. Hua, a self-described “older tai tai” (posh wife), offered the case of an irascible neighbor who found her path inconveniently blocked by a burning offering. “It happened many years ago,” she recalls. “This neighbor, she stays in the kampung. And every evening, she will walk to our house to have dinner, and then she will walk back. She is such a fussy woman, quite [obsessive-compulsive], and she like to wash her hands, wash her feet. You know, in the seventh month, Chinese all like to burn. She was walking towards her house, and she saw this road-burning, and as usual you have all this ash flying. She says, ‘Uh! What is all this ash?’ and she kicked a pile on the ground in front of her. And you know what happened? She landed in the hospital for one year. From seventh month to seventh month the following year, she was [in and out of the intensive care unit] in Tan Tock Seng Hospital and nobody can tell what’s wrong with her.”16

This, too, is a familiar trope. Author Jonathan Lim notes that “those unfortunate enough to step on the remains of seventh month offerings on the pavements are often punished with sickness.”17 As respondent Alan warned, “when you see the offerings, you walk by and see this, the best thing is to avoid it. Out of respect.” Harry agreed, noting that “they also have a practice that after they burn, when they make the offering and walk off, they won’t even look back. But then a lot of people who are not the ones who pray avoid these areas.” The offerings become temporary barriers, he notes, as “you find that people don’t want to anywhere walk near it.”18 In denser, older neighborhoods, it is not uncommon to pick up the recognizable scent ahead and opt for a different street.

This is not only a matter of expressing disrespect. The paper, while burning, has a specific function: creating a temporary physical bridge between the living and the dead. This is because ghosts are thought to follow the odor of the joss—and odors in general. As Chu has pointed out, there is an oily smoke produced by this money matter that is in many ways akin to the presumed materiality of gui themselves. This extends to all of the detritus. Author Russell Lee demonstrates this in a story told to him by a young temp clerk, whose brother “had stepped onto a trail of papers left at a funeral site for the spirits to find its way into the other world. When my brother had stepped on the trail, the spirit, which at that time had been on its way into the other world, found its journey interrupted.” Ghosts’ movements through worlds have their own logic, and their circuits often intersect our own. And those whose paths are impeded become vengeful and must be propitiated with new routes and thresholds—as with the doorways drawn in military bunks to let trapped spirits return to hell.19 Whereas gui frequently redirect human movements, they do not often tolerate the reverse.

Lee’s confidant noted that the solution “was for him to retrace his steps, find the exact spot where he had stepped onto that paper trail and stand there.” Only after he had made a new offering—which would serve as a kind of beacon—would the inconvenienced spirit leave him alone. It is common to hear similar narratives in passing. At a ritual in Chinatown, I was admonished against stepping on any paper in the street during this period, because “you never know why it is there.” And, it is true, there were very often scraps of joss paper lying about, especially at significant times of year. As we will see later, paper in particular is understood to be a medium of transformation and communication between worlds, a radically labile substance and thus potentially dangerous.

An offering is considered the property of the spirits for the time it takes to be consumed by the flames. This creates an “unclean zone,” briefly saturated by the contamination and energetic disturbance of death. The burnt offering will attract both ancestral spirits and unknown ghosts, who may be dangerous. The purpose of many street shrines is precisely to propitiate those who are unhappy and uncared for, and hence their operation is fraught. As described in the next chapter, the burning not only transfers value to di yu but also opens a connection to it. The boundary between worlds becomes thinner and more porous. Space expands and becomes fuller—becoming heavy with yin energy and those nonphysical beings drawn to the altar like a light in a dark, poorly navigable realm. The city appears to locally “dilate,” to borrow Lewis Mumford’s evocative phrase, and to become denser with nonphysical presence.20

There appear to be considerable discrepancies among understandings of the extent of this zone. Some individuals claimed that they would avoid a street where they see smoke, others that they would merely cross to the other side and feel safe to pass. Nearly all agreed that the offering produced a penumbra into which rogue spirits would be drawn and that thus it is best for bystanders to avoid attracting their attention.

Fruit and rice left on altars are also hazardous for a misplaced step—especially as these can remain for some time, positioned on the floor near the tables and chairs of the island’s open-air coffee shops. This is a surprisingly frequent problem, especially as offerings for earth god Tu Di Kong—which, like all burnt offerings, will draw opportunistic wandering ghosts—are left on the ground. There are thus established protocols in the event that an offering is trod upon. Informant Kok advised me that, if there is a suspicion that one has stepped on something “bad,” it is essential not to wear the shoe into the house before washing it thoroughly. In his youth, Kok lived near the former cemetery on Kiam Hock Road, where offerings were nearly constant. When he would return late at night, he would wash his shoes and leave them at the door before walking in backward, “because if you just walked straight something might follow you and be invited in.”

As Kok’s precaution makes clear, there are areas in the urban fabric that are particularly vulnerable and must be dutifully protected. Thresholds, openings and portals, stairs, roads, axes and alignments—all significant in geomantic tradition—are cause for the most concern, as they are seen to be attractive channels for spectral movements. Although it is acceptable to burn offerings for a well-tended ancestral spirit in the home, the broader city is open to the traffic of unknown and potentially hungry and vindictive spirits. There is thus a known spatial logic to the placement of altars and other preventive technologies. These are highly ambivalent, as a shrine that “stops” a ghost at the doorway—and prevents it from entering—also necessarily brings the unwanted presence close. Likewise, pungent smells and loud noises thought to repel evil spirits may drive them to other unwanted locations.

Given assumptions that gui are highly mobile, one must be protected from them at numerous points in the normal day’s path. This requires gifts to be made at various key junctures, and observant Singaporeans note that the burnings may begin at the door and move concentrically outward to the city at large. Mei Zhen Jie observed, for example, that she would burn in the road in front of her home such that she might “go in and out in peace.”21 This is a matter of public order during the seventh month. A complex matrix of burning points—bins, altars, and urns—extends between the door of an HDB block and the public spaces beyond. The metal security gate over the front door often contains small joss stick holders. The common corridor will have a wastebin-sized burner, and others sit at the intersections of passages with major public spaces, such as lift lobbies or void decks. The larger communal drums sit in open spaces just beyond the perimeter of the building, to protect its perimeter at that point. There are thus multiple, imbricated scales of risk and protection that extend from the domestic to the public.22

I have noted that offerings to hungry ghosts are “unmoored,” that is, not tied to a conventional location where the ancestor has been placed and, to a degree, domesticated. These do not take place in the home, the temple, or the columbarium. Owing to the anonymous nature of the hungry ghost, and to the fact that its histories are unremembered, such locating is not possible; like the value burned for them, they circulate endlessly. For this reason, they are “called” to unspecific places—office entryways, roads, and public spaces—to be appeased. Gifts on construction sites, for example, are distinct from main altars and are temporary. Johnny specified that these are placed in open areas that their recipients may easily discover.23 Centralized fires will be started here, alongside smaller bundles of joss sticks placed in the ground at the margins and center on the lot. At the end of the seventh month, the dedicated altar will be removed and destroyed, to avoid attracting habitual visitors.

The burnings are created, of course, by people and not by spirits. Thus the obstacles of the ghost-world are, in a Durkheimian sense, social ones. This is plainly understood by Singaporeans. But the locations of the fires are seen as neither random nor simply subject to human will. The circuits of the ghost in the living world have a presumed spatial logic, based on the assumptions of conditions in the afterlife. The ghost moves through the city in a state of confusion and imbalance and thus seeks and follows overt signals or flares. These are the same elements that give legibility to urban space and are known in feng shui theory to create energetic harmony of which the ghost is painfully deficient: organizing axes, aligned roads and structures, clear apertures, monuments. These are also how the human city is organized. Hence the work of burning diverts the ghost to the margins of these spaces: the property’s edge, the green patch lining the pavement, or the undefined and underused public plaza. An ironic effect is that such an action, due to the amorphous spread of smoke as a material, temporarily centralizes the ghost and forces the living to circumvent.

At the same time, this is attended by an anxiety: the widespread fear of contamination produces a concern to delimit these areas, to contain the fires within designated receptacles or chalk outlines, and to strengthen the boundary between temporary ghost spaces and the ongoing world of human affairs.24 In reality, tidy burning seems nearly impossible, and official bins do not prevent detritus from settling nearly everywhere. The spatial unboundedness of burning, ash, and smoke—and the attempts to constrain spectral presence—merely dramatizes the larger problematic quality of both air and ghosts.25 Ghosts, like airwaves, are in fact uncontained by the abstract dimensions or demarcations used in law or property. The ubiquity of oily smoke and ash merely underscores the imaginary of the ghost itself as a medium of pollution. This cannot be quarantined. Proliferation is central to its ritual vocabulary.

Seventh month rituals thus have a curious and contradictory spatial character. They are performed openly, in the street and across the extended public realm where ghosts are presumed to wander. And while these follow a known, consistent geomantic logic, they nonetheless remain mobile and flexibly open to interpretation at specific urban sites. Singaporean Chinese practices do not hold to a temple culture that would establish exclusive locations or even require priestly oversight. This lends the person conducting the rite a genuine, momentary power. They can conjure a space of danger and protection, as well as one of opportunity for personal gain, at the time and location of their choosing. The use of spirit money allows individuals to produce temporary nodes of heightened danger, to force together diverse modes of value and being, and to manufacture favorable distributions of probability. In practice, any urban clearing might be appropriated as a point of religious–economic convergence, whereby the rationality of planned space, its monofunctional partitioning and logistical hierarchy, is suspended. There is a flagrant kind of liberty being exercised here. Kimzua is a popular invention thought to move instantly beyond our world. As such, it exists both above and below the legislative frame of state. It is invested by the labor of belief, by a faith in the social to bypass gatekeeping authority and engage freely with its underlying speculative glamour. Its power is not exercised through fiat or design but (as we have seen in chapter 2) emerges from the voluntary and nonproductive release of value from a given form. The near immateriality of paper—its two-dimensionality, which stands at the horizon of substance and nothingness—is of the essence here. Combined with the restless potential of currency, it is a force that is liberated from spatial bounds and able to push and pull at the very concrete assumptions of illiberal state infrastructure.

The power of the offering opens a gateway, a capital circuit between worlds that is, while benevolent and generous, also a vehicle of risk management and potentially exponential profit. But the rite—as itself and as transaction—also makes use of the anxious and haunted character of the public realm as a site of value-production. The moment of mutual enrichment (or, at the very least, of spectral care) gains power precisely by drawing on the past sins of the city’s production. In a profound sense, the Promethean “dead labor” of the state, as mass producer of lost souls and maker of spectral infrastructures, estates, and terrains, is the precondition for personal enrichment. As with so many aspects of ghostly economics, this would appear to fundamentally reverse the relationship between the work of living subject and ghost.26

The Ever-Spectral Jungle

The careful avoidance of offerings occurs alongside a more general concern about categories of commonly haunted locales. Clearly this includes troubled sites, such as massacre locations, former graveyards (which could reasonably be anywhere), roads with a history of accidents, and yin-dominant physical conditions, such as ponds and canals.27 I have also heard concerns about Singapore’s many areas of reclaimed land, as these bring soil from overseas and thus might also bring foreign spirits as fellow travelers. This avoidance has a temporal aspect, as the cautious will eschew certain places at night or during festivals (as earlier) associated with the tending of the dead.

In this context, “jungles”—loosely understood as any predominantly wooded area—are particularly fraught and exert their own spatial logic of boundaries and circumlocutions. A common subgenre of ghost stories concerns wooded army camps and rural operations sites. These are of the kind left tactically overgrown to avoid maintenance or as an obstacle to human ingress. Such zones are predominantly forested, some with old growth, and hence assumed to be densely inhabited by old spirits with similarly ancient claims of valid ownership. Tales dramatize horrific encounters: national servicemen, in a rite of passage to nationalized adulthood, come face to face with an illegible aboriginal nature—one that reasserts its power with astounding violence.28 It is a case in which the soldier is completely out of his element, forced to perform dangerous tasks in an ecosystem only dimly apperceived. It is, in a sense, a spectral minefield that must be traversed. Soldiers are murdered or maimed for minor infractions, for sleeping or urinating in the wrong places. Many stories express an explicit terror of being lost in or consumed by vegetation. The ghostly antagonist, here, often does not present itself; rather, it is described as nothing other than nature itself.

The basic military training (BMT) camp at Pulau Tekong, among others, is surrounded by secondary and tertiary wet forest. Ghosts are thought to live among the flora, in trees and shrubs, and even in soil. The camp is seen to be in a condition of siege, and the spirits’ behavior is used to explain BMT rituals such as a ban against training on Thursday nights. Stanley recounted to me that “every guy in Singapore who has been to Tekong knows this: you don’t go training on Thursday nights because it’s the night when the ghosts come out into the jungle.”29 Malam Jumat is a time when duties are canceled and troops stay indoors.30

In forest-ghost accounts, Singaporeans are typically represented as essentially urban folk confronted with a violent presence whose language and history they little understand. Many accounts begin with individuals lost or overwhelmed by their environs. A telling detail is that several of these stories involve conclusions whereby “local Malays” needed to be consulted to explain mysterious events or to help put things right. These somewhat shadowy discursive figures help to find the missing men or tell the commanding officers (who are as hapless as their charges) the “local” histories of inexplicable events or methods for rectification. The Malay here represents the aboriginal Singaporean, the wise and spooky landsman who instructs the modern urbanite in the ways of the woods. The invocation of the Malay often serves to dramatize the occult character of events.

In these narratives, Chinese Singaporeans often realize their lack of literacy the hard way. Contractor Mr. Chen described that “the jungle” demands specific rules of conduct that should be learned long before conscription age:

When we are young we are already taught from parents, friends: don’t just pee in the woods. If you have to do it you say “excuse me” and “sorry.” That one I know from the army time. Some idiot guy go and pee or shit somewhere and got something. Suddenly he’s crazy, raving mad, and we have to tie him up. So have to get the Malay guy in the kampung, the bomoh [Malay spirit medium].

Mr. Chen here explains a recurrent problem in military training areas, where an uneducated recruit may relieve himself in the woods without first propitiating the resident spirits. In punishment, he will be driven temporarily insane, or worse.

Dangerous natural areas are often associated with features that are illegible to most soldiers—in particular, large, old trees and tree “guilds” (clusters of corelated species), as well as notable topographical forms, such as mounds and ridges.31 Within the undifferentiated conceptual complex of “the jungle,” there is nonetheless a lexicon of problem places: clearings, tangles, and eroded paths. Installations that would serve to securitize regions of forest are also highly problematic—the worst being guard towers where servicemen must perform sentry duty at night. Ghosts seem to especially dislike such devices of panoptical military power, not least because they are typically constructed where vegetation has been cleared. Eric recalled to me that “the tallest tower in Changi still has a very old jackfruit tree next to it, inside the fence. You must never ever go and pick the fruit that is hanging around there. If you do that the spirits will come and really shake the tower.”32

Jungle spirits are particularly violent, and narratives about them focus in detail on the abuses of the soldiers’ bodies by a supernatural force. Men are casually flung into the jungle and eviscerated. It is important to note here that the individual recruits are explicitly understood to be property of the state. For example, a senior official at the Ministry of Defense told me that soldiers who are discovered to have contracted HIV while in the army are given heavy prison sentences—as the soldier is considered state property, venereal disease is tantamount to property damage.33 Their bodies are “possessed” by a force other than the Ministry of Defense. In another frequent trope, they are immobilized by invisible forces. Stanley noted that “one of my company mates woke in the night and had the feeling that he was being sat on by an elephant. It was one of these ghosts, which were very well-known in the bunks to cause a kind of sleep paralysis. Every time he tried to push up, he was pushed down again. That’s quite a common phenomenon. Sometimes they couldn’t even rise for duty in the morning or for night exercises and got D.B.”34

However, it is not only on military bases that a spectral nature behaves in this way. Army stories are merely a heightened variant of ghost accounts centered around the uncanny and dangerous presence of nature across the island more generally. Similar concerns fix upon those remnant urban forest fragments left idle by the URA. Mrs. Tan told me that her crews won’t dare to enter these thickets. It’s not because of the snakes but for fear that “all the city ghosts, killed in the road or wherever, will come to stay inside there.” The affinity of ghosts with natural places—especially unruly ones—invests these stands, also, with a climate of dread.

Many Singaporeans confessed to avoiding heavily wooded areas—particularly at night, and without question during Ghost Month. This reinforces, perhaps, their official intention as devices to keep people out, as threatening admonitory objects. But concerns about jungle extend, also, to far less dense or overtly wild regions of the national landscape. Related fears were expressed about “nature” writ large: flora and earth throughout the city are seen with respect and fear. This extended, in narrative accounts, to “wayside” plantings like roadside trees and the flora beautifying condominium complexes and HDB estates. It applied also to public parks at night. Bishan and West Coast Parks, as well as the Singapore Botanical Gardens, are places to avoid after dark because, in the words of one staff member, “got a lot of ghosts there, also.”35 Even a single large tree, “nature” or “the jungle” in its most abstracted case, can be treated with wariness. Singaporeans claimed many individual specimens, especially older and larger and more spectacular ones, to be haunted, in much the same way that they enumerated specific houses or institutional buildings (see later).

Not least, trees have been known to resist their own felling, against the best intentions of modernization and urban renewal. Foreman Mr. Chen and medium Master Goh offered a case that is “famous” among contractors in Singapore, one that caused HDB—usually single-minded in the pursuit of a plan—to change course.

“This happens with government buildings sometimes,” said Master Goh. “People say the government can do anything. But if they have a ghost-place they cannot do whatever they want. Toa Payoh, many years ago, was one of our first so-called New Towns. There is one tree down there, until now cannot touch. The first one approach the tree to cut, got heart attack. OK? People think it’s a coincidence. Second go, this person also died already ah. Third one want to go, bulldozer never start. People think government one no problem, government also cannot.”36 The blocks were hastily replanned, Chen says, with the tree at the center. There is now an informal shrine to the goddess Guan Yin at the base.

Other famous “problem” trees have similar reputations. Mr. Kok, a businessman in his late sixties, felt that this was a common and predictable response of the spirit world to disturbance and upheaval. This is because “contractors, because of their work, they disturb a lot of things. They disturb the ground and entities get upset, and they fight back to protect themselves. This happens a lot, a lot. They want to go and chop down some tree, they can’t do it—everyone who gets close gets sick.”37

For architect Arthur, stories of haunted trees embodied “a kind of shared guilt.” This was common in his native Malaysia also, where haunting has much to do with the erasure of natural places. He noted,

When [Malaysians] cut the tree, there will be erosion, the land falls away—they say that nature is fighting back. So, they will say that there is a spirit in the tree. For example, a strangling fig is supposed to contain a lot of spirits, and it’s bloody hard to cut one down. Accidents happen. Trucks never get started. There are always things that look mysterious. Even the image of the dying tree, it looks skeletal, right? It looks ghostly.

Mr. Ong, a devout Buddhist, confirmed that many stories pit contractors against trees. In his experience, this was also “because the builder disturbs the ground. That ground is important because still owned by someone from last time. If you regrade it, you shift the topography, you had better watch out.” Chinese tradition holds that the ground and the trees have designated spirits to take care of them. “So often, if you will see a shrine, it’s under a tree.”

For this same reason, it is a common tactic for a medium, priest, or monk to “relocate” a troublesome ghost into a tree by first luring the ghost to a shrine, which is then hastily moved to the base of a trunk. When a construction project is complete, for example, it is the job of the contractor’s men to make a final offering to the resident spirits and to “just inform [them] that the job is finished, we have to move your home out from this site.” The shrine or altar will then be customarily left under a tree near a temple, with some offerings and joss sticks. The shrines are never reused. Johnny recalled, with a laugh, that “if we go to a new job site, we will get a new shrine. We don’t reuse the old one. Everything got to buy new, because it’s considered a new project, must give the ghosts a new house. Old one is in charge of the old project.”

It should be noted, also, that a number of the region’s famous ghosts, ones that have entered into the Singaporean Chinese awareness—though not via the gui-shen axis of spirits—are likewise associated with flora. Most fearsome is perhaps the Pontianak, a vampiric female spirit thought to evolve from a childless woman or one who died in labor. She is thought to populate fruitless trees, such as ornamental banana variants—a clear symbolic analogism. The Pontianak often cannot be seen, but her presence is signaled by a cloyingly sweet smell of frangipani flowers. There is a double association here, as these are also used at wakes to produce a heavy fragrance, particularly around the body. This is similar to Bengali funerary traditions and a variant of Indonesian and Malaysian practices of planting the plumeria tree in graveyards. Though this species is often selected for its beauty in urban landscaping, it is often avoided because it is thought to attract ghosts.

Given the clearly frightening potentials ascribed to nature in Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s valedictory claim that landscape was his “secret weapon” assumes complex ambiguities. Certainly the practice of cutting the tropical flora into bonsai, to show investors that his nation is well groomed and properly disciplined, appears far more strident and provocative. Nature-as-topiary is understood rather differently by the public, via an oral tradition that casts the island’s flora as possessed of an old and deadly force and as vengeful when subjected to gestures of control.

This does not mean that natural spaces are avoided, however. Here, too, the prevalence of spirits—especially of the dangerous kind—translates to potentially powerful trading partners for the more overtly profit seeking. Jean spoke with great disapproval of visiting older, overgrown cemeteries to divine lucky digits for the national 4D lottery.38 This wildly popular game is administered by the Singapore Pools company, a subsidiary of the government’s Tote Board, which channels betting revenue into social welfare projects. Mrs. Tan spoke frankly of her own participation in this practice. It is believed that if offerings are made at burial sites, even of unrelated individuals, it is possible to ask for winning combinations. Aspiring diviners will sometimes purchase halal food to take to Muslim cemeteries that are less well guarded and where they can get uninterrupted access to the gravestones.39 Mrs. Tan recounts that “some go to graveyard at midnight. They also bring [other] people to the graveyard, to ask for luck. Like we go there, every time got one whole lorry full of people. Go and burn and ask for numbers.”40

As “lorry full” suggests, this is hardly a fringe activity. Such commerce continues a long-standing tradition, observed by gamblers also during colonial times.41 This practice reflects long-standing beliefs that gui-shen communicate with the living through numerical sequences ascertained through yarrow stalk divination.42 In Singapore, it is at least in part an outgrowth of the Qing Ming ritual: descendants would ask for lottery numbers while cleaning family plots. It was natural for ancestors to want their living relations to prosper, especially in a money-minded “meritocracy.” Tramping among tombs in the expectation of personal gain is considered to be vulgar by some, like Harry and Jean—and among observant Christians, who seem to find this practice unsavory on principle. By contrast, Chinese religionists understood this as a time-honored exchange by which the lots of both parties are bettered.

The practice became a question of public controversy in 2006, however, when residents living next to Kubor Kassim Muslim Cemetery along Siglap Road complained to authorities of noise and disturbances at night. Visitors were entering via Siglap Close, to avoid the guard post at the cemetery’s main entrance. Numbers written on paper slips were left atop the stones, and punters would chant for a sign that one had been selected by the spirit. A resident complained that

some of these people would be here in the middle of the night in their big cars, Mercedes and BMWs. . . . I’ve seen groups of men sitting around a grave, as if they were having a board meeting early in the morning.43

It is an apt metaphor: speculators had pooled their spirit money and were meeting with their ghostly colleagues to, in effect, pursue a deal. At the time of writing, it was brought to public attention that “night tours”—of the type mentioned by Mrs. Tan—were being conducted, taking paying customers to remote Choa Chu Kang Cemetery in the wee hours. This phenomenon even came to be mentioned in a popular 2007 Singapore guidebook.44

Because ghosts are seen as most available for solicitation, there is a preference for divination at older graveyards where the dead have likely been forgotten. Likewise, places associated with violence and disturbance are popular for pilgrimages. Johnny noted, “There are people who believe in ghosts, especially gamblers will go to any place where someone was killed, they will go and pray and get the number.” This means visiting accident sites, highway stretches with known histories of fatalities, and other macabre business. But it can also mean going to stands of urban forest and burning spirit money at the perimeter. This hearkens back to Mrs. Tan’s assertion that ghosts killed in the road will sleep rough in patches of urban forest. Although such beings are highly dangerous—you must never reveal your name within their earshot—they are assumed to be the best partners in divination. As punter “Ah Tee” told a New Paper journalist, “the more violent the death, the more accurate the numbers will be.”45

Haunted Houses and Institutions

Narratives of haunted places articulate another version of the alternative spatial order enforced by ghosts. This is evident, for example, in reports of strange events that took place from 2000 to 2005 at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), an arm of the Singapore Police Force that prosecutes violent offenses, sexual assault, and “specialized” malfeasance like gambling and cybercrime.46 The CID is headquartered on New Bridge Road in a complex of metal and mirrored glass that blends technology and Orwellian featurelessness. This building was plagued by paranormal incidents from the earliest days of its construction. Such events were perhaps not unexpected, as the department’s previous base of operations—still standing on Eu Tong Sen Street—is considered one of Singapore’s most haunted places, undoubtedly related to the dark nature of its mandate.47 Most unsettlingly, when the foundations of the basement parking were being cast, an excavator unearthed a wooden Chinese coffin in the old style.48 This was discovered thirty meters below the surface—far too deep for a normal burial. The object was sitting directly in the path of a main “pile,” an anchoring column driven into the ground. The contractors immediately stopped work, unwilling to disturb it. This was in keeping with local construction practices, given the widespread belief that sickness and bad luck befall those who handle such artifacts. Their negative effects are considered highly contagious.

The story became yet stranger. The engineers were convinced, somewhat reluctantly, to reposition the pile. When the new location was checked on-site, however, it once again appeared to coincide with the coffin. It had somehow moved.49 An architect on the project recalls,

They thought they would modify the pile-cap, so as not to touch the box. The interesting thing is that whenever the surveyor came to do the check, and passed the information to the contractor, the piles [had] moved. And it continued to happen. They just could not cast those pile caps, because the piles moved. It is so incredible that they get another surveyor, a second. And it keeps happening.

The casket appeared to be exerting a transformative effect on the design, shifting the footings to avoid its location. To resolve this impasse, an exhumation consultancy was hired—a business specializing in relocating the dead without incurring their wrath.50 This expertise was crucial, as “you don’t know [who is buried inside]. It needs to be handled properly.”

Construction was completed. But soon after, occupants allegedly began reporting unfortunate events: unexplained illness, freak accidents, infertility, and streaks of bad luck. The department responded with a standard Singaporean haunting protocol, hiring a team of religious “ghostbusters” to tour the interior and drive out malevolent spirits. This included a Buddhist monk, a Catholic priest, an imam, and a medium, who together blessed the space.51 The medium later told me that he had located the source of the problem, a central depository where evidence from violence crimes was being stored.52

During the hauntings, however, the facility and its operations fell into a state of disarray. Employees took extended “sympathetic leave,” worried about the risks to life and luck. The place was said to be suay (“unlucky” in Hokkien, the opposite of huat)—a property that, also, is understood as infectious when associated with spiritual or energetic disturbance. The branches of internal security that operated within this building were, in effect, barred from normal operation until the invasive spirits were convinced to leave.

This seizure of architecture is a commonly alleged pastime of the dead and a major focus of Singapore’s paranormal discourses. For example, the MRT station at Dhoby Ghaut was built on a Jewish cemetery after 1983. Here, it is said, ghost passengers ride the trains in endless loops, restlessly moving yet going nowhere—their movements a very embodiment of the undirected and periodic character of a spectral existence overtaken by the tide of modernization. As noted, the construction of the mass rail system was also seen as a major violence perpetrated against the island and an invitation to haunting. More Jewish grave sites were disinterred to create the Novena area, now a modern health care hub and home to Tan Tock Seng Hospital, the nation’s flagship public medical center. This hospital is avoided by many, and when a Covid-19 outbreak was followed by a dramatic suicide leap in May 2021, internet commentators speculated that this was due to the place’s “dark past.” Even buildings not associated with tragic events or disturbances can be taken over—even large parts of Yale-NUS College, the academic institution where this book was finished, are avoided by students at night due to allegations of hostile spirits.

The haunting of a building may cause its partial or complete abandonment or the collapse of its functions. As often, it causes irrational modes of occupation and an intrusive illogic in the actions of occupants. “Rightful” homeowners will find themselves abandoning their master bedrooms to sleep in the nursery or on the living room floor. Or the house may be avoided completely during certain times of day, when the ghosts dominate the space and its uses. Commercial tenants may be forced to avoid certain rooms or to work during truncated hours. The spectral presence militates against full ownership and use-value, causing occupants to divert and avoid.

This was the case at Stanley’s house, where a “foreign” ghost claimed part of the domestic space for itself. He recalls,

When I was nine I used to play at my grandmother’s house where there were these terra-cotta dolls, like the warriors from Xian. I rode into one with my bike, and the head came off. I thought, “Oh shit, I don’t want my grandmother to know.” So, I rolled it up in newspaper and brought it home. I thought I would glue it back on and sneak it back, but of course I was lazy and never got around to it.53

A ghost was understood to have taken hold of the rooms around the garage, where the maids were housed. Spectral events were limited to this area, and none of the other household members were affected. Stanley’s nanny would complain to him of a ham sup (perverted) ghost who would come in the middle of the night and pinch her all over her body. He laughs, saying, “We thought she was full of shit, but she rolled up her sleeves and there really were brutal blue-black marks all over her arms and legs. The maids had to all move out of their rooms, and sleep on the kitchen floor.”

This forcing of residents to relocate in perverse ways is one of the hallmarks of domestic haunting. A similar account was given to me by a realtor who had lived briefly in the center of three compound houses, old bungalows in East Coast adjacent to Katong Shopping Centre, which was then being built. During construction, a site watchman had been killed, a Sikh guard known locally as a jaga.54 His ghost was thought to have migrated from the scene of death to the home next door. After this, she told me, the center house was “so haunted that nobody can stay. Because when you are sleeping, the ghost takes you out of that room, and you wake up in the garden.” This took place even when all of the doors and windows were locked. As this bungalow was uninhabitable at night, it was rented to a Montessori school and ultimately torn down during the housing boom of 2007.

In Stanley’s case, his mother immediately called in a Taoist medium, who wandered around the house—mainly commenting on energy and feng shui issues, such as the proper placement of mirrors. But arriving at the garage, her attention was immediately drawn to the newspaper wrapping around the terra-cotta warrior.

“My mum said, ‘Oh, that’s just a doll which my son broke,’” Stanley remembers. “But the medium said, ‘That is the source of the ghost. He should never have brought this home. I’m going to take it out of the house.’ So she took the newspaper with the doll inside. She said, ‘Don’t follow me,’ and she walked down the road outside our house. And she walked outside my neighbor’s place, where there was a big tree. She put the bundle with the decapitated doll under it, saying that the spirit was going to go up into the canopy. I thought she was fucking nuts, but after this the maids were fine—no more bruising.”

Mrs. Tan55 observed that an invasive ghost can be very ma fan (Mandarin for “troublesome”) because they prevent the proper running of the household, not least because it is often the domestic helpers and maintenance staff who seem to be most directly affected by the spirit’s malfeasance. Mrs. Tan ran a large household in Ewart Park, near Old Holland Road, with two “helpers,” a cook, a driver, and an itinerant gardener with his crew. The house was built on high land above the road—in British colonial tradition, with the main house above and servants’ quarters below. After a freak bicycle accident injured one of her sons, Mrs. Tan fetched the medium to see whether ghosts were involved. She recounts,

I got a lady medium to come. And she told me that it is a haunted tree at the edge of the plot. She advised me to do some offering, on a Friday—because she said the ghost is Malay, and the Muslims usually worship on Friday. So every Friday I must go and make offering at the tree there, at the base. And I must not cook for the ghost with my own utensils, because the utensils have touched pork. Not halal. So I have to go all the way down to buy Islamic food. So one day we were driving to buy the ghost’s dinner, and I told my husband, “Ayah, let’s shift to another place, I can’t take this hassle anymore.”

But the husband did not want to leave. Life retained its former rhythm, until the gardener was found hanged in the garage. One of the two maids, a “very iconoclastic” Cantonese amah with one eye, went to scold the ghost. “She really went and berated them,” Mrs. Tan recalls. “And she was very offensive. And you know the next day she came up covered with bruises all over!” In the wake of this, the running of the house collapsed—none of the staff wanted to work. Mrs. Tan convinced her husband to move to another large house nearby.

In these two stories, several similar spatial themes emerge. In both cases, spirits laid siege to the servants’ quarters—in one case a liminal zone by a drain, in the other a space near the garage. In both cases, the maids, being either sensitive or bold enough to resist, were punished by pinching. And in both stories, it should be noted, the ghosts themselves were both foreign and mobile. They came from “elsewhere”: in one case, the ghost was Malay and “out of place” in a wealthy Chinese housing tract; in another, it immigrated from China in a clay figure.

Ghosts may be benign and simply live alongside the living in a shared home. Typically, they are seen as the source of harmless mischief—lost keys, spooked pets, irregular TV reception or Wi-Fi connectivity—in much the same way that the British speak of “gremlins.” In unserious cases, a medium will often advise the occupants not to attempt to drive away or disrupt the ghosts but to see them as inoffensive. The ghosts are particularly covetous of small household objects, often nonvaluable trinkets. Here, too, spectral behavior forces a kind of nonrational action on the part of those who should by rights have unfettered access and ease of use. Residents have admitted to leaving false sets of keys or other “decoys” of frequently abducted objects.

Many impassioned personal accounts revolve around reversals of fortune. Hua, for example, recalled that she became aware that her house was haunted when her husband, James, began to consistently lose bets on horses. At first this was not noticeable, but the evidence began to mount. She noted, “Whenever your house is haunted, your luck is very good, or very bad.” For the year after moving in, her husband’s was very poor. “Everything he touched, he was just losing money,” she recalled. “Every weekend the bookie would come to the house to take money. How can my luck be so bad? How can I be losing money every weekend?” Hua pointed out that, with horse racing, luck will eventually turn around. “You may win some, you may lose some.” But while they remained in the house, he consistently lost.

In some neighborhoods, reversals of fortune are associated with specific houses—especially when ill events were known to befall previous owners. Gossip identifies homes (and sometimes entire roads) where a series of owners lost money. In 2009, for example, rumors were fueled by media scrutiny of Ron Sim, a Singaporean technology millionaire who had lost much of his fortune in the end of 2008 on the acquisition of Brookstone’s, the troubled American retail company. Sim’s extravagant house was thought to be responsible and to have brought similar ruin to its previous inhabitant, a well-known entrepreneur.

At the same time, however, Singapore’s tortured environments are seen—precisely due to their disturbed and haunted energetic characters—as fertile spaces for making money. Following Hua’s preceding statement, the chemistry of spiritual presence vis-à-vis luck and value is complex and volatile. Although living with a ghost is undoubtedly uncanny, eerie, or even terrifying, it does not necessarily result in ill fortune or mishap—quite the opposite. As in Korea, Thailand, and other Asian contexts, a house spirit can be lucky.

This might seem counterintuitive, especially as famous examples have involved horrific events. This was the case in a seventh-floor unit of block 12, Lorong 7, Toa Payoh, which was the former home to serial killer Adrian Lim. Lim was a self-proclaimed medium who, with two accomplices, murdered a nine-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy and allegedly drank their blood in a sacrificial ritual involving torture and sexual assault. According to an article from the Straits Times, police discovered “crucifixes, blood-stained Hindu and Taoist idols, and a book on witchcraft” as well as “pills and hypodermic syringes, and a newspaper article on human sacrifice.” Lim and his conspirators were hanged in 1988. A year before the execution, the highly pragmatic Tan family (Catholic) bought the flat for the bargain price of S$28,600. They were “aware of its dark history”—nearly all of Singapore was familiar with the salacious details of the case—but considered it lucky, as they struck 4D the month they moved in.56

Why would a home with such a traumatic history be seen as lucky? Does expectation not hold that such sites remain traumatized, melancholic, and disturbed by the unfulfilled desire of the dead for justice? Interestingly, the opposite rationality holds. The energetic disturbances taking place at troubled sites are assumed to attract ghosts. This is the nature of spiritual forces, and those drawn in are not necessarily malevolent. Meanwhile, the living who dwell in such places have great opportunity to appease gui, who are then predisposed to altering energetic forces toward benevolent (“lucky”) outcomes. Even the willingness to pay for a flat that has been radically devalued by murder can be seen as a form of offering. In this sense, a lingering negativity can be recuperated. While a space may remain problematic, the energies surrounding its residents can become very huat. Ghostly magnetism is like the solicitation of custom at a shop; if one is prudent, and the visitors are correctly “served,” then value will increase.

For example, even avowedly secular youths—who viewed Chinese religious practices as “superstitious”—admitted to performing rites when occupying new homes or offices. This occurred either at the urging of parents or out of fear that making a big change without ritual acknowledgment would be unpropitious. For example, Meizi and Jianhui, investment bankers and self-described “agnostics,” leaped over a lump of coal at the threshold of their new house while carrying a bag of rice. They touched all domestic surfaces and appliances with notes of large denomination and made a large burnt offering in the driveway. When asked about it, Meizi laughed, recalling that her parents felt that it would have felt strange to begin living at the house “unceremoniously” and that there was “no harm” in the ritual. When young entrepreneur Ann opened a fashion boutique of a high-end French brand in the Raffles Hotel, her father was first to enter the premises, walking backward and wiping the racks of clothes with a thousand-dollar bill.57 Some of these recall traditional symbolic practices to avoid bad luck. For example, there is a common belief that one should not sweep the floors during Chinese New Year, as this might serve to brush away luck—instead of sweeping out, people will sweep in.58

Ecologies of Luck

What an initial exploration of insecure spaces suggests is a far more nuanced understanding of the process with which we began this section: of securitization as a strategy by the PAP to make a nation safe for speculative risk. Just as the government’s clearings and jungles create openings and closures in the national landscape, hauntings and offerings produce local spatial distortions that alter movement and time. Conjured ghosts flaunt the limits of established order and enforce their own; they do so in a way that obliges an oppositional regime of indirect paths and closures, portals to the spirit world, and connections (via traumatic histories) between noncontiguous places in the national sphere. Troubled places are avoided and others occupied in strange ways that appear to undermine the logic of their design. And yet, spectral interventions also have penetrating consequences for presuppositions of value and luck—producing, in their spatial contortions, a logic of opportunity. We will return, in the next and final chapter, to ghosts’ seizures of buildings to see how their true value, both of use and exchange, will be radically affected via negotiation. Haunted houses, at the largest scale, are understood explicitly to be a form of development.

We find in the preceding discussion a pair of significant and recurrent themes. First, invocation of the ghost-world produces irrationalities of space, time, and action. To be safe against (and benefit from) spiritual influences, we must begin inhabitation on specific dates, leap across the threshold, walk backward or obliquely, set our money alight, or carry objects that embody puns or dramatize their own purposelessness.59 In such acts, that ur-Singaporean logistical rationality, alongside the planned logics and conveniences of modern spatial inhabitation, come to be suspended—if only briefly. A second insight, familiar from chapter 2, is that the bill—be it SGD, yin zhi, or hell money—is an instantiation of value and thus gives humans a degree of influence over ghostly powers and future outcomes. Fanning surfaces and objects with a big note ostensibly makes them into magnets for ghosts, who are then served with generous gifts. The imaginary of monetary profusion, of high numbers, reserves, profits, and excess payments, creates a vocabulary for acts of numinous empowerment.

This, like all spectro-economic phenomena, rests upon a conception of luck that contrasts models of probability. To be huat is to be routinely subject to greater positive outcomes than could be expected. In Chinese popular conceptions, what appears to humans as chance is in fact the result of a complex and occult causality. There are, as Master Goh will tell us, inherently lucky and unlucky places—and here ghost-discourse begins to resemble the environmental determinist theories of state. Harmony and balance of energies will, like the proverbially rising tide, lift or lower all boats. Disharmony will thwart plans and processes. The decisive factors for futures are energetic, and these can be adjusted for good or bad via geomantic precautions or spiritual observances. A specific balance of elements and energies is required. Thus we might begin to understand the ghost’s influence over risk. As beings of yin able to skew the energetic balance of a location, gui—alongside deities—exert powers of determination over environmental and personal conditions. Only those like the mediums, with their powers of sight and energetic sense, can “enter into” such places and bargain with their resident influences.

The crucial point, here, is that matters of luck (and hence of risk and value) are beholden to the proto-ecological model of ghosts and broader “spirit fields”—the expansive, yet localized, interplay of living and dead natures, materials and confluences. The foundational violence of the city’s self-making acts as a form of infinite debt that must be continually ameliorated. As a result, bettering the energies of places through prayer and geomantic outreach is a work commonly undertaken by religious groups in the service of national prosperity. To this end, offerings are conducted with regularity at significant points in the landscape, to assist the glacial process of healing an environment scarred by modernization. For example, reports of prayers held at the foot of the Tourist Board’s Merlion sculpture (positioned, importantly, at the mouth of the Singapore River) triggered great consternation for evangelical respondents who saw this as attracting satanic spirits to the city.60 From a geomantic logic, this is understood as restoring harmony and safeguarding luck and profit by shoring up the river. The latter is a major geomantic feature that was disturbed in the large-scale geoengineering of the state’s drainage network.61 In the aggregate, however, we can see here a powerful explanation for Singapore’s famous wealth: disturbance itself. Like Adrian Lim’s troubled flat, Singapore’s larger history of violence can be seen to predispose the place to opportunities for tremendous fortune. Luck must be understood here not as a transcendental force but as a social product set amid historical ecologies. This is an understanding with near-utopian consequences, and it is to the pursuit of these that we now turn.