With a flashlight in one hand and an electromagnetic meter in the other, paranormal phenomena investigator Charles Goh scours some shrubland in suburban Singapore, looking for hidden graves that could give clues to a ghostly encounter that he had three decades ago.
Goh’s investigations have led him to the residential neighborhood of Yishun, an area that only few tourists visit, and that has a reputation for criminal, strange and sometimes supernatural events in one of the world’s safest cities.
In the past few years, Yishun has seen buses spontaneously combust, cats strangled, peculiar murders, giant caterpillars and supposed ghost sightings — spawning reams of satirical sites, online memes and local media coverage.
Photo: Reuters
Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service, has poked fun at the neighborhood’s unfortunate reputation to promote the supernatural mystery series Stranger Things and other horror content to local audiences.
One blogger coined the ring road that circles the neighborhood “the devil’s ring.”
However, local politicians say that there are rational explanations for these events, and statistics show that crime rates are not unusual.
ANCIENT CURSE
However, Goh, a safety manager for a construction firm, has a theory that ancient burial sites disturbed during the area’s rapid development could have been behind the spooky encounter that he had at a military camp in Yishun 30 years ago.
“In the daytime, I look out for the living, in the nighttime I look out for the dead,” said Goh, who in 2005 founded a research group, the Asia Paranormal Investigators.
Others who have investigated the neighborhood’s “weird and sometimes dangerous” reputation, like Japanese YouTuber Ghib Ojisan, have come to less exciting conclusions.
“I discovered that it is just a nice neighborhood,” said Ojisan, who started making videos about Yishun last year.
However, the normalcy of his encounters with friendly locals, tasty food and neat parks have not dampened interest for his videos, attracting tens of thousands of views.
CONTRAST
Ojisan said that part of the fascination for his mainly Japanese audience is that the city-state is seen as an uneventful place.
Singapore was last year ranked as the second-safest city globally, behind Tokyo, in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index.
Singaporean Legislator Louis Ng (黃國光) said that Yishun’s reputation can be put down to the fact that “bad news sells faster than good news” and that it is a safe neighborhood with a strong sense of community.
As for paranormal encounters, Ng said: “We have got a lot of temples around in Yishun, so hopefully that will help to curb this curse and the supernatural powers that are at play.”
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