The Ghost Festival is coming, so it is hard not to talk a bit about the “good brothers”. The road next to the Chinese cemetery at 2.5 miles Tuaran Road has been known as one of the haunted spots. I had heard many stories about it. It usually goes like this – a driver passed by this cemetery alone late at night and saw someone (usually female) waved hand at his car and wanted to take a ride. The driver stopped the car and picked her up. The passenger would say she wanted to visit her friends in Kolombong (there is another cemetery facing the Puu Toh Temple). When the driver reached the destination, one of the five things below would happen:
1) The passenger disappeared.
2) The driver saw something horrible in the mirror (then he would get sick for months or something).
3) The passenger got out and vanished in the dark, without opening the door.
4) The passenger revealed her ghost face. The driver lost control of his car and died in accident (HAHAHAHA… who told this story later then? The ghost or CSI?).
5) The passenger gave the driver some money. The next day it turned into paper money.
(In most versions, the good brother always sat in the back seat, as if she already planned to scare the driver.)
Well, I don’t know if the stories are real, but they definitely do not sound creative. You always hear the similar story everywhere (only the names of cemetery changed).

Personally I haven’t seen anything weird there so far. Sometimes I needed to pass by that road alone, after 10 pm. There were many times my car was the only car on that road. A few time I did smell something like a dead rat in my car. My brother even smelled strong perfume in the car. Last year my sister also saw a human figure with long hair covering the face, standing by the roadside around 11 pm. Until today, she still wonder if it was a “real” thing, or just somebody fooled around.

But there is a real incident. Many years ago, my cousin was staying with my family. He was a school boy studying in a school nearby the 2.5 mile cemetery. I don’t know what happened to his brain. One day he went to the Japanese cemetery with a few friends. He scolded the Japaneses for what they had done in World War II, then he “she-she” on a Japanese grave. From that night on, he would see a Japanese ghost, next to his bed, staring angrily at him every night. My cousin was so scared that he could not sleep well. He could not take it anymore so he told my mom. My mom ordered him to go back there again and apologize sincerely in front of that grave. After he did that, the ghost did not harass him again. I was a bit unhappy because this “visitation” happened in my room (my cousin slept in my room when I was studying overseas). And I am typing this story in this room now.

If you ask me if I believe in ghost? I also don’t know how to answer. It might be a form of energy or brain activities that cannot be explained by our knowledge today. People tend to be afraid of something that they do not know or understand, and they will relate it with ghost or God. In the past, people also think that lightning was the act of God. Now we all know it is an electrical energy and we use it to light up our house at night. Same case to ghost? People just do not learn from history?