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By John Geddie
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – With a torch in one hand and an electromagnetic meter in the other, paranormal investigator Charles Goh wanders a bushland in the suburbs of Singapore, searching for hidden graves that may provide clues to a ghostly encounter he had. three decades ago.
Goh’s investigations have led him to the residential neighborhood of Yishun, an area rarely visited by tourists that has developed a reputation for criminal, bizarre and sometimes supernatural events in one of the safest cities in the world.
In recent years, Yishun has seen spontaneously burning buses, strangled cats, quirky murders, giant caterpillars, and alleged ghost sightings, spawning heaps of satirical sites, online memes, and local media coverage.
Even Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service, has poked fun at the city’s unfortunate reputation to promote the supernatural mystery series ‘Stranger Things’ and other horror content to local audiences. A blogger coined the ring road that surrounds the city as “the devil’s ring.”
Local politicians say there are rational explanations for these events, and statistics show that crime rates are not unusual.
But Goh, a security manager for a construction company, has a theory that ancient cemeteries disturbed during the city’s rapid development could have been the cause of the spooky encounter he had at a military camp in Yishun thirty years ago.
“During the day I look for the living, at night I look for the dead,” said Goh, who went on to form the Asia Paranormal Investigators society in 2005.
Others who have investigated Yishun’s “strange and sometimes dangerous” reputation, such as Japanese YouTuber Ghib Ojisan, have come to less exciting conclusions.
“I found it to be a nice neighborhood,” said Ojisan, who started making videos about Yishun last year.
But the normalcy of his encounters with friendly locals, tasty food, and orderly parks haven’t dampened interest in his videos, drawing tens of thousands of views.
He says part of the fascination of his mainly Japanese audience is that Singapore is seen as uneventful. It was ranked as the second safest city globally last year, behind Tokyo, in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index.
Local MP Louis Ng said Yishun’s reputation can be attributed to the fact that “bad news sells faster than good news” and that it is a safe city with a strong sense of community.
Regarding paranormal encounters, Ng joked, “We have a lot of temples in Yishun, so hopefully that will help stop this curse and the supernatural powers that are at play.”
(Reporting by John Geddie; Editing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa)
