Preface to the short story "Haunted in Singapore: My True Ghost Story": My encounters with the supernatural really began when I was in my teens and it has never stopped since. 
Even though I now live in the United States, I continue to see ghosts and experience the paranormal. Many of us may have experienced some of these out of the world experiences sometime in our lives and it is quite natural actually. Seeing ghosts is commonplace because of the history that goes into a place. A house somehow encapsulates the emotions, feeling and culture of the people who occupy it and within the four walls, somehow, a lot of history can get trapped over the years. As to why a house retains spirits and ghosts, I have no idea. Perhaps, it has to do with the emotional experiences that occurred in the house through time. If there had been anger, sadness or a tragedy of some sort, that feeling encapsulated by the affected party gets trapped in a space that has difficulty finding a way out. While I have experienced angry spirits as well, spirits that really scared the hell of out me, I have also realized that there are forms that wish no harm. They are just there, as if they are completely lost, trapped through time and really waiting for some direction to move towards the next step only they don't know where it is or what it is. While I have questioned these odd "experiences" many times, I have also seen the divine work in some way or the other as happened on September 11, 2000 at about 10 pm, hours after the World Trade blast. So, just as much as there are bothersome beings from the dark side, I do know there are works of the divine which do happen because I have experienced them.
This short story revolves on my life in a haunted house in Singapore. I call it "haunted" because it truly is. It is a gateway to spirits that walk through trapped walls in my house and not sure which direction they should take, to get out. I believe that it is not the house that is haunted but that there is a path that gets the spirits and ghosts to our property and consequently, they stay there until they find the right way out. Hence, from time to time, we have seen spirits and ghosts, and we have lived with that awful feeling of knowing we are not alone in your own house. You see, my house directly faces an oncoming road and that is considered very taboo in Chinese culture. You may dismiss this as simply an old belief guided through ancient principles which are totally irrelevant to our current times, but trust me, the Chinese culture is an ancient one and they do understand the elements of nature very well. Feng Shui, I understand would have been very central towards containing the effects of the menacing forces I had experienced, but at that time I never knew what that art was. It took us a long time to understand the problems we were going through with the house and when a Chinese man told my father one day that "no Chinese will ever buy your house", we thought he was just darn silly.
Just for the record, there is a house close to where I currently live which has been on sale several times in the years and I see a road that directly faces it. So many times, I wonder if the same problems irk the home owners and so many times more, I had been inclined to walk up and ask but I am not sure what the house owner would think. However, all things considered, something must be obviously wrong that the house has to be sold that frequently. Bad pipes perhaps? Or maybe, there's too much noise being on the main road? I am not quite sure….but I can only guess.
This story will either scare you or make you wonder at the very least about what ghosts and spirits are. They do exist for me. Every word is true and smacks of the macabre. It took me a long time to understand that my house was an unusual one but my experiences do continue and I still see and hear these entities even living here in the USA. I wish I did not. Believe me, it is hard to deal with this ability because ghosts and spirits are not real, most people would say, and because they are not something you can touch and know for sure, they remain an area clouded with suspicion and open to dispute. I have some things to say to that just as much as I have more to say about the time when my husband and I were in our apartment and something incredibly divine took us out. If we had not followed our instincts that day, we would have been killed in our own apartment and no one would probably have known. But yes, that story is for another day…..for now, let's talk about ghosts and the hauntings that went on in my Singapore home…
