The Ghosts of Old Sha Villa

Illustration by Syed Wilson

Confessions by Thomas Lim

I've been in the tourism industry for about 15 years now, and have worked in few hotels, tourist attractions and also a STB tourist guide. Apart from all the glamour of this industry, I have also seen a lot of spooky stuff in store. From weird encounters and unnatural deaths in hotels, to eerie places and practices of some attractions, and to a storeroom that keeps some of the war relics till today where we would hear occasional banging coming from even though nobody is inside. I would love to share all these stories with the great audience here.

For my first confession, maybe it'll be best to start from the beginning. I was a student in SHATEC back in 2001. As part of our curriculum, we had to do a work attachment at this place called The SHA Villa. The SHA villa is a training hotel and restaurant that we students had to go to gain some real work experience before going out to an actual hotel. I swear that is one of the creepiest places I've ever worked at. If you refer to the photo that I've attached, you can see its a very old, colonial-styled building.

The old Sha Villa was situated at 64 Lloyd Road, Singapore 239113

You could enter the hotel lobby on the brightest, sunniest afternoon but it would always seem to be very dark inside. I knew this uncle who was in charge of the building maintenance and he once showed me an altar behind the building where some of us knew of its existence. He said it was for the spirits 2 little kids who still roam the building. Every morning without fail he would buy some biscuits, sweets and chocolate and placed them at the altar. If this was not done on a daily basis, we would have guest complaints that their stuff would be missing, there is constant sound of footsteps running along the corridor. That was not all.

There was once in the middle of the night, we had a guest come down to the lobby and said he wanted to check out immediately. It was really weird to see a guest check out in the middle of the night, so I asked him if everything was all right. He told us that he saw Japanese soldiers walking along the corridor and then going down the stairs. He did pay for the nights that he stayed in the hotel before he left, so we had no reason to believe that he was one of the cheapos trying to get a free hotel stay by cooking up such a story.

Another experience I had in the building was during my attachment at the restaurant this time. I was doing the night shift and we were cleaning up at the end of the day before going home. One of the last tasks we had to do was to clear the rubbish from the kitchen and bring it out to the main rubbish chute outside, which was just a short distance away from the main building. So that evening, 2 girls in the same shift as I was brought out the rubbish at about 10:30pm or so. Shortly after they went out the backdoor of the kitchen, we heard a loud scream from the both of them.

They ran back in and were sobbing uncontrollably. After they managed to calm down, what they told us sent shivers down my spine. They said while they were bringing the rubbish to the refuse area, they saw an old man squatting by the piles of rubbish. Thinking he was one of those seniors who went around collecting things like cardboard, they continued to walk towards the refuse area. But when they were quite near the old man, he turned around and they saw he had no eyes in his eye sockets with his mouth wide open. This they screamed and ran back.

It'd be good to know after carrying this story with me for so many years. After hearing what the girls told us, some of the guys went out to check, all we saw were that 2 bags of rubbish strewn on the floor near the refuse area as the girls had left it. There was no old man in sight.