Night Shift Security Guard Encounters Playful Spirit

Confessions by Daniel B.
​Edited by Eugene Tay

I work as a night shift security officer in a building that's situated in the commercial district. I am one of the only two personnel working the graveyard shift. ​Work starts at 8.00pm and one of us have to be stationed at the security counter while the other makes his rounds to patrol the building.

One Friday night while I was on duty and taking my turn to patrol while my colleague took his break, I experienced my very first haunting. 

It was 11.00pm; I started my patrol from the 39th floor and made my way down. Each floor had two staircases so I will walk down from one stairwell, cut cross the entire stretch of floor to the other stairwell, and continue making my way down in this zig-zag pattern. 

On the 16th floor, when I was passing by the middle lift lobby, I saw an open pink umbrella with a kids ball outside an empty unit. In fact, the entire floor is vacant, it's quite strange to find these items here; and besides my partner would have mentioned seeing them when he went on his patrol. I was honestly freaked out at this time. The hair at the back of my neck stood up.

Convincing myself that my colleague probably was lazy and skipped some levels, I tried to calm my nerves and completed my round. When I reached the ground floor, I still couldn't shake off the weird sensation I felt on level 16. Something about it just did not feel right. I decided that since my colleague did not mention anything before, perhaps this was a small matter and not worth talking about. There's still the entire night to work and we had to do some more patrols before knocking off, let's not scare either of us unnecessarily. 

I sat at the security counter playing games on my mobile phone. My colleague was inside the mail room taking a nap. Nothing happened until about 1.00 am, then I heard a lady's laughter going, "heheheh".

​Nothing happened until about 1.00 am, then I heard a lady's laughter going, "heheheh".

It was loud enough to echo through the empty foyer. I paused my game and looked around. I was sure I heard a laughter. The sound of laughter is very distinct. It's not a bird or a sound that came from outside. This laughter came from inside the building. 

I waited for a while expecting to hear any follow up sounds but there were none. I shrugged off that experience and went back to my game, and that's when I heard the laughter again. This time I chose to ignore it and continued to play my game, but I must tell you, inside I was freaking out. About 5 mins later, the laughter echoed again. This time I got pissed. You can say that way I handle fear is to replace it with temper. I jumped over the counter, not even bothering to walk around it, and ran towards the direction of the sound.

I stood there in the dim light and shouted into the dark corridor all the vulgarities that came to mind. After that I did not go back to the counter. I went out of the building to smoke the adrenaline away. For the rest of the night, I stayed at the counter. 

Later on I found out that the building had a lot of weird incidents and according to the guards who had been there longer than me, the experience I encountered was not uncommon. There was another incident where a sleeping security guard woke up to find three ghostly apparitions in soldier's uniform scolding him in Japanese. So far the hauntings had not been malicious. With regards to my experience, I felt that the ghosts were more playful and just trying to get my attention. For most of us who had an experience in that building, it's usually just through sounds and feelings only. There were rumours that this building was built on old cemetery grounds and that the spirits are anchored to this place.

Most places in Singapore, to be honest, have their own stories and hauntings lah so it's no point shifting job to another place either. Who knows what I will experience there. Maybe I may not be so lucky. Like they say, better a hantu you know than a hantu you don't. ​