Possession at Old Police Academy

Confession by Keith

The old Police Academy has a lot of ghost stories. Anyone doing NS would have heard of one urban legend or another. I served my NS in the police force. This was in the year 2000.

The building was sibei (very) old. Three stories high with communal toilets on each floor. My buddy, X, was sensitive and could actually see ghosts. As early as the first day of in-camp he had his cupboard filled with a Bible, talisman, holy water, etc.  I would joke that being his buddy was the safest because if any ghost were to come, he would have an answer to deal with anything.

Yet he still got possessed.

This was during the second week of our stay. Throughout the first week, X was unable to sleep well. He complained that something was trying to enter his body. I didn’t think anything of it. My first thought was that he was trying to Chao Geng (skive).

One night he woke me up and complained he felt very hot and needed to shower. I said, “Bro, it's so late already just go to sleep lah.”

X left the bunk on his own. After that I couldn’t get back to sleep and felt a bit like a dick, so I went to the toilet to check on him. In the force, we were always told to go in pairs, look out for each other. There was an unspoken understanding for some that if one person needed to pee at night, the buddy would go with him. So lan lan. I didn’t want to be the asshole. 

The stall water was running. I could hear voices but couldn't make out the words. They were a bit muffled. For some reason I became wide awake. Alarm bells were going off in my head and this unsettled feeling came suddenly.

I crept up to the stall calling his name. For the first time in my life I felt real fear. You know we used to write in composition that “my blood ran cold in my veins?”

I felt that.

X was standing with his face to the wall so I could only see his back. He was fully clothed and soaking wet. I reached in to turn him towards me and that was when I noticed X features were slightly altered. He spoke to me in another voice… and in Mandarin! My Chinese was not all that good and even conversational Chinese is a stretch. However X, an Indian, was speaking a whole string of chinese to me.

I kept on repeating, “Eh fuck lah, stop it. Not funny.”

Then X stopped talking and smiled. His eyes showed only the whites. Through the smile, I heard, what I believe was X voice calling from somewhere inside this body - Help.

Fuck. I left X there and bolted. I woke the whole squad up. When we got to the toilet, X was in a squatting position, crying in a girly sobbing way. The Malays in the squad recited their verses. Others just stared blankly. Back then phones got no cameras, otherwise this one confirm would go viral.

Luckily I had the cow sense to go to his locker to grab his religious items. As buddies, we both knew where each other hid our keys to our cupboard.

I hung the crucifix around his neck, placed the Bible against his chest, and doused him with the bottle of holy water. It seemed to work because X calmed down and went into a deep sleep.

We carried him back to his bed and he slept throughout. At some point I was wondering if he would wake up. I don’t know if any of us managed to sleep that night but nobody wanted to talk about it. We just went back to our respective beds and we waited for the first row call which was going to happen in a matter of hours anyway.

That morning, thankfully X woke up. He woke with a high fever so he was sent off to the medical centre and got warded for three days. When we finally got back to training the following week, he told me what he had experienced.

He said that for many nights already there was a spirit of a woman who came to him for help. He tried to ignore her but she was very persistent. He finally relented and asked her what she needed, she said that she needed a place to rest. So X replied, "then go rest lah". That was when the spirit managed to enter his body through his mouth and nose as if he had inhaled her.

Everything after that was a blank. He just knew he felt very hot and needed to douse himself in water. But things were on autopilot and the memories were very fuzzy. Apparently after that incident, X topped up his cupboard with more religious paraphernalia. Though from time to time he would say he could see spirits approaching, there were no other major incidents like the one I witnessed right before my eyes.

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