The Forbidden Sixth Floor of Stagmont Camp

​Confession by Justin Chua

This incident took place when I was a trainee in Stagmont camp back in 2012.
 
Life was a joy there. The technical training was strenuous but we had delicious cookhouse food and canteen snacks. I was bragging about how good it was to several friends who had enlisted before me when one of them mentioned that the accommodation block that housed trainees like us was 'dirty'. It sparked my curiosity.
 
One Sunday night before my official book-in time, I googled about the camp’s haunted history. The stories online were centered around the sixth floor of the accommodation block, where people were cautioned to keep out. Several versions mentioned about a particular bunk on the sixth floor with talismans pasted on its door, secured with chains and a lock.
 
You can call me itchy backside, as on one of the nights where we had some rest time, I gathered some of my platoon mates and told them what I read online. We decided to head up to level six for some thrill.
 
We didn’t encounter anything, so we went back to our bunk to sleep. However after that exploration, some of us started to hear dragging footsteps, walking along our hallway, into the bunks, past our beds and disappearing into thin air. It happened on a nightly basis and affected me so badly that I resorted to sleeping with earplugs on. In addition, I had recurring dreams of a Chinese wayang painted face glaring angrily at me. I assumed it was my overactive imagination, and not anything to do with the supernatural. Until a bunkmate told me about his dream and it was the same as mine. What were the odds?!
 
There was also a night where the trainees were woken up by a piercing scream directly outside of our window, on the third floor. We exclaimed "walao eh", did our best to ignore it and went back to sleep.
 
I went to speak with my sergeants, telling them that I was suffering from a lack of sleep due to these nightly disturbances and obviously there was nothing that they could do. Their only advice was, "Just go and sleep. There are these things all around us, but just go to sleep."
 
Apart from the footsteps, the same eerie dream and the scream, there was this metal gate leading to level 2 where the officer cadets are housed. That level was not always occupied, as the current batch of officer cadet trainees had moved out after their training was cleared. The heavy metal gate tended to slam several times a day, which occurred only after sunset.
 
I would think that these occurrences were happening from the very first day I entered the camp, but it wasn't until I learned about them online and from a friend that I became aware that they were happening.