Spooky encounters

Being a real estate agent or negotiator means one has to visit locations and properties. Some have stumbled upon unexplained incidents during one of these visits. Here are two spooky encounters.

Not a big sister you would want around

I was showing a terraced house to a family with a young son who was aged around seven. At first, the lad was running around on the ground level of the 2-storey unit with the usual child-like exuberance. After a lot of exploration, he kept telling his parents how much he loved the house. Then he rushed upstairs to continue exploring, leaving his parents and myself behind.

When it was time for his parents to go upstairs, we realised that the boy had gone very quiet. When he saw us, he immediately insisted that they leave and would not let up until his parents relented. The boy dashed down the stairs, out of the house and into the car, where he waited. The family soon left.

After a few days, I followed up with a call to the husband to find out what the decision was about the house. The husband said they were going to have to pass on the house. I was surprised and asked him why. He said his son is sensitive to spirits and saw a ‘jie jie’ (big sister in Mandarin) upstairs!

The house has since been sold by another agent, but the memory of this incident remains an eerie one for me. – Anonymous

The spirits of the forest

In the mid-1990s, I was attached to a property investment company. My bosses were looking at investing in large tracts of agricultural land.

My job was to liaise with estate agents and negotiators to source for good land. After looking through quite a few pieces of land for sale with my investment team, we decided to view a freehold 1,500-acre estate with old rubber trees.

This land was located in Tangkak, Johor. We had to drive our Pajero four-wheel drive to view this land together with the estate agent.

It took us a few hours to reach the land from my office in Subang Indah. We arrived in the afternoon. The agent had a local man act as a guide as he knew the land well.

The terrain of the land was undulating and the ground was wet after the rain the day before.

While driving through the estate, our car got stuck in the mud.

We tried jacking the Pajero to no avail due to the wet soil. The four of us even tried lifting the car but it was too heavy. A sense of desperation set in as darkness fell.

Finally, the local man who was accompanying us in a motorcycle asked me to go with him to find help from a nearby village. It was probably the longest ride of my life.

There didn’t seem to be an end to the journey. It was pitch dark and it felt as if we were surrounded by nothing and everything. There was no way to tell where we were. But more frightening than anything else, was the trance-like state of the local man.

I could hear my heart pounding in my ears; to say something not right was an understatement. Silently, I prayed to my God to drive away whatever it was that was bothering the man and guide us out of the estate safely.

Thankfully, after that, we managed to get out of the estate. The kind folks in the village offered to help us and in the end, eight of us managed to lift and free the vehicle from the mud.

Later, I asked the local man how he got lost since he knew the estate like the back of his hand. What he told me was chilling. This was one of the very few times he was in the estate after dark as he always made it a point to get out while the sky was still bright.

During our motorcycle ride earlier, he felt something was directing him to go somewhere else and that something was not from this earth. After sharing this with me, he quickly said a prayer and that was it.

My boss treated all of us to a sumptuous Chinese dinner in Tangkak town and we were so thankful that it all ended well. -- Hartamas Real Estate (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd associate director Christopher Chan (pictured)