This is more than just a story; it is actually a true encounter on how spirits influence my mind to do things out of my consciousness.

I was about ten years old and lived in a condo built on a horrible accident site. This was how the haunting began: on the first midnight after we moved in, I had a weird idea and drew five skulls - two big and three small - on the wooden wall panels of the living room, while my parents were sleeping.

You know it is a popular interior design where people like to have a full-length large mirror to be put on a wall, so to make the living area visually more spacious. The mirror didn’t come on time on the first day when we moved in. So the renovators only fit the wall with several wooden panels serving as a smooth base for the mirror to paste on later.

On that night, I suddenly woke up, had an urge of drawing something. I stealthily walked out of the bedroom with a pencil, and faced the wooden panels on the wall. Out of so many possible figures that I can draw, with no specific intention; I somehow only drew five skulls. My family teaching was always strict, especially during my childhood, and it was not my habit to draw graffiti on wall. In fact, I have never drawn anything on wall except these five skulls. In short, I was doing something totally out of my characters.

The next morning, the house renovators came and covered my skull drawings with a big mirror as expected. They didn’t notice my drawings. Or may be they didn’t bother as they just wanted to quickly come, get the job done and collect the money. Our whole family lived there for about six years before we migrated to Australia. During the years, things did not go right?

My youngest sister Carol, who used to be a strong and healthy baby before moving into this house, became very sick. My parent had been taken her to see many doctors from different countries, but still no cure. They blamed it on Carol’s weak body resistance. But as I remember my mum cooked plenty of nutritious food for her everyday. But that didn’t seem to help; her face got paler each day.

The most alarming thing is that, as I recall now, my nanny who was employed to baby-sit Carol, said that Carol sometimes would have played with something invisible. My nanny strongly believed that there was an invisible group of entities in our house. She was given a maid room, but she never wanted to sleep alone there. She didn’t speak much too, but from her face she expressed a strong fear every time we mentioned about that room. So every night she just laid down and slept along the corridor near the foyer area. But never she slept nor entered the maid room.

Initially my parents didn’t take her words seriously. And my nanny didn’t properly tell us about what she saw because of her introverted character. There happened another incident by my father, and then they believed.

In one evening I was in my study room doing my homework. My dad was having his shower after he returned from work. Suddenly he roared and used his hand to tap on the dinning chairs while he was rushing out from his bedroom. His fierce action looked like chasing off something. That shocked everybody in the house. Breathing in and out heavily he was sitting down, regaining his energy. Looking tired and fearful, he told us in a mumbling way that he saw a dark figure “moving” slowly across the dinning room.

After that incident, they believed there was something other than us who lived in the house. By their Buddhism religion, they tried to setup a ritual altar with a board namely “To Whom We Pay You Respect”, and they offered joss sticks to the altar every day. However, it didn’t seem to help. Sightings of those unknown entities still continued. And they were causing disturbance to the youngest and the eldest; Carol and the nanny turned sicker each day. They both had been hospitalized several times. And the nanny lately passed away.

Years later, our family couldn’t bear with it any more and sold the house at a very cheap price. After we had moved out, surprisingly my siblings including myself grow in better health. Carol’s sickness just disappeared without any special medicine. Well, doctors, as usual will follow their scientific practice and explained logically in this tune: ‘as a child grows older, the body resistance builds up and therefore sickness will heal naturally’. Ironically, we paid a big bill to listen to this superficial crap which we already know.

Now back to the five-skull drawing. I was then much older. Lately, my parents revealed to me that the house had originally been a family-run wax factory where the members burned to ashes in a tragic fire accident. The doomed family had exactly five members - a father, a mother and three children, mirroring the five skulls I had drawn!

Once I learnt about this, my horror suddenly intensified. On the other hand, I was also enlightened. Perhaps it was me who guiltily planted the seed by putting up their drawings and thereafter their “presence” in our house. And if I were told earlier about the tragic fire accident by my parents, I would have suggested removing the mirror and erasing the drawings immediately.

For some time I have been blaming myself. But thinking further, it was never my own motive to draw up the skulls on the wall. I was motivated or rather, used as a tool to manifest their haunting. They used a child who usually has a weak mind power to set an anchor for their stay in the house. I just didn’t know what I was doing during that night.

That experience, and many others that followed later, became my impetus to get serious about ‘things-that-go-bump’ in the night. Thereafter I pleaded to find out what the ghost is all about by setting up SPI.