I used to live in Tampines near the quarry at Bedok Reservoir side which has quite a big forested area. A friend of mine who used to live on the same street used to go to the quarry and just play and stuff. Well one time we had just finished reading one of those Singapore Ghost Stories series that I think every kid growing up in Singapore has read, and we had just read the story about a boy and his brother who get an old drum for a birthday or Christmas or something. The two kids take the drum out to some secluded place and are just playing around beating on it until it starts making sounds by itself.

It starts to do an old Indian war beat and it turns out to be an ancient Indian war drum or something and the kids get freaked out. They start to see Indians in the corner of their eyes and as they run back home one of the kids gets shot in the head with an arrow or something. I don’t remember the exact details, but the important part was drum beats and killer Indian ghosts.

Being stupid kids, the first impulse we had after reading this story was to go run around in the woods. So we’re messing around, talking about how scared we’d be if drumbeats started playing and talking about how we’d trip the other one and let the Indians get them and crap like that. Then, out of the blue, we hear these faint drum beats. We look at each other and we realize that we both heard it but don’t say anything about it since it faded really quickly.

We slowly start walking back out of the quarry in the direction of the bright street when a drumbeat comes out of nowhere. We both start to book it home, scared out of our minds. We make it out of the forested area and look to see if we have arrows in our heads and basically thank god we made it out alive. We get home and tell my mum about what happened and she looks at us like we’re the stupidest kids. She then explains to us that the school nearby might be having some sort of band practice. Well who knows..