The Society of Paranormal Investigators (Singapore) had updated their site. “Ongoing Watch: The Lady in Black” Ongoing?! she muttered into her tea. The first image had gone viral in certain circles—those who loved ghosts, conspiracy threads, and speculative spiritual theory. Then came the new sightings.
A man wrote in, claiming he saw the same figure a few nights before the reported incident. “All black,” he wrote. “Face covered. Just the eyes… glowing. When I looked, something shined over me. Like... a wave of heat and light.” Another claimed she was “hovering.”
One said she vanished mid-step. A taxi uncle swore she crossed the road near Bartley and didn’t trigger the traffic sensor. “I’m a ghost with road safety issues now?” she muttered. She kept reading. Against her better judgment.
Theories had spiraled out of control:
• A lost soul from pre-colonial Singapore
• A forgotten spirit-guardian of Bidadari
• A modern-day nun performing midnight exorcisms
• The feminine manifestation of Death herself
She clicked on a comment thread titled: “Why Her Eyes Glow: Esoteric Analysis of Spirit Energy” That’s when she closed the tab. Sighed. “All I wanted… was to sit at a grave. Breathe. And leave quietly.”“Now I’m glowing?!” She had only gone once. One night. One grave. One quiet personal ego-death.
But humans are wild. One grainy Polaroid and the whole kampung lost its mind. Newspapers ran with it. The paranormal investigators came with walkie-talkies and sage sticks. One even claimed she “smelled like ancient sorrow.”
They camped out for two weeks. They found nothing. Not a whisper. Not a wail. Not a floating head. Eventually, as all good ghost stories do, this one died quietly. People moved on. Back to politics, price hikes, and drama plot twists.
Later that week, she called her guru over the phone. As always. She told him everything. The grave. The camera. The ghost story. The comments. The eyes-glowing theory. The viral photo. The shawl under the bed. There was a pause on the line.
Then he laughed. Long, deep, and completely unbothered. “What?” she asked.
He took a breath. “See how the human mind works?” That was all he said. No long lecture. No guidance. No holy verse. Just that.
And somehow, it was enough, because he was right. All she did was sit in silence. They saw a ghost. All she did was walk away and they created a legend. Later that week, she spoke to her guru. He had already laughed once at the photo, the Society, the ghost rumours.
But now his voice turned casual again. Almost too casual. “No plans of doing it again?” he asked. “After all, the first one got disrupted. This time, you go further in. Away from the main road. Somewhere secluded. Can’t be seen from the roadside.” She paused.
The idea was tempting. Too tempting. Not just because of the silence. But because it was starting to feel like a mission. A secret one. In. Out. Leave no trace. Just presence. There was a thrill to it. The kind that makes your heart beat slower, not faster.
Like slipping into a liminal space between the seen and unseen. No audience. No explanation. Just stillness... and risk. “I should,” she said. “But the challenge now is what to tell my husband. I can’t go on lying to him like this.”
“What did you tell him earlier?” the guru asked, amused. She told him. The Mak Lang story. The emotional reset. The sickly aunty who wasn’t really sick. He laughed again. Couldn’t help himself.
“My issue,” she continued, “is that I don’t feel guilty about it. Is that bad?”
His voice softened. “No. Don’t feel bad. You did what needed to be done. You were protecting him. Not from death. From knowing what he couldn’t handle.” That was the assurance she didn’t know she needed, especially from another woman’s husband.
She smiled into the silence. “Alright then. Give it two or three months,” she said. “Let’s see what other stories I can come up with.” They both laughed. And of course, two months later she got the call. “Your uncle passed away.” She stared at the phone.
“Okay, universe. I get it. No need to be so dramatic.” And so she went back. For the funeral and other things on the side. This time, no lies were needed. The universe handed her an alibi on a silver tray. That phone call from her cousin is all she needed. She packed her bag calmly. No need to fabricate stories. No need to sneak past suspicion.
The funeral was the surface. But beneath the rituals, the tears, the catered bee hoon a different plan was unfolding. She returned to Bidadari. But not the same spot. This time, she chose another unmarked grave. Further in. Deeper.
Away from the road. No street lamps. No curious photographers. No boys with cameras. Just solitude. And enough silence to sit inside herself without interruption. The mission had evolved. The agent had upgraded. “No more hauntings,” she thought. “Just clean entries and quiet exits.”
She moved like someone who belonged in the dark. Not to hide but because this was her ground now. She didn’t flinch when the shadows thickened. Didn’t pause when the road disappeared. This wasn’t fear anymore. This was protocol. “No visa. No border. Just breath,” she thought.
“My spiritual passport gets me through everything these days.” And as she sat down again, breathing into the earth, she smiled. “Let’s see what gets born this time.” It was peaceful again. She sat, eyes closed, breath soft. The earth beneath her was cool, grounded, undisturbed. Insects sang their invisible chorus. She could hear the wind even though none was blowing.
The trees spoke in creaks and rustles, even in their stillness. And then, a silence settled. Not quiet, but emptiness. In that emptiness, she saw herself. Not sitting, but buried. Six feet underground, earth packed above her, breathless and still.
Then a shift. Her form, rising from the soil, silent and slow, like memory in reverse. She emerged, transformed, cloaked in something new. She walked away from the grave. A different face. A different self. And then—another wave of emptiness. Timeless. She didn’t know how long she’d been there. But suddenly, something snapped.
Her guru's voice, distant and clear, cut through the stillness: "Now rise." Her eyes opened. She looked at her watch. 3:02 AM. Still hours before sunrise, but the state was broken. The thread had been pulled. No point in sitting longer. The moment had passed. She stood slowly, adjusted her shawl, and began walking the narrow path back.
Past the big tree. Feet quiet against the grass. Eyes soft but alert. Then movement. A man. Walking toward her from the opposite direction. He must've entered from the carpark nearby. They met halfway. They both froze. She saw his eyes widen. His mouth part. A flicker of disbelief. Then panic. He screamed.
Tried to turn and run but slipped and crashed sideways into the grass. She gasped too, caught off guard, let out a startled cry of her own. They locked eyes for a fraction of a second. Then she turned sharply, slipped back into the inner cemetery, and disappeared between headstones.
She took the long path to the other exit, change into her other cloths, walking fast, heart hammering. She didn’t stop until she reached her stepmother’s home. Quietly, she slid the black shawl and outfit into the bag and tucked it neatly back under the bed. Then she lay in the dark, pulse still racing, listening to the silence around her.
Two days later, it was in the papers. A man had reported seeing a ghost at Bidadari Cemetery. He’d pulled over at the roadside late at night, needing to relieve himself. He claimed to have encountered a woman in black. Covered entirely except for her eyes.
Eyes, he said, that stared right through him. “She screamed,” he told the reporter. “No we screamed. I think she screamed first. Or maybe I did. I don’t know.” Then came the question: “And the scream what did it sound like? Human?” The man shook his head.
"No. No, it didn’t sound human at all. More like…” He paused for dramatic effect. “Like two cats about to go into battle. That kind of shriek. Wild. Untamed. Ancient.” She nearly choked on her tea reading that part.
“Cat fight?” she muttered. “Please.” She texted her guru and told him about the incident.
"Do I need to start wearing a nametag that says: NOT A GHOST?" He replied: "No. Just get your spiritual passport renewed." And he send he a laughing emoji
She stared at the emoji a skeleton and laughter. She sighed. Then laughed again. Not because it was funny. But because of course he would send that. Because what else was there to say?
“I went looking for silence and came back a supernatural meme,” she thought. And then the update came in at the online site, as the story goes, apparently the man had driven straight to the nearby emergency department. They admitted him because his blood pressure had shot through the roof.
He kept muttering about "the eyes" how they stared through him, haunting, like they knew things he didn’t want to remember. She winced. "Enough is enough. So she made a decision. No more night visits at cemetery. No more accidental hauntings.
This wasn’t about proving anything anymore. She had gone to die to herself, not to inspire emergency room admissions. As she sat there, cross-legged in the dark in her balcony, it came to her. Not all at once. Not like lightning. More like a tide that had been waiting patiently for her to sit still long enough to notice. She wasn’t visiting a grave to mourn. She wasn’t here for the dead. She was here… for what needed to die inside her.
The grave wasn’t for them It was for her. She sat where endings live. Where breath slows. Where illusions lose their grip and in that space, she became the bridge. Between the woman she had been, and the one who was quietly emerging beneath her skin.
The grave was a meeting point between worlds. Not just between the living and the dead but between who we think we are, and who we are finally ready to become. She sat in the stillness, smiling. And when she told him later just a short message, typed fast, not overthinking “I get it now.” She could picture his face, grinning like a cat that knew this would happen all along.
“Yeeeeees,” he typed back. “You got it.” Later, when they finally spoke again, he told her “you actually don’t need to go to the grave to experience all that”
“No?” she replied confused
“Yes. No need.”
She blinked. “Then why did you send me there in the first place?”
He sipped his tea. “To see if you were up to it.” She stared at him and then grinned.
“So all that effort... and you’re telling me now there was a shortcut?”
“Sometimes,” he said, “the long way is the shortcut.” She rolled her eyes.
“Typical.” But deep down, she understood. This was the test. Not of survival, but of readiness. He leaned forward slightly, eyes soft.
“Now that you’ve crossed that... you’re ready for the next phase.”
“Which is?”
“Visualization.” She frowned. “Like imagining things?”
“No. Like seeing without your eyes. Creating internal forms with stillness and fire. Making your inner world more real than anything outside.”
She paused. “So... no more cemeteries?”
“No more need,” he smiled.
“The grave was the mirror. Now you enter the space behind the mirror.”
“Sounds... cleaner.”
“For now,” he said. “Until the mind screams louder than that man in the grass.”
She laughed. “Okay, okay. I’m ready.”
