Now, us Singaporeans are properly superstitious. Even my atheist friends have decided to err on the side of caution whenever possible. And what I experienced, well, I don't have a reasonable explanation for it.

Context: the pontianak, according to local Malay folklore, is the ghost of a vengeful woman who lures men with her beauty before ripping out their innards, heralded by the smell of frangipani flowers.

I’m pretty sure you know where this is going.

After a typical day of Basic, the company was dismissed by the Officer Commanding with lights-out in an hour. We went to the bunks, shot the shit, and got ready for bed. Then, just as we were settling down for the night, the room's smell changes on an instant. Frangipani flowers. The whole room smelled of it. My stomach dropped.

Conversation freezes. The section stills. Even the jokers are spooked. It must have been only a few seconds but it felt like minutes. Somebody tries to disperse the tension by making a joke. The room IC quietly asks us to close our windows. We get off our beds and gingerly do that.

The windows are shut. And yet the smell remained. With no recourse or explanation for the experience, we decide to evacuate to the next section’s bunks. Despite being literally adjacent to ours', their room has NO SMELL. We are all but shitting ourselves at this point.

A recruit uses his mobile phone to contact our section sergeant, 3SG Relaxed (named as such for his particularly un-sergeant-like demeanour) who is in disbelief and probably thinks that this is just more silly recruit BS. When he gets there, he takes a sniff and instantly pales.

He knows that he COULD order us to just go to sleep, but he also knew that my section would have rather gone for a crawl in the mud wearing full combat gear than go to sleep in a room possibly inhabited by something else. He told us to stay in the other section's bunks for another ten minutes, then check again. Thankfully, the smell dissipated in that time, letting my section go to sleep. Unsurprisingly no one slept particularly well. The Malays in my section looked particularly freaked.

The next day, while marching around with the platoon, we walk past the exterior side of our bunks. We hadn't marched this direction much, so I wasn't particularly familiar with the route. So when I see the banana trees that would've been at equal height to my bunk (which was on an upper floor), I feel a chill run down my spine. You see, some people say that pontianak spirits inhabit banana trees...