Do you believe in ghosts?

Saturday 15 October 2005.
Old memories come back haunting.
It’s the holy month of Ramadan and the Devil is bound from mischief. Other spirits however may still be up to their old tricks, or perhaps even some new ones. I heard yesterday that my Aunt back in Kelantan had a close encounter with some of these spirits a couple of nights ago.
The story really began back in WW2 when the Japanese occupied Malaya. The Japanese soldiers landed in Kelantan and went on to take over the entire peninsular. During the early days of the occupation, a Japanese squad made camp beside the river less than a kilometer away from my grandmother’s place. They stayed there for quite sometime, perhaps waiting orders from the headquarters in Kota Bharu. In that time, they interacted with the local villagers and some of that interaction led to dire consequences on the part of the villagers. I guess, some villagers had decided that they had enough.
The squad, or perhaps there was a small platoon by then, would march up and down the road that is, today, the main road that passes right in front of my grandmother’s house. From the stories I heard, I guess that these were new soldiers because the marching and stories of other things that went on in the camp suggested that these were new recruits being trained by their seniors. They marched from the camp beside the river that runs beside Kampung Cabang Empat to Kampung Pauh Lima and back carrying their guns. There would be two officers, or perhaps senior soldiers, leading this column and they wore those caps that have a piece of cloth stuck to their back covering the back of the wearer’s neck. This small platoon of soldiers was decimated one night when they were attacked by troops comprising Coalition soldiers and local militiamen.
I remember hearing stories of ghostly sightings at the camp site when I was a kid but I have not heard of any for a long long time until my Aunt experience recently.
It was about four in the morning, when my Aunt was making her way from her house to my grandmother’s house next-door. The two houses are only separated by a few feet. They had decided to have syahur at my grandmother’s house that morning. For some unknown reason, they did not switch on both porch lights that morning. My Aunt was almost at my Grandmother’s steps when she heard the sound of many feet stomping the ground: the sound of people marching, on the road a few feet away. That struck her a strange. “Who would be marching at this hour,” she thought.
She peered into the darkness, it seems that even the street lights were out that night, and she saw two figures marching side by side coming from the direction of Pauh Lima but the sound that accompanied them came from a whole file of feet. The two figures had those Japanese soldier caps and had rifles slung on their shoulders. They marched closer and my Aunt said that she was petrified in place, unable to neither move nor call out. As the two figures and the invisible troops moved past the compound, one of them turned his face to my Aunt. She said she did not see any faces under the cap. She added that she saw their upper torso but she saw neither legs nor feet.
It wasn’t until they had passed that my Aunt was able to move, and she quickly ran into my grandmother’s house where the family was waiting. Of course, by the time she had related the experience to the others and they went to investigate, no troops could be found.
Perhaps, it’s the ghosts want their presence remembered because people no longer told stories of what happened during the Japanese occupation or stories of ghosts that originated from that era. I guess it is because it is becoming harder to picture the Japanese as the ruthless and merciless occupying army when you drive Toyotas, keep you food in a Toshiba refrigerator and watch soppy soap operas on Sharp televisions