Lawang sewu,Semarang
 
Sitting on one of Semarang’s busiest traffic circles facing the Tugu Muda monument to fallen heroes and the Diponegoro military museum is Lawang Sewu, one of Indonesia’s most famous buildings. Indonesians easily recognise photographs of the building, and mentioning Lawang Sewu will energise a lagging conversation. The story of its fame is a tale of competing narratives. Its impressive architecture evokes the nation’s ambiguous colonial past. The site of a revolutionary skirmish, it had its own part in Indonesia’s complicated and internecine revolution. And its infamous reputation for being the home to unhappy ghosts who died bad deaths feeds a popular fascination with the gruesome and macabre.
Currently, official efforts to write the narrative of Lawang Sewu are losing ground to local myths and folk tales. Unfortunately for government agencies and local boosters, the official story has little to do with the building’s dramatic rise in popularity with domestic tourists. The government monuments of earlier eras gave unambiguous signals. But the meaning of Lawang Sewu for contemporary Indonesia is slippery and confused. Dutch monuments sought to cement the power of imperial enterprise, Sukarno’s monuments stressed the young nation’s alleged unity and burgeoning strength, and Suharto’s New Order monuments praised the general as the saviour of the nation and vilified the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) as an almost satanic existential threat. In contrast, Lawang Sewu illustrates that today’s Reformasi era struggles to define itself.

An imperial temple

The Kota Lama area of Semarang is home to one of the best collections of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial buildings in Southeast Asia. Sadly, like Jakarta’s Kota Tua, this neighbourhood is in a desperate state of neglect and decay. But Lawang Sewu, just a kilometre down the road from this musty neighbourhood, stands in freshly-painted contrast.
The building’s architecture is an example of the imperial propaganda common to the cities of colonial Southeast Asia. As with other colonial public works, Lawang Sewu sought to convey imperial order, power and permanence in Dutch Semarang. Originally built as the headquarters for the Dutch East Indies Railway Company, construction began in 1904, with the main building completed in 1907 and other parts of the complex finished in 1919. It is actually four structures on a large plot of land protected by a high fence, and was once linked to other buildings in the city by underground tunnels. One of the structures, Building B, has a massive basement that could be filled with water as an early air conditioning system. However, the most impressive component of the complex is the L-shaped Building A.
Dominating the corner of Jalan Pemuda and Jalan Pandanaran, Building A could easily be mistaken for a church. Two four-story towers (which initially held massive water tanks) flank the broad corner façade, and a third rear tower anchors the powerful edifice. Gleaming Dutch-style red tiles draw the eye across the roofline, as the large structure soars above this relatively flat section of the city. Between the two towers, a massive arch guards the second floor veranda, which in turn reaches out to shade the beautiful dark wood and stained glass front doors. Reaching away from the facade, down the length of both streets, stretch the shady door-lined arcades that give this building its name: Lawang Sewu is Javanese for ‘thousand doors’. While short of a thousand, the labyrinthine series of doors in the other buildings of the complex definitely add to the sense of mystery.

Colonial modernisation and its discontents

Entering Lawang Sewu’s Building A is to enter a chapel dedicated to Dutch technology. The stained glass panels fill the room with light and lift the eyes to the arch of the ceiling. It would be easy to assume the glasswork depicted biblical stories, but this room is dedicated to the contemplation of progress in the form of the railroad and Dutch ingenuity.
Given its grandeur, we might expect Lawang Sewu to have housed a more glamorous enterprise than a railway administration. So why did the railway get such an ostentatious home? The ideology of empire gives us an answer. As with Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’ and the French ‘Mission Civilisatrice’, the Dutch colonial government’s Ethical Policy justified conquest and occupation by arguing that they brought modernity in the form of commerce, the rule of law and industrial infrastructure to the backwards East Indies.
Even while denying freedom, the colonial enterprise delivered key aspects of European modernity. And what was more modern than industrialised mass transportation? If in Europe rail travel symbolised the transformative powers of modernity, in the Dutch East Indies and in European colonies worldwide, railways became the great symbol of European supremacy, and they required buildings that announced this. With Lawang Sewu, the Dutch architect Cosman Citroen accomplished the goal of creating a monument that sang the power of empire.
Yet a competing narrative also haunts the building. Someone had to lay and maintain the thousands of kilometres of rail, labour in the machine shops and shovel coal into the engines of Dutch colonial trains, and they were not always content. Railway workers were notorious for left-wing political activism. So as they created an infrastructure of industrialised transportation, the Dutch also created an Indonesian industrial proletariat. It was no coincidence that colonial Semarang was both home to the headquarters of the Dutch railways and the birthplace of the PKI in 1920, with railway workers playing an important role in the early party history. Thus, while Lawang Sewu was a symbol of the Dutch imposed capitalist socio-economic transformation, it also unwittingly hosted covert agitation and conspiracies against the colonial order of things.

A thousand doors, a thousand photos, Michael G. Vann

Occupation and revolution

Lawang Sewu’s golden age as a symbol of empire was not to last. Its troubles started with the Second World War. As Japan’s Asian blitzkrieg quickly swept aside centuries of colonial rule in Southeast Asia, the new conquerors quickly appropriated some of the best real estate for themselves. In Semarang, the Japanese took over Lawang Sewu, with the Kempeitai using the massive basement of Building B as a detention centre. As rumours circulated of brutal torture and summary executions, locals came to view the building with dread.
One story held that the severed heads of former prisoners were thrown into a corner in the basement. When the Japanese war machine collapsed in 1945, Indonesian nationalists claimed the city and the Dutch launched an attack on Semarang. Making use of the tunnels that once linked Lawang Sewu to other strategic sites in the city, troops penetrated the city’s defences and came to the surface to attack key sites in October. For five days, skirmishes raged in the city, with six railway workers dying at Lawang Sewu.
Today a sombre monument stands to honour the fallen and to educate visitors about the role of Indonesia’s nationalist youth who resisted both the Dutch and Japanese occupations. Yet few of the domestic tourists (overwhelmingly youths themselves) stop to read the plaque on the small squat structure near the exit of the tour.
What many do remember – or at least think they remember – about the war is that people, mostly Dutch colonials, were tortured and died violent deaths in Lawang Sewu.  The consequence, as clear as any political one, is of course that their unhappy ghosts threaten to harass the living until they finally find a proper resting place. This popularly held view tends to upstage any nationalist attempts to evoke Lawang Sewu’s role in the revolution. The macabre and paranormal offer more of a spine-tingle than the edifying lessons of sacrifice for one’s country.

From neglect to stardom

In the early years of the republic, the newly nationalised Indonesian railway, Pt. Kereta Api, took over Lawang Sewu. However, as it began to age and Pt. Kereta Api Indonesia failed to reinvest sufficient funds for maintenance and as newer office complexes were built in the 1970s, the building fell into disrepair. In recent decades it was clearly falling apart and headed towards ruin, much like other colonial era neighbourhoods of Semarang, Jakarta and Surabaya.
Decades of neglect were evident in the deep stains and missing roof tiles. The floors of two rooms bore the markings of long abandoned badminton courts and sky can be seen through several spots in the attic roof. Ghost stories multiplied as Lawang Sewu truly began to look the part of a haunted house. Men who wanted to prove their courage would venture into the building in the darkness or even try to spend an entire night inside. This is not surprising as in kejawen, or Javanese spiritualism, there is great significance in the linkage of violent death to specific spaces.
These local ghost stories were cemented into the national consciousness with the 2007 film Lawang Sewu: Dendam Kuntilanak (Lawang Sewu: Kuntilanak's Vengeance). It tells the story of a group of young people out for a night of partying in Semarang. When they wind up inside the old building, the resident spirits become angry and seek revenge after one youth disrespectfully urinates on their home. Amongst the ghosts defending the dignity of the building are a Dutchwoman who committed suicide and a kuntilanak, the vampiric manifestation of a woman who died in childbirth. The director makes use of Lawang Sewu’s striking architecture, including its more gothic looking features, its surreal and seemingly endless hall of doors and the seriously spooky basement of Building B.
Of dubious artistic merit and paned by some critics (one accused the director of ‘raping’ a culturally significant site), the film did relatively well at the box office – not at all surprising considering the Indonesian fascination with ghosts. Lawang Sewu was then the subject of further intrusions from reality television as a series of lowbrow infotainment shows began to investigate the haunted building, with a headless Dutchwoman, possibly executed by the Japanese, mentioned most often. Indonesia’s recent proliferation of smart phones and obsession with social media has ensured that the Internet is now full of blurry images of Lawang Sewu’s alleged ghosts.

An exercise in exorcism

In 2009, Pt. Kereta Api announced a plan to revitalise Lawang Sewu. Stressing the new concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, plans cited the site’s national and international cultural heritage and noted that without conservation this cultural resource could crumble from neglect. Perhaps motivated by examples of colonial nostalgia tourism as seen in projects in Siem Reap, Malacca and Singapore, investors set about both preserving the existing buildings in the complex and proposing new functions for Lawang Sewu.
In July 2011, First Lady Ani Yudhoyono presided over the opening of the fully renovated Building A. Various media reports that covered the ceremony wanted to dispel the myth that the building was the domain of terrifying ghosts, speaking of Ibu Ani as if she had performed an exorcism. The local tourist board hoped that her presence and the opening of a craft fair at the site would reinvent the haunted house as a community centre, and argue that with future rehabilitation the site can serve as an anchor for tourism in Semarang and Central Java. Subsequent press releases that speak of Lawang Sewu losing its ‘mystical air’ show that the official narrative has no place for the supernatural.
Much of the completed work is quite admirable. Facades and interiors were repaired and repainted. Beautiful stained glass was restored. The grounds were cleared. As the project also sought to educate visitors, several rooms on the ground floor of Building B now house presentations on the history of the building and of railways in Indonesia. This public history exhibit skates around the issue of who built the railways and for what purposes. Indeed, it is striking that in this monument to empire, the historical context of colonialism is not discussed. Yet, like the unhappy souls of those who died bad deaths, the ghosts of empire and revolution haunt Lawang Sewu. They can be seen in the imperial designs of the architects and the use of the weak euphemism ‘international style’ in lieu of ‘colonial style’.
Another spectre that haunts Lawang Sewu is the Indonesian Revolution, especially its more radical factions. While there is a monument and plaque to fallen nationalist soldiers, there is no mention of working class radicalism or of the role of the PKI in resisting Dutch colonial rule. While this would have been unthinkable under Suharto, the possibility of such complexity and nuance entering the historical narrative is now possible but remains unlikely. For now, the memorial on the grounds, like the massive obelisk and bas relief in the centre of the traffic circle, and the Diponegoro Division museum, still promote allegedly deceased New Order militarism, not the unsettling and unsettled spirits of social revolution.
Ironically, it is the ghosts of empire, both metaphoric and literal, that have saved Lawang Sewu by seducing investors to revive its long neglected structures with a large infusion of cash. Interest in refurbishing the building is clearly tied to both the structure as an excellent example of high colonial architecture and the popular fascination of the morbid and the supernatural. Yet official statements are loathe to invoke either imperial, ghostly, or complicated revolutionary narratives. Thus press releases fail to clearly state why Lawang Sewu is receiving such generous attention.

Monumental past, uncertain future

The various governments of twentieth century Indonesia hoped to crystallise their identity in their monuments, but this new century is remarkably lacking in such construction and this absence is perhaps best explained by the current lack of ideological consensus. Apparently, democracy is a much messier state of affairs than authoritarianism – be it colonial, nationalist or militarist. So try as it might to define the significance of Lawang Sewu, the current administration consistently finds the building’s meaning to be haunted, both metaphorically and literally, by unresolved issues of times gone by.
A contemporary visitor to Lawang Sewu might be confused as to why he or she is there. What is the significance of the building? Why is it being preserved? What aspect of Indonesia’s history does it represent? These questions are not clearly answered in the official information. Future visitors might be drawn in by the huge commercial renovation in store for the site: Building A would be home to a first floor exhibit, a second floor library and a third floor gallery, while the infamous Building B will be rented out as retail shops on the first floor and office space on the second floor, with the third floor housing a food court and fitness centre (where one could torture themselves on a treadmill or in an aerobics class).
But, today, many visitors do know why they are there. Jalan Pemuda’s vivid graffiti murals of snarling, clawed spirits grasp at them as they approach Lawang Sewu to see the home of some of Indonesia’s most famous ghosts.

Michael G. Vann is an Associate Professor of World History at California State University, Sacramento, author of ‘The Colonial Good Life’ A Commentary on Andre Joyeux’s Vision of French Indochina (White Lotus Press, 2008), and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universitas Gadjah Mada where he is busting colonial ghosts and chasing the phantoms of empire.

.  Clark air base
Clark Air Base, Hospital, Home Plate canteen, Clark Museum Clark Air Base, being an American settlement, experienced some major bombing from the Japanese during the War. One of these reportedly happened during Christmas of 1941 -- an air raid that was the death of merrymakers inside the Home Plate canteen, who were then celebrating Christmas. The souls apparently have not lost their party spirit, as early morning joggers have reported hearing party music and excited talk coming from inside, even when the building is obviously empty. Other paranormal activities are reported in the abandoned Clark Air Base Hospital, where apparitions and mysterious voices are common occurrences. Violent spirits witnessed by the inhabitants have rendered the area off limits to everyone. And in Clark Museum, the ghost of a serviceman who committed suicide still haunts the place where he hanged himself.

Clark Airbase has a long, turbulent, and often bloody history in the Philippines. The old air force base was closed after the US withdrawal, and a portion of the large base became the DMIA airport, commonly thought of as Manila’s second airport. However, there are a number of reminders of that bloody past in existence today, and those locations are some of the most haunted in the Philippines. The base also was the location to which many wounded American soldiers we evacuated during the Vietnam war, and the traumas and deaths from that conflict have also left their mark on the spirit presence in the hospital.

Just after Christmas, 1941, the base was bombed by the Japanese, and the Home Plate canteen was hit, killing most of the personnel inside who were celebrating with their holiday dinner. Near the foundations of the old canteen, the sounds of swing music are often heard in the early morning hours while no-one is present or nearby.
The modern airport has a museum on the grounds, and there is an apparition inside of an aviator who supposedly committed suicide to avoid capture that has often been seen.
The base hospital, now in ruins, sees the most spirit activity. Screams are often heard, as are dancing orbs of light. Voices in the empty building are also often heard, and there have been countless reports of apparitions being seen walking or floating through the building, most bearing the scars of battle. Several unidentified white forms have also been observed floating across the airstrip. Objects have often been “thrown” at visitors, making them aware that their presence is unwelcome, in no uncertain terms. The hospital was said to be haunted even while it was open and operational: Many employees heard doors opening and closing on their own or saw unexplained people standing nearby who simply vanished.
A Mambabarang is a kind of a mangkukulam. Mambabarangs are ordinary human beings with black magic powers who torture and later kill their victims by infesting their bodies with insects. They are different from Mangkukulams - the latter only inflict pain or illness. Mambabarangs use a strand of hair from their chosen victim and tie it to the bugs or worms which they will use as a medium. When they prick the bug, the victim immediately experiences the intended effect. Mambabarang are often said to gather nearby. They are known as a summoner of the dead or as a witch who uses insects and spirits to enter the body of any person they hate.
Numerous TV crews have visited the hospital, investigating whether the spirit presence is real, and a number of them have literally been frightened so badly that they fled immediately. Several other crews have captured several spirits on camera, including the “Ghost Hunters” crew. It is notable that the hospital is one of the few places that Ghost Hunters ever examined that was actually deemed haunted.

Kadena Air Base: Tales of strange sightings, noises at Building 2283 spook Kadena air base

Each year during the week leading up to Halloween, Building 2283 on Kadena Air Base becomes a focal point for tour groups visiting spooky sites on Okinawa.
The building is actually a single-unit family home that sits in a residential area reserved for mid-grade officers and civilians of comparable rank. A day-care center sits next to it.
The tranquil surroundings belie the hair-raising, spine-tingling stories associated with the house.
Tour guides tell of murders former residents committed and of eerie occurrences: water faucets and lights turning on and off by themselves, apparitions of a Samurai warrior riding a horse through the house and of a woman washing her hair in the utility sink. Former residents and neighbors also reported hearing the voices of children laughing and crying, when no children were around.
Base officials stopped assigning families to the home years ago. It is now uninhabited and serves as a storage facility.
April Marling, director of Kadena’s Information Tickets and Travel office, recalled one frightening moment two years ago while she was giving the annual Spooky Sites tour. It was late at night as 30 people gathered in the back yard to hear her recount the history of the home.
“Suddenly, the phone started ringing in the house,” Marling said. Everybody darted for the bus, she added.
Nobody orchestrated the phone call to enhance the effect of a Halloween scare tour, Marling said. As far as she knew, there shouldn’t have been a phone line connected to an uninhabited house, she said.
Another group visiting the house in the mid-1990s had a similar experience, said Jerry Johnson, a former tour director for Kadena’s United Services Organization.
As the tour guide began speaking, “a curtain parted in front of all of them,” said Johnson. “That was enough to break up the tour for the evening.”
For some years after housing officials stopped offering the home as a residence, USO personnel used the house, which sits behind the USO parking lot, for storage.
Johnson said he had heard all the stories and was curious to check out the house. So he and some fellow USO employees went inside. Although it was summer and nearly 100 degrees outside, he said the house was ice cold as if the air conditioning had been left on high.
Because past residents had often complained of one room being much colder than the rest of the house, base officials knocked down that room.
Besides the chill he felt in the un-air-conditioned house, Johnson said he saw bloodstains on the floor and on the old curtains. “It was an extremely eerie experience going into that house. One could almost feel a presence there,” Johnson said.
Author Jayne Hitchcock wrote about the residence in her 1995 book “The Ghosts of Okinawa,” which documents a number of Okinawan ghost tales. From her research, Hitchcock determined, “The most frequently heard and most horrifying story is of the teenage girl who was stabbed to death by her stepfather. They were the last family to live in the house. After the murder, it was boarded up before being used as storage.”
Other tour guides speak of an officer bludgeoning his wife to death.
Hitchcock, who lived on Okinawa from 1992 to 1995 while her husband was assigned there as a Marine, said base officials were very vague about the details then.
Kadena housing and security forces officials did not respond to recent Stars and Stripes’ questions about the house or alleged murders there.
In her book, Hitchcock details how she held a séance in the house on Halloween night in 1994. During the séance, she said she spoke with a spirit of a little girl who played with the spirit of a little boy. The girl said she was afraid of a man on a horse.
The author noted how a candle flame would jump up four or five inches each time she would ask a question that required a yes answer. She claimed to have a recording device that picked up whispers of the spirit answering questions.
Although many people asked her to do more séances, Hitchcock said she was so spooked and unnerved by her experience, she never returned to the house.
Because ancestor worship is deeply imbedded in Okinawan religious life, many island locals are very superstitious, said IT&T tour guide Setsuko Inafuku. They believe that many sites on the island built on or near ancient burial grounds or sacred sites become prime sites for hauntings.
Inafuku said local city officials believe a tomb across the street from Kadena’s haunted house belonged to an Okinawan Samurai warrior. The house may have been built on part of that property, she said.
On the Spooky Sites tour, Inafuku takes groups to several sites throughout the island that are believed to be haunted. The house is one of three sites on Kadena that the tour passes. Another site is in a cave near Kadena’s Banyan Tree golf course where the Japanese had a field hospital during World War II.
After the Americans took the airfield, 17 volunteer nurses committed suicide in the cave. For Okinawans it’s a very spooky place, said Inafuku, who refused to go near the entrance of the cave.
One problem that arises after the spooky sites tour is that many youths want to go back to explore the sites on their own, said Marling. “My concern is that we respect the land and the history associated with it. We don’t want to disrupt the land and cause a disturbance with the locals,” Marling said.
Inafuku’s concern was more on a spiritual nature. She warned that people should never go to these sites alone, and they should go prepared to appease the spirits.
the picture of the military house in kadena air base (2283):

and this ghost video of the military house in kadena air base (2283):
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S8pAqAWZko

 Tak tat school

2 students formed a "Spiritual exploration team" to investigate a haunted school. Yesterday afternoon, the group went to Yuen Long Tat Tak School in Ping Shan following constant reports of the school being haunted. During their "exploration", a girl saw a female ghost in red dress in front of a tomb stone in the graveyard next to the school. After she told the team members, the whole group left the site and ran for 30 minutes. When the group were catching their breath, the girl suddenly started screaming and tried to strangle herself with her bare hands around her neck. Her team members tried to stop her from hurting herself, one of the boys was bitten by her. Two other girls also fainted at one stage and one girl had to be taken to hospital.

The "Spiritual exploration team" consists of 4 boys and 8 girls. Most of the team members are students from a secondary school in Tin Shui Wai. According to the team leader Ah Cheung, they heard that Tat Tak School which has been "abandoned" for over 20 years is haunted. They wanted to find out more about the rumors, hence they formed a team to investigate. Yesterday was the teacher's training day, there was no school. 12 of them met up at the entrance of Tat Tak School at 3:30pm. When they entered the school, they saw the ground was covered with weeds and a few stray dogs were circling around the campus. There were two tombs at the hillside next to the basketball court. They heard foot steps coming towards them, and then the foot steps seemed to have disappeared. A girl called Law suddenly saw a long hair girl dressed in red in front of the tomb stone. She asked the other team members if they saw her too, but they all said "No, didn't see it". The team members looked at each other in horror, they started running towards the entrance and left the school. About 30 minutes later when they reached Ping Shan light rail, they stopped to catch their breath. One member was shaking and said "Just now that one was dressed in white, not in red." When Law heard that, her face turned white, and she started screaming and put her hands around her own neck. The other team members tried to stop her hurting herself, Ah Cheung poured water at her hoping to wake her up, but Law started to bite his arm and scratched him. The team managed to calm her down and they called the police. Law then fainted and two other girls also fainted at that time. When Law came round, she said when she fainted, she saw images of many dead people.

Tat Tak School was founded in 1931, it was moved to that new site in 1974 but the school was closed in 1998. It was rumored that the school mistress dressed in red committed suicide in the girl's toilet, hence it became haunted. Some people say that in 1941 during the Japanese occupation, a large number of villagers were killed resisting the Japanese in Ping Shan, their remains were buried in a mass grave at the hillside next to the school.

picture of the tat tak school: