07/06/2026

REPORTING THE WEIRD, THE EERIE & THE UNEXPLAINED BOO! BEYOND AND

theSunday Special XII ON SUNDAY JUNE 7, 2026

Footsteps, kopi and other unexplained things

BY AZURA ABAS newsdesk@thesundaily.com

H

ere’s the thing about ghosts - they have terrible timing. They never show up when you have witnesses. Never when your phone camera is working

properly. Always at 3am when you’ve had just enough kopi to question your own credibility. I know this because I have lived it. Multiple times. Occupational hazard, as it turns out, of being a reporter. The graveyard shift Let me take you back to about 20 years ago, to a version of me that was simultaneously exhausted, caffeinated and arguably unhinged. I was juggling a full-time job as a senior reporter at a mainstream newspaper and a part-time master’s degree, which meant the only shift that made logistical sense was the graveyard shift. Yes. The graveyard shift. In a newspaper office so legendarily haunted that the security guards – grown men, trained professionals, people who signed up to deal with threats – refused to patrol the premises alone. Always in pairs. Always. They had seen things, those guards. On their rounds and on the CCTV feeds. But those are stories for another Sunday. Tonight, we start with mine Most nights it was just me, the hum of the air conditioning and a television mounted on the wall blaring the news into an otherwise empty office. I had made my peace with the solitude. You do, eventually. You put your head down, you file your stories, you don’t think too hard about why the lights flicker or why certain corners of the room feel inexplicably colder than others. You are a journalist. You deal in facts. You are fine. Nobody there Then one night I heard footsteps. Not soft, ambiguous, could-be-anything footsteps. Loud, deliberate footsteps on the wooden walkway – the kind that demand you look up. So I did. I looked up fully expecting to see a security guard doing his rounds, probably having broken protocol and wandered up alone, poor soul. There was no one there Now, a sensible person might have sat very still and waited to see if the footsteps continued. A sensible person might have called out a calm “hello?” A sensible person might have done many reasonable things. I packed my bag at a speed that would have impressed Olympic athletes and left. The parking lot was well lit, which I appreciated. My car sat alone in the bay, gleaming under the fluorescent lights like a getaway vehicle that had been waiting patiently for exactly this moment. There I was, walking towards my car, minding my own business, when my brain

The truth is out there. So are a lot of nonsense. Every weekend, we sort through both so you don’t have to do it alone at 2am -–that absolute traitor – decided this was the ideal moment to start replaying every single creepy story it had ever stored about this particular carpark. Wonderful timing. Really appreciated that. So naturally, I picked up speed. Not running, mind you. I still had my dignity. But I was walking with purpose – the kind of walk you do when you’re late for a free buffet and someone else already has a plate. Because there was this one story. This one specific story that kept rewinding itself in my head like a bad drama on repeat. Several people had apparently seen a car. A whole, entire, fully assembled motor vehicle. Coming down that ramp at absolutely reckless speed. Like it was personally sponsored by Ferrari. Like it had somewhere important to be. But here’s the thing... no driver Empty front seat. Just a steering wheel turning itself, very confident, very unbothered, absolutely no explanation offered. That car came down like it owned the place. So yes. I walked fast. Extremely fast. I was not about to become a supporting character in somebody else’s ghost story, thank you very much. I got in, exhaled, told myself I was being ridiculous and drove off into the night. Pukau -ed It was a lovely evening actually. Cool air, quiet roads, the particular stillness of a city that has finally gone to sleep. I wound down the driver’s window to enjoy the breeze. I was perfectly calm. I was a rational adult. I was absolutely not thinking about footsteps. And then two men on a motorbike stopped me and robbed me. One of them reached through my open window and grabbed my bag off the passenger seat, bold as brass, cool as a cucumber, while his friend blocked my path from the front. I sat there. I did absolutely nothing. I want to be very clear that this man was right in front of me. I could have grabbed his hair. I could have introduced his face to my steering wheel. I am not a small woman

After hours: A quiet newsroom, a deserted walkway and footsteps with no obvious owner. – AI GENERATED IMAGE

Road Transport Department enforcement officers flagged us down. They gave us a comprehensive earful about our speed, our recklessness and our apparent disregard for our own lives. We nodded. We were appropriately contrite. And then, in the same breath, having fully established that we were idiots, one of them leaned in and told us to be careful on this road because it was keras . We knew, we told him. Why did he think we were driving like that. He nodded. He understood completely. Sometimes, it just wants a witness Those Terengganu roads have a reputation that precedes them. Drivers – usually alone, usually at night – have reported seeing a woman with long hair in a red dress flying alongside their moving car. Not running. Flying. Keeping pace. Cool as you like. What makes this particularly interesting, from a purely journalistic standpoint, is the pattern in the accounts. The driver sees the woman from his side mirror. The passenger, if there is one, sees nothing – but remarks on a smell. Just a smell. Arriving from nowhere, explaining itself to no one. The face-palm moment, as you can imagine, belongs entirely to the driver. In some versions of the story, she carries a baby. I will leave that image with you. As reporters, we had heard these stories for years, collected them the way others collect stamps, with the same mixture of obsession and mild shame. And on that road, in that car, having just been pulled over for driving like women fleeing something unspeakable, my colleague and I did what any self-respecting journalist would do. We recited every prayer we could remember. Every single one. From the depths of our respective faiths, quietly and with great sincerity, for the remainder of the drive. We made it back fine The woman in red, if she was there, kept her distance. And that, dear readers, is where this column begins – not with proof, not with debunking but somewhere in the middle. Where rational people drive too fast on dark roads and pray anyway. Where footsteps echo in empty offices and nobody stays to investigate. Where the unexplained doesn’t always want an answer. Sometimes, it just wants a witness. Welcome to Boo! and Beyond. Grab your kopi . Things are about to get weird every Sunday.

and I was, at that point, running on adrenaline and approximately four cups of kopi . I did nothing. Not a single thing. My hands stayed in my lap like they had been glued there. My mouth did not open. My body, apparently, had decided to take the night off and sent no one to cover. I have thought about this moment many times since. The only explanation I have ever been able to arrive at is pukau – that peculiarly Malay phenomenon where someone appears to have been placed under a kind of spell, rendered temporarily incapable of action or rational thought. If that is what pukau feels like, then yes, I had been thoroughly pukau -ed. I was not present in my own body. I was somewhere slightly above and to the left of it, watching events unfold with mild academic interest. The rest of that night and the following day were spent at various government counters and banks replacing my MyKad and cancelled my bank cards as well as my credit cards. I will say only this about the photograph on that replacement card – it was taken at the tail end of a very long, very traumatic 24 hours and it looked exactly like that. It was not a flattering portrait. It was, if I am being honest, the kind of image that could reasonably frighten a Pontianak . I did not waste a single day replacing it the moment the government introduced the upgraded MyKad with improved security features. That photograph has been confined to history where it belongs. But back to the supernatural because we are not done. The keras road Some time earlier in the late 90s, I found myself in Terengganu covering a PAS ceramah ahead of a general election. Night assignments in Terengganu have their own particular atmosphere – the roads are windy, the darkness is serious and the locals will tell you, without a trace of irony, exactly which stretches of tarmac are keras . Haunted, to use the more straightforward translation. Places where the veil between this world and whatever sits next to it runs a little thin. My colleague and I were driving back after the ceramah at 2am, navigating those winding roads at speeds I will put at 120 to 130 kilometres per hour. I will not apologise for this. We were reporters on deadline and also, frankly, we wanted to get off those roads before anything got curious about us. We heard our brakes scream in protest – a truly operatic sound – when several

The woman in red: One of the region’s most enduring legends, said to appear on lonely stretches of road after midnight. – AI GENERATED IMAGE