Many NS men who have served in the School of Basic Military Training (SBMT)in Nee Soon Camp in the 1980s have heard of the "famous" 1st Wing Echo Company. In the first half of the 1980s, it was housed in an old building at a corner of the parade square, with its back facing the old School of Signals.

The building, like many other buildings in the camp (now closed down or demolished), was built in 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War. My father witnessed the camp's construction and I was an instructor in 1st Wing Echo Company during the 1983-1985 period.

There have been a number of ghostly encounters by instructors and trainees in this building, but I shall narrate an unusual one here.

Some people believe that one should not kill a baby cobra, or death will befall the person or place. Some time in late 1984 or early 1985, one of the staff, in an act of bravado, caught a baby cobra and a baby python. He placed them in an empty fish tank as part of "entertainment". Being inexperienced in how to feed them, it was a matter of time before the two snakes suffocated or starved to death.

Around midnight in June 1985, a platoon sergeant went to the toilet. As he passed by the laundry room, he thought he saw a recruit standing inside. Having answered nature's call, he went back to his bunk, passing by the laundry room again. Still drowsy from his interrupted sleep, he asked the trainee what he was still doing at this unearthly hour. No response. He blinked again, and to his horror, the trainee was dangling from his bootlace tied around his neck, hanging from the laundry bar.

In July 1985, another suicide occurred in Echo Company. Early one morning, trainees from the next-door Delta company walked out to the common staircase for breakfast. To their horror, they saw a trainee dangling from a nylon toggle rope tied to the corrdior bar.

Well, any connection between the deaths of the two baby snakes and the two recruits? Some of you may not believe so, but it was serious enough to warrant the late CO of the camp to call in Taoist priests and other exorcists to cleanse the whole building of unclean spirits.