There Was a Haunted Tree Outside My Office

In 2010, I was in charge of overseeing a small warehouse in Malaysia. We packed and stacked up cartons full of stuff like coffee, tea, creamer, chocolate and so on.

It was basically a small lot with all kinds of machines installed. We had over a dozen workers who would work round the clock sometimes to fulfill orders.

When I signed up for the job what puzzled me was the large old tree inside the compound of that factory. For some reason, it was left alone when everything else around it had been cleared to make way for the parking lot.

That was the strange bit, parking our cars next to an old tree that seemed totally out of place there. But no one seemed to mind. No one also said a word to me.

Then something happened one night.

Thankfully, I was not on duty. But the night manager reported the strangest thing to me.

One of the workers, an immigrant from Bangladesh, was walking out the back of the factory to smoke a cigarette. He saw something that made his skin crawl.

In the moonlight, he could make out the silhouette of a woman wearing a long white dress, standing on the large branches of that tree. Her face was hidden by long black hair that reached to well below her knees. She seemed to be standing perfectly still. Then, as the man watched in horror, the woman, face still hidden by her long tresses, jumped off the branch and floated upwards!

She floated into the sky and immediately disappeared!

The man was so traumatised that he refused to return to work the next night.

That was not an isolated incident.

Several months later, two seasonal workers on night shift reported seeing, in their own words, “a woman flying away from the big tree at the back”. Their description fit what the other worker had reported months ago.

Others reported hearing what sounded like a woman’s cackling laugh coming from out of nowhere at night.

Puzzled, I asked top management about it. One of the managers told me a curious story.

The previous owner of the property had decided to cut the tree down but had failed. Multiple times.

It seemed that whenever they tried to cut it, the machinery would fail, an unfortunate accident would happen to the staff or the person assigned to do the cutting would fall sick.

In Malaysia, we have several superstitions about certain trees, that they can be homes of spirits and other entities. I myself had smelled a sickly-sweet fragrance emanating from the area around that tree during the daytime, even though the gnarled branches did not grow flowers of any kind.

The previous owner was certain the tree was haunted and refused to chop it down. The ethnic Malay staff whispered about the “pontianak” — a female vampire-like entity. Some say she is the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. Others say she was a woman who had died at the hands of men.

Some say the “pontianak” craved the blood of pregnant women and children. Others say that she attacks men, perhaps in vengeance for whatever horrible things that had been done to her when she died.

Popular folklore describe the “pontianak” as being almost bird-like, perching on — you guess it — tall trees at night. The legends also speak about her being associated with a sickly-sweet fragrance, the smell of a certain species of night-blooming flower. Whild I did not see her, I did smell flowers emanating from somewhere near that tree. The staff who was with me asked me if I smelled it too, I said yes. She then shrugged and gave me a look that said “you know what it is, right?”

We stopped the graveyard shift due to low orders, but when I left that job over a year later, everyone still avoided that tree and refused to go near it.

A few years ago, while I was living abroad, I did a Google Earth search of the area and, zooming down on the old factory lot, saw that the tree was still standing there.

If you do happen to come to Penang, Malaysia, and are curious about the supernatural, I’d be happy to take you to the area. In fact, I can bring you to that very factory. Just don’t ask me to bring you there at night.