Anthony Burgess and the Haunted Bathroom

Before he became famous as the author of “A Clockwork Orange,” Anthony Burgess spent several years working as a teacher in British Malaya. He became fascinated by the culture and folklore of the region, particularly “hantus,” the Malayan word for ghosts of various--and equally unpleasant--types. In 1955, he was confronted by a “hantu” as sinister as anything in his most famous novel, and far stranger. Some years later, he provided an account of his eerie experience to Peter Haining, where it eventually appeared in Haining’s “The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings.”

Burgess and his wife lived in Kuala Kangsar, the royal town of the state of Perak. Their home was the former Residency, known as the King’s Pavilion. It was a large, elegant place with two spacious bathrooms. The larger of the two, next to the master bedroom, was a beautiful room with colorful mosaic tiles, but it had a horrific past: when Malaya was occupied by the Japanese during WWII, it had been used as a torture chamber. The tiles still carried bloodstains that could not be eradicated. Burgess’ amah (general maid) had an understandable aversion to the room, and dreaded having to clean it. In the time of the Japanese, she noted with understatement, it was a “bad place.”

King's Pavilion.  Photo: Katherine Adamson

The Burgess household knew from the start that the room was haunted. Even when Malaya was at its hottest, the bathroom remained cold; a malignant, pervasive sort of cold. “It was somehow obscene,” Burgess noted, “as though it were trying to turn itself into a bad smell.” Understandably, the family all used the smaller bathroom, but the former “interrogation” room was an “inescapable presence.”

One day, the “presence” escalated itself. The cook, Yusof, came to the Burgesses in a state of near-hysteria, screaming about a “hantu.” When he had somewhat calmed down, he was able to say that he had gone into the master bedroom to collect shoes for cleaning. He noticed that the bathroom door was half-open. When he went to close it, he saw a strip of black, congealed blood on the floor. It rose up in the form of a tiny man and lunged for him. The panicked cook slammed the door shut and ran for his life.

At the time, at least, Burgess was a bit dubious that this was what Yusof truly had seen. Perhaps the bathroom’s undeniable air of evil played tricks on his mind. But to calm him (and likely to dissuade the servants from quitting en masse) Burgess performed a sort of DIY exorcism ceremony, even though he privately doubted that Malayan “hants” would be impressed by a Catholic liturgy.

Unfortunately, he was quite correct. Soon afterward, both Yusof and Mas (the amah) began hearing a voice, evidently emanating from a ventilator grill between the cursed bathroom and the verandah. Curiously, this phantom voice did not frighten them. It spoke in Chinese, a language neither understood, but they sensed it was a gentle presence. They believed that the voice complained a lot, but in sadness, not anger. One evening, the servants approached Burgess and his wife. The Voice was making itself heard, they explained. Would the Burgesses like to hear it for themselves?

Well, who wouldn’t? The four of them went to the verandah, where, indeed, a quiet, monotonous voice could be heard from the ventilator grill. It was impossible to make out what it was saying, or even if it was male or female, but the Voice was undeniably there. Burgess attempted to find a rational explanation--could the metal grill be acting like a loudspeaker picking up a nearby radio signal? Was it somehow echoing a human speaking in the vicinity? In his heart, however, he sensed that what he was hearing was of no earthly origin.

What was the Voice saying? With some difficulty--it is hard to get someone to act as interpreter for a ghost in our dull modern era--Burgess persuaded one of his Chinese colleagues to come over to hear the Voice for himself. The man, seeing the thing as a big joke, finally consented to go along with the gag.

One evening, as the Chinese man sat on the verandah enjoying Burgess’ whiskey, the Voice started up again. Now genuinely intrigued, he questioned the hantu in some detail, after which he gave the Voice what was clearly a long and deferential speech.

After he had finished, he told the Burgesses that the Voice had forgotten who he had been in life. However, the Voice could not forget the terrible things the Japanese had done to it in that bathroom. All it wanted was to go on complaining. The Chinese man replied that it shouldn’t interfere with the lives of the people who now lived in the house. He suggested that it go live among the banyans in the Residency Gardens. Perhaps it could try to be a bird?

The Voice obviously liked the idea. The sounds from the ventilator grill stopped, but anyone who walked in the gardens at night could hear the Voice. It was still endlessly complaining, but the noises were now oddly peaceful, having morphed into “a kind of bird-chatter.” The King’s Pavilion and its gardens still exist, so perhaps Burgess was correct in assuming that “the ghost must still be there.”

After this, the bathroom lost its macabre atmosphere. Mas now had no objection to entering it, where she found that the bloodstains could now be easily removed with soap and water. The Voice had now become a benevolent force: on one occasion, it cried out a warning when a child went too near a cobra’s nest, and on another, it stopped two gardeners from fighting.

Whatever horrors the “hantu King’s Pavilion” had endured in life, in death it had clearly finally found peace.