On Singapore’s Bukit Larangan, the Forbidden Hill now known as Fort Canning, an early colonial story places an unseen crowd above the settlement. The Temenggong’s men reportedly heard gongs, drums and human shouts there, and feared to climb it. In Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s retrospective account, William Farquhar answered their warning by taking a cannon uphill and firing it twelve times. The surviving narrative documents a haunted reputation and an assertion of authority; it does not supply an independently verified encounter with spirits.
Map location: Approximate area: rounded Fort Canning Hill reference, historically Bukit Larangan. The memoir’s listening position and cannon emplacement are uncertain; this is not an exact ghostly encounter point. Geographical coordinate source.
A hill with an older prohibition
The hill’s name already had an explanation before the ghostly sounds entered the story. In chapter 11 of the 1918 English translation of Abdullah’s autobiography, the Temenggong tells Farquhar that former rulers had their palace there. People could ascend only by royal order or summons. He also identifies a restricted bathing place behind the hill, associated with the ruler’s wives and concubines. In this telling, the prohibition originated in access to a royal residence, rather than in a demonstrated supernatural danger.
That distinction gives the episode its setting. The conversation about the hill occurs within Abdullah’s account of negotiations over a British settlement: ships offshore, tents being erected, a well dug, and arrangements made with local rulers. The hill was part of an inhabited and politically meaningful landscape. Treating it simply as an empty patch of frightening jungle would remove the earlier authority that the name preserved. Abdullah’s description gives readers both a royal explanation of the taboo and, later, a supernatural reason for avoiding the ascent.
What the men were said to hear
The central passage is on printed page 123 of W. G. Shellabear’s translation, The Autobiography of Munshi Abdullah, published at Singapore in 1918. It begins with Farquhar wishing to go up the hill. The Temenggong’s men refuse: their explanation is that evil spirits inhabit it, accompanied by sounds resembling a multitude of people. They describe recurring noise, including percussion and shouting. This is a reported collective warning, without a list of individual witnesses, separate statements or the dates and conditions of particular listening episodes.
The account does not describe transparent figures, a procession seen among the trees, or a face-to-face confrontation. Its uncanny element is chiefly acoustic, combined with a reluctance to enter a particular place. Nor does Abdullah provide a measured duration, direction, distance or comparison with a known source of sound. Those omissions matter when later versions turn an early account of local belief into an apparently precise investigation of a haunting.
The cannon and the ascent
Farquhar laughs and expresses a wish to see the ghosts, then orders his Malacca men to pull a cannon up the hill. Abdullah distinguishes these men from the Singapore men, whom he says would not approach. The men doing the work are also frightened, but go on under the pressure of Farquhar’s presence. The ascent therefore does not show that everyone had dismissed the warning. Within the narrative, obedience and embarrassment overcome an expressed fear.
The hill itself is described as having relatively little jungle and only scattered larger trees. At the top, Farquhar has the cannon loaded with shot and fires twelve rounds in different directions. A pole is erected and the English flag raised. He orders the brushwood cut and a road made, with clearing and road work continuing thereafter. These practical consequences occupy the close of the episode. The story moves from a place people decline to enter to one being opened, altered and claimed.
There is no report here of an apparition fleeing, a spirit answering the gunfire, or a subsequent controlled watch establishing that the mysterious sounds stopped. A later assertion that the cannon proved the ghosts unreal, or permanently drove them away, goes beyond this passage. Firing a weapon and clearing vegetation can change people’s use of a place without establishing what an earlier sound was. The memoir records the challenge and its social outcome more clearly than it records any test of the alleged phenomenon.
Farquhar or Raffles?
The commander’s identity is a genuine problem in the transmission of the story. Shellabear’s 1918 text repeatedly names Farquhar. Ng Yi-Sheng’s 2017 essay, published by Singapore’s National Library Board in BiblioAsia, retells the expedition under Stamford Raffles. Its first endnote explicitly acknowledges that Abdullah named Farquhar, while later historians considered Raffles the likely leader, citing Emily Hahn’s Raffles of Singapore. That qualification should travel with the familiar retelling.
These are not two independent ghost encounters. They are different attributions attached to the same narrative. The edition inspected for this case supports what Abdullah’s account says about Farquhar; the modern essay establishes that the identification has been challenged. Hahn’s underlying argument has not been independently checked here, so this case retains the disagreement rather than substituting a confident new identification. Likewise, 1819 is the conventional setting of the founding-era story, not a day and month supplied for the hill ascent in the passage.
Reading a retrospective memoir
Abdullah is an important early narrator of Malacca and Singapore, but this is a recollection transmitted through a later English translation. His introductory account presents the book as a requested telling of his ancestry and life, covering what he had seen and heard. It also acknowledges the possibility of errors and forgotten details. Dialogue laid out as direct speech in an autobiography should not automatically be treated as a verbatim transcript made at the moment.
That caution is especially relevant to the supernatural warning. The passage gives the Temenggong’s men a shared speech, and the ascent a compact dramatic shape: warning, laughter, reluctant labour, cannon fire, flag and clearance. It preserves how the incident was narrated. It does not tell us which parts Abdullah personally witnessed, how the wording was recovered, or whether the men themselves would have described their fear in the same terms. The surviving English voice is also mediated by Shellabear’s choices as translator.
The surrounding chapter illustrates the narrator’s perspective. It describes the early settlement through negotiations, unfamiliar landscapes and encounters between groups, and sometimes characterises the Orang Laut in language that is plainly disparaging. Those judgments belong to the historical text and should not become an unexamined description of the people concerned. The ghost episode can be read as a story about unequal power and entry into restricted space, without assuming that a European officer’s confidence settles the beliefs of the men whose work made the ascent possible.
The landscape visitors encounter
The present park contains interpretations of these older layers. Singapore’s National Parks Board describes the Pancur Larangan garden as a recreation of the former royal bathing place in a fourteenth-century Javanese style. It also identifies the Artisan’s Garden with earlier craftsmen’s activity and archaeological excavation. These features help explain why the hill has significance beyond its colonial associations. A modern recreation, however, is not an untouched survival of the setting described in the memoir.
The photograph accompanying this case shows the fort gate in November 2005, as documented by its photographer. It provides recognisable location context, rather than evidence of the early ascent or the reported noises. This record is left without a map pin: the source identifies the hill but does not establish a precise listening position or where the cannon was placed. No present-day gate, garden or shrine is being identified as the verified source of the sounds.
What remains of the case
Bukit Larangan’s ghostly drums survive as a specific written tradition, with a traceable episode and a disputed central name. The strongest evidence here is for the existence and later retelling of the story: a warning about unseen crowds, frightened labourers, a cannon and a flag. The historical account leaves the acoustic cause untested. Its value lies in preserving a remembered encounter between local prohibitions and colonial intervention, while allowing readers to see where testimony ends and interpretation begins.
Sources and related reading
Abdullah, The Autobiography of Munshi Abdullah, translated by W. G. Shellabear (1918): introduction and chapter 11, especially printed pages 119 and 123. The haunted-ascent passage is PDF page 131; some machine-readable text misidentifies the printed page. This early memoir translation is the principal source, rather than a contemporary investigation report.
Ng Yi-Sheng, “A History of Singapore Horror” (BiblioAsia, 2017): founding-era retelling and endnote 1 on the Farquhar/Raffles disagreement. National Parks Board, historical gardens at Fort Canning Park: present landscape interpretation and recreated features.
For another case where a written ghost narrative must be distinguished from independently documented events, see Hōichi the Earless at Shimonoseki. Return to Case Files.