April 6, 2025 • 58 mins
Deep in Malaysia's tangled jungle stands what remains of a colonial nightmare—a mansion with 99 doors where boundaries between worlds have worn dangerously thin. This week, we explore the haunting legacy of Caledonia House, a monument to British imperialism that became something far more sinister.
The story begins with land that was never empty. For over 40,000 years, indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula recognized the jungle as alive with spirits—guardians, tricksters, and vengeful entities that demanded respect. When British colonizers arrived in the 1840s, they saw only opportunity, clearing ancient forests for rubber plantations and building grand estates without heeding local warnings.
The Ramsden family's mansion became infamous for its labyrinthine design—99 doors creating endless thresholds throughout the sprawling estate. But the property's dark transformation truly began in 1948 when John St. Mauer Ramsden was murdered on the grand staircase, shot twice execution-style in a killing that remains unsolved. Was it political violence during the Malayan Emergency? A business rival? Or something more supernatural seeking retribution?
After John's death, the mansion's reputation grew more sinister. Workers refused to approach after dark, reporting strange lights, unexplained voices, and the persistent feeling of being watched. Then came perhaps the most disturbing chapter—an unnamed Bomoh (Malay shaman) took residence in the abandoned house, performing rituals many believe were attempts to open what legends call "the hundredth door"—a portal between our world and something beyond.
For decades, the mansion decayed until 2020, when an unexplained fire consumed most of the structure. Even recent preservation attempts have faced mysterious setbacks, including a crane accident in 2024 that caused further damage during restoration work.
What fascinates me most about Caledonia House isn't just its history of violence and the supernatural, but the fundamental question it raises: Do places become haunted because of what happens within them, or are some locations inherently wrong from the beginning—land that was never meant to be claimed, built upon, or controlled?
Join me as we step through these haunted thresholds and explore what happens when colonial arrogance collides with forces that cannot be conquered.
------------
I want to be part of the club!
Check out our other Podcast Network shows!
Cinematic Secrets
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your Podcasts
Email me! jeremy@whenwallscantalktarot.com
Instagram: @when_walls_can_talk
Twitter: @WWCTThePodcast
Join the Facebook Group!
Visit the website
Become a Patron
Shop WWCT Merch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
We're always told that doors are supposed to keep
things out or maybe they'remeant to keep things in.
But some doors Some doors don'tcare what you think they're for
they open when they want to andsometimes they don't close.
Deep in the tangled, overgrownwilds of Malaysia, there's a
(00:35):
house that shouldn't be thereanymore.
Most of it isn't.
The walls are crumbling, thefloors have rotted through, but
if you stand outside its remains, if you listen, you might hear
something shifting in the dark.
A house doesn't need walls tohold onto things.
The people who go looking forit ghost hunters, urban
(00:58):
explorers or just the unluckycome back with stories to tell
Doors that slam on their ownVoices, that whisper names they
shouldn't know, growls that comefrom nowhere, and some don't
come back the same at all.
The real question isn't whyit's haunted, it's how it got
(01:19):
this way, because the housewasn't always an abandoned ruin.
Once it was a mansion fit foran empire.
It belonged to a British family, the Ramsdens, back when Malaya
was a land carved up bycolonial wealth, the kind of
house that stood for power, forcontrol.
Then, one night, a man wasmurdered in cold blood on its
(01:42):
grand staircase and somethingabout the house changed.
It sat empty, but never silent.
Locals wouldn't go near itafter dark.
And then someone else moved inNot another wealthy family, not
someone looking to restore it.
A man with rituals, a man withofferings, a man who knew how to
(02:09):
open doors that were nevermeant to be opened.
Some say what he did was amistake.
Some say it was deliberate.
Then, in 2020, as if trying toerase itself, the mansion burned
A fire that no one couldexplain, no known cause.
Nearly gone.
But places like this don't justdisappear, and that's why I
(02:31):
can't stop thinking about it.
The real question isn't whethersomething is still there, it's
whether it ever left.
Tonight, we step through thefirst of 99 doors and let's just
hope we don't open the wrongone.
I'm Jeremy Haig, and this iswhen Walls Can Talk.
(02:53):
I don't recall exactly when Istarted listening.
Maybe I always have.
Some people are drawn to whatthey can see, what they can
(03:16):
prove.
I've never had that luxury.
The world has always spoken tome in ways I couldn't quite
explain, through the heavyweight of a silent, empty room,
through a story no one rememberstelling, through a voice in my
head I'm not entirely sure wasmy own.
I used to wonder if I wasimagining it If I was just
(03:42):
another person looking forpatterns in the noise.
But the older I got, the more Irealized the past doesn't go
quiet just because we stoppedlistening.
I don't know if I'll everunderstand what it all means.
Maybe I'm not supposed to, butI do know this.
I will never stop searching.
This might be my journey, butthese are their stories.
(04:06):
I'm Jeremy Haig, and this iswhen Walls Can Talk, the podcast
, season five.
(04:41):
There's something differentabout certain places.
You don't just see them, youfeel them.
You step forward and the airshifts.
The silence isn't reallysilence.
It's the kind that listens, thekind that waits.
I've always believed that landremembers that long before a
place becomes haunted, beforepeople started whispering about
(05:04):
curses or shadows that move ontheir own, the ground itself has
already been soaked insomething Violence, grief, fear,
maybe even something older thanall of that, something we don't
have a word for.
And that brings me here to thisplace, because before there was
(05:25):
a mansion with 99 doors, therewas this land.
It was here long before thefirst stone was laid, long
before the British, before theplantations, before anyone came
along and thought they couldclaim it as their own.
I can't stop wondering was themansion born haunted, or was it
(05:46):
built on something that alreadywas?
So let's step back for a secondPicture.
(06:06):
It Dense, ancient rainforeststretching endlessly in every
direction, the kind of junglewhere the canopy is so thick,
sunlight barely touches theground.
The air itself is thick, notjust from the humidity, but from
something else, something alive.
The trees here are old, olderthan maps, older than names.
(06:31):
Some of them have stood forcenturies, watching as the world
changed around them, watchingpeople come and go, watching as
someone at some point decided tocut through it all and build
something they shouldn't have.
And the thing is, the peoplewho lived here before the
British, before the mansion,they knew this land wasn't empty
(06:55):
.
They never thought it belongedto them.
They just understood, naturally, that they were sharing it.
I keep coming back to this idea.
Before the 99-door mansionCaledonia House, as it's known
before the British, beforeanyone with maps and deeds tried
(07:16):
to claim this land as their own.
Who was here first?
And, more importantly, what didthis place mean to them?
And, more importantly, what didthis place mean to them?
If you ask the Orang Asli, theindigenous people of the Malay
Peninsula, they'd tell yousomething the British never
(07:36):
bothered to understand.
The Malay Peninsula has beeninhabited for over 40,000 years,
long before borders, beforekings.
The first people here were theNegrito tribes, small-statured,
dark-skinned hunter-gathererswho migrated from what is now
Thailand and Myanmar.
(07:56):
They moved with the seasons,living off the land in ways that
left no scars, tracking animals, fishing along the rivers,
knowing which plants healed andwhich ones could kill.
Thousands of years later,another wave of migration
brought the proto-meleeseafarers from southern China
and Taiwan.
They arrived in dugout canoes,navigating by the stars, their
(08:21):
lives built around the rhythm ofthe ocean.
They were farmers, fishermen,traders.
They knew how to work iron, howto build boats that could
withstand the monsoon winds.
They settled along rivers,carving villages out of the
jungle, but always knowing thisland was never theirs alone.
(08:43):
The world they lived in wasdense and green, thick, with the
sound of insects and thedistant cries of gibbons
swinging through the trees.
Rain was a constant companion,soaking into the earth, feeding
the roots of trees older thanmemory.
The nights were alive with thehum of frogs and the rustling of
(09:05):
unseen creatures, and always,always, there was the jungle, an
endless breathing presence thatsurrounded them, sheltering
them, but never fully theirs.
Life moved with the pulse ofthe land.
Families lived in bamboo stilthouses built high to avoid the
(09:26):
floods and prowling tigers.
Men hunted with blowpipescoating their darts in tree sap
so toxic that even a smallscratch could bring down a deer.
Women gathered wild yams,weaved baskets from rattan, knew
how to read the shifting clouds, to predict when the storms
(09:46):
would come.
Everything had a purpose,everything had a spirit, and if
you asked them where they werefrom, they wouldn't point to a
kingdom or a country.
They'd point to the trees, therivers, the mountains, because
this land wasn't just where theylived, it was who they were.
(10:07):
And to them the land wasn'tjust a resource or something to
be conquered, it was alive.
Every tree, every river, everymountain, it all had a soul.
You didn't own land, youcoexisted with it, and that
meant you respected the otherthings that lived here too.
(10:29):
Because there were spirits here, and some of them had been
there even longer, in the deep,untouched jungles where sunlight
(10:49):
barely reaches the ground.
The Orang Isli believed insomething unseen but deeply felt
.
Spirits, or the Hantu, wereeverywhere.
Some were guardians, some weretricksters, and some some you
never wanted to cross.
Imagine walking alone at duskjust as the sky turns that deep,
(11:14):
inky blue.
The jungle is quiet, too quiet,and then you feel it, a
presence just over your shoulder, not a person, not an animal,
something else that might be theHanturaya, the great ghost.
(11:36):
This wasn't just any spirit, itwas one.
You made a deal with, apowerful entity bound to its
master, carrying out theirbidding in exchange for Well,
that's the thing.
These kinds of deals alwayshave a cost.
And when the master dies, theHantu Raya doesn't go willingly.
(12:01):
It lingers looking for a newhost, a new master, a spirit
like this.
If it were ever left behind onthis land, if it had nowhere to
go, well, that's a terrifyingthought.
Then there were the Panunguspirits that watched over
(12:21):
specific locations.
Not evil, not good, just thereWatching, waiting.
A panungu could guard a tree, ariver, a mountain or a house.
If you treated them withrespect, they let you be.
But if you disturbed them, ifyou cut down a tree that wasn't
(12:42):
meant to be cut, or if you builtsomething where it didn't
belong, bad things happened.
And I keep wondering.
When the British carved aplantation out of this land,
when they built a mansion with99 doors on top of something
that wasn't theirs, what ifsomething was already there.
And then there's her, the onethat makes my stomach not just
(13:08):
thinking about her, thePontianak, the spirit of a woman
who died in childbirth, trappedin the world of the living,
angry, grieving and vengeful.
She lingers in banana trees anddark corners, her presence
marked by the sudden scent offrangipani flowers or, if she's
(13:29):
really close, rotting flesh.
The stories say she rips menapart who have done her wrong,
that she can take the form of abeautiful woman, luring them in
before she turns sharp nails,hollow eyes and teeth ready to
tear into flesh.
And I think about this mansion,this house built by men who
(13:53):
took land, who took labor, whoignored the warnings of those
who came before them.
I wonder if something waswaiting for them.
The Orange Astley didn't seethemselves as owners of this
(14:15):
land.
They were caretakers.
They respected what was herebefore them.
They knew better than to buildwhere they weren't welcome but
the British.
They didn't ask for permission,they didn't believe in spirits
or curses, or the quiet rulesthat had kept this land balanced
(14:35):
for so long.
If they had known what theyknew, if they had listened,
would the 99-door mansion haveever been built at all?
Or would they have walked away,feeling that creeping sensation
on the back of their neck, thatgut instinct that whispers
(14:56):
you're not supposed to be here.
By the time the British arrived,this land already had its own
rulers the jungle, the rivers,the mountains.
They had already been claimed,but not by foreign kings or
European maps, and not even byrule the way that we know it,
(15:19):
but by sultans, spirits and thepeople who knew their names.
The Mele Peninsula was acrossroads, a place where
traders, warriors and mysticshad been passing through for
centuries.
By the 1400s, this land hadtransformed into a powerful
network of sultanates, eachruled by its own sultan, a king
of sorts, whose authority camenot just from wealth or armies,
(15:42):
but by something divine.
Came not just from wealth orarmies, but by something divine.
Islam had taken root here,brought by traders from India
and the Middle East, reshapingthe way people saw the world.
But something strange happenedin this part of the world Islam
didn't erase the older beliefs,it merged with them.
The jungle was still alive, therivers still carried spirits,
(16:09):
the old ways never fully left.
Even as the great mosques rosein the port cities, deep in the
forests, people still whisperedabout the unseen forces that had
been here long ago.
Spirits, jinn curses.
These weren't just stories orlost to time, but remained facts
of life, and no one understoodthis better than the Bomo.
(16:32):
If the Sultans ruled the people, the Bomo ruled the places in
between.
They were the healers, theintermediaries between human and
the supernatural.
You didn't go to a Abomo justfor medicine.
You went to them when youneeded protection or power.
Abomo could cure an illness,break a curse or call upon
(16:55):
spirits for guidance, but theycould also bind spirits to
objects, trap them in places orsummon forces that weren't meant
to be controlled, and some wereeven feared among their own
people.
There were whispers of Abomowho had made packs with the
Hanturaya, great spirits thatacted as their servants or
(17:16):
enforcers.
Others were said to havetrapped jinn inside bottles,
using them for power, and some,the darkest ones, could create a
susuk, a sort of spiritualimplant hidden beneath the skin
that made a person invincible,but at a terrible cost.
These weren't superstitionseither.
(17:39):
Sultans themselves had bomoadvisors, using their abilities
in matters of war, strategy andcontrol.
The supernatural wasn'tseparate from power.
It was power, and I keepthinking what happens when a
shaman calls upon something thatcan't be undone?
(17:59):
What happens when a force thatwas meant to stay buried is
pulled into the land of theliving.
Because if spirits could bebound to places, what kind of
rituals might have beenperformed on the land where the
99-door mansion now stands, anddid they ever truly end?
(18:25):
History has a way of smoothingover the rough edges.
We hear British colonial ruleand it sounds like something
inevitable, something clinical,just a shift in power, a new
administration stepping in.
But that's not what it feltlike.
It was theft, massive,systematic and ruthless.
(18:48):
There's a pattern to the wayempires spread.
They don't start with armies orwar, they start with money
trade Ships pulling into ports,promising silk, tea and
gunpowder, promising alliances.
At first they shake hands, theysign agreements, they talk
(19:11):
about partnerships.
And then, slowly anddeliberately, they sign
agreements, they talk aboutpartnerships and then, slowly
and deliberately, they take.
By the 1800s, the British hadmastered this process.
They had already taken India,hong Kong, australia, south
Africa and more, and now theyhad their eyes on the Malay
(19:31):
Peninsula, not for its history,not even for its people, not
even for its traditions, but forits wealth.
To the British, malay wasn't aland with history, with spirits
and with power.
It was simply a resource, aplace they could mine, extract,
(19:52):
ship and exploit for wealth.
They saw fortune.
Not wonder.
They saw a people who, in theireyes, were lesser people, to be
ruled, controlled and made intoa workforce for the empire.
By the 1800s, the British werealready swallowing Southeast
Asia, claiming lands that hadnever belonged to them, with
(20:15):
treaties signed under duress,manipulation or outright force.
The Malay Sultans, oncepowerful rulers in their own
right, were forced into deals.
They could not refuse tradingtheir autonomy for survival, for
a desperate attempt at keepingsome form of control.
But control was never the goal,domination was, and the proof
(20:45):
of that you can see in the landitself.
For centuries this land hadbelonged to the Malays and the
indigenous Orang Asli.
It was not owned, not in theway the British understood
ownership.
It was passed throughgenerations, shared, respected,
(21:06):
but the British saw untappedwealth.
The jungle was never somethingto be revered, it was something
to be conquered, and so, pieceby piece, they cut it down,
entire forests cleared, riversdiverted and land flattened to
make way for a cash crop empireSugar, coffee and, most of all,
(21:30):
rubber.
At first it happened on paper.
The British signed treatieswith local Mele sultans
(21:50):
promising protection in exchangefor influence.
They presented themselves asadvisors, as allies, but the
contracts were always written intheir language, using their
laws designed to slowly shiftpower away from the people who
had lived there for centuries.
And once they had control ofthe laws, they took the land,
(22:13):
they divided it up, carving therainforest into plantations,
factories and British estates.
Villages that had existed forgenerations were suddenly gone,
their people pushed into laboror driven further into the
jungle.
Land that had once belonged toeveryone spirits, ancestors,
families was now fenced off,claimed and owned.
(22:39):
It didn't matter what the landhad meant before, it didn't
matter that the locals warnedthem that the forest wasn't just
a forest, that the land wasn'tjust land.
The British didn't believe inspirits, they believed in money.
And right in the middle of it,all estates began to rise,
(23:05):
mansions, massive and opulentand impossible to ignore.
And the 99-door mansionotherwise known as Caledonia
House.
It was one of them, a house solarge and so unnatural to this
land that it imposed itself uponthe earth.
It was built to stand as areminder.
I suppose, that this was allBritish land, now that the power
(23:26):
had shifted, that the spiritsand the old ways, the people who
had once lived here, they nolonger mattered.
But the people who, the oldways, the people who had once
lived here.
They no longer mattered.
But the people who did livehere, they knew that was a lie.
(23:52):
By the late 1800s, life inBritish-controlled melee was a
world split in two.
On one side there was theBritish elite, the rubber
tycoons, sugar barons, theofficers of the East India
Company.
They lived in sprawlingplantation estates,
european-styled mansions,dropping into the middle of the
(24:14):
jungle, like they had alwaysbelonged there.
Their lives were filled withimported luxuries, french wines,
hand-stitched suits, grandpianos in drawing rooms where
the humidity warped the wood.
They built tennis courts in thetropics, hosted ballroom dances
under chandeliers brought in bysteamship.
(24:34):
In their minds, this wascivilization.
And then there was the otherside, the melee farmers, the
Indian and Chinese laborers, thefamilies who had lived on this
land for generations becausetheir lives had been rewritten.
When the British took the land,they forced the people into
(24:55):
labor Rubber plantations, tinmines, sugar fields, places
where men, women, even childrenworked from dawn to dusk, hands
blistered, feet sinking into theheat of the earth.
But when night fell, that'swhen the real fear set in.
(25:17):
To the British, the jungle waswild, uncharted and something to
be controlled and contained.
But to the locals it wassomething else entirely.
At night, the jungle belongedto the spirits.
Workers refused to go out aftersundown, terrified of what
(25:37):
lurked beyond the light of theiroil lamps, they whispered about
the Hantu Raya, the greatspirits that roamed in shadow,
and the Pontianak, the vengefulghost of a woman who had died
too violently to move on.
And the thing is strange, thingsdid happen on these plantations
.
Sometimes simple tools woulddisappear, only to be found in
(26:02):
places no one had ever put them.
Strange noises echoed throughthe trees, not animals and not
wild, but something else.
People reported feeling watched, their skin crawling as they
walked home alone, and sometimespeople didn't make it home at
all.
Some said they had been taken,others said they had seen
(26:25):
something standing at the edgeof the trees watching.
The British called itsuperstition, but the workers
knew better.
And here in the jungle, theCaledonia house rose like a
thing that shouldn't exist Ahouse with 99 doors, openings,
passageways, places for thingsto move through, built on land
(26:48):
that had been taken, reshaped,disrespected, a house where the
people who built it refused tostay after dark.
Because if the British hadlistened, if they had paid
attention, maybe they would haverealized they weren't just
taking land, they weredisturbing, something much older
(27:09):
, something much older, andthings like that.
They don't go quietly.
By the time the Ramsden familyarrived in Malaya, the British
Empire was at its peak.
They weren't explorers, not inthe way history romanticizes.
They weren't adventurerscarving civilization out of the
(27:29):
wild.
They were businessmen, andMalaya was a goldmine.
The mid-1900s was an era ofsugar and rubber industries that
were swallowing the land whole.
British investors were floodingin, carving up the jungle into
neatly measured plots ofownership.
The Ramsdens were exactly thatkind of family.
(27:50):
They came from wealth, fromstatus, bringing with them a
certain confidence, the kindthat comes from believing that
land any land, can be bought,tamed and controlled, and that's
truly how the 99-door mansioncame to be.
The Ramsdens didn't want asimple estate, they wanted a
(28:12):
kingdom, and a house like thisdoesn't rise organically, it
doesn't settle into itssurroundings the way villages do
, shaped by the land, growing inthe way things were meant to
grow.
Built in the 1840s, the mansionwas commissioned for the Ramsden
family, one of Britain'swealthiest lineages White walls,
(28:34):
grand archways and imposingcolumns that mimicked the
architecture of Britain.
Dropped like an afterthoughtinto the heart of the Malayan
jungle, the mansion had tenrooms, each designed with five
to six doors, creating alabyrinth of ninety 99 openings
that turned the house intosomething closer to a puzzle
(28:54):
than a home.
Some say this was a designchoice, an attempt perhaps to
cool the house in the relentlessheat of the tropics.
And then there are others whosuggest the design was perhaps
inspired in some abstract orinexplicable way, that the doors
were never meant for the living, that the layout itself a maze
(29:17):
of thresholds, an overabundanceof openings wasn't just an
architectural quirk, butsomething deeper, stranger A
house designed to be impossibleto map, impossible to navigate
or impossible to leave.
And if you consider thispossibility, I have to wonder
(29:37):
did the Ramsdens know what theywere building on?
Or did the house itself startshaping itself into something it
was never meant to be?
Life inside the 99-door mansionwas a world apart from the land
that surrounded it.
It was high societytransplanted into the tropics,
an insulated bubble of wealthwhere parties spilled out onto
(29:58):
the verandas and where dealswere made over whiskey and
cigars.
For the British elite, this wascivilization.
For the local workers, it wassomething foreign and unknown.
It was something foreign andunknown.
They weren't even guests inthis world.
They became its machinery.
Melee and Indian laborersworked the plantations, tending
(30:21):
to the rubber trees andsugarcane fields, their hands
stained with the labor that madeBritish men rich.
The mansion itself was an alienthing to them, a monolith of
foreign wealth built on landthat had once been theirs before
.
The British decided that itwasn't.
The Ramsdens thought they hadbuilt something permanent here.
(30:43):
They thought they had tamedthis land, bent it to their will
.
But you can only ignore thewarnings for so long, because
something was growing beneaththe surface, a resentment, a
shift, a force that had beendisturbed.
And then, in 1948, theunthinkable happened.
(31:06):
John St Mauer Ramsden was founddead on the staircase, shot
Twice, twice, execution style, amurder that was never solved
and a house that would never bethe same.
John had been born intoprivilege, expectation and power
(31:27):
.
His grandfather had arrived inMalaya decades earlier, back
when the land was still untamedin the eyes of the British, back
when fortunes were made bythose bold enough to take it.
The Ramsdens had been one ofthe families that took
everything land, labor, control.
By the time John was born, thefamily empire was already built.
(31:50):
He didn't have to fight for it,he just had to keep it running.
His life was one of comfort androutine.
He woke in the grand estateServants prepared his meals,
washed his clothes, kept thehouse pristine, even as the
jungle outside threatened toreclaim it.
From his study he could see thevast plantation stretching into
(32:12):
the distance, rows of rubbertrees, the endless repetition of
green.
Somewhere out there, dozens ofworkers were already sweating
under the morning sun, tappingthe trees for latex that could
be turned into his wealth, powerand progress.
That is, for the British atleast.
John had inherited the throneof an empire within an empire,
(32:37):
the director of the PanangRubber Estates Group managing
the business that had turned hisfamily into one of the most
powerful in the region.
But while his grandfather hadruled with confidence, john
lived in a different world,because by the late 1940s the
British weren't as untouchableas they once were.
The war had changed everything.
(32:59):
Malaya was no longer just acolony but a battleground, and
John, whether he realized it ornot, was standing in the center
of it.
I imagine a morning at the99-door mansion Caledonia House,
perhaps one of John's lastbefore everything unraveled.
The morning air is thick, withthe scent of damp earth, heat
(33:22):
and burning wood, the distantsound of cicadas humming through
the trees.
The sun rises slowly castinglong shadows over the veranda
where John steps out surveyingthe land his family built.
It's a house that should feellike home to him, but does it?
The halls are too large, theceilings too high.
(33:45):
At night the wind moves throughthe doors in strange ways,
creating whispers, howls thatdon't belong.
The servants say some doorsnever stay closed, that they
wake up to find them open, nomatter how many times they shut
them.
John doesn't believe in ghosts,at least that's what he tells
himself.
The house this morning has beenlong awake servants moving
(34:08):
through the quarters preparingbreakfast, opening windows to
let the jungle air in theBritish elite in Malaya live in
luxury, weighted on by the handsof people their empire has
forced into servitude.
He eats at a long dining tablewith his family Somewhere in the
mansion.
The radio crackles with newsfrom London, talk of politics,
(34:31):
of the slow unraveling ofcolonial power across the land.
But here in this place John isstill a man of influence, still
a ruler of his own privatekingdom.
By mid-morning he is dressed inhis white linen suit, riding
horseback through the plantation, checking on hundreds of rubber
trees that pay for his life.
(34:52):
Somewhere in the fields,workers lower their gaze as he
passes.
They still call him Tuon, atitle of respect or maybe just
obligation.
He nods at the plantationmanager, listens to a report
about production, about trade.
The world is shifting, but therubber business is still strong.
(35:16):
He signs papers, sendstelegrams, makes decisions,
because that's what he wasraised to do, but still there is
unrest in the air.
The Malayan emergency has begun, the guerrilla war between the
British and the anti-colonialresistance is growing bloodier.
There are whispers of attackson planters, of men being
(35:38):
dragged from their homes andexecuted in the fields they had
owned.
But John doesn't think thiswill happen to him.
So who is John really?
That's the thing we don'treally know.
Was he a ruthless businessmanwilling to exploit whoever he
had to in order to keep hisfamily's fortune intact?
(36:00):
Or was he something else, a mancaught in a world that was
shifting too fast beneath hisfeet, unable to adapt to a
future that had no place for him?
What we do know is that he waspowerful, he was wealthy, he was
a target and soon he would bedead.
(36:20):
In the days leading up to hismurder, something around the
plantation had changed.
There were rumors of threats,warnings that British planters
were being hunted, some wereleaving, just abandoning their
estates, retreating to thesafety of Penang or Singapore.
But John had stayed.
Maybe he thought he wasuntouchable, maybe he thought
(36:43):
the land was still his.
But the thing about places likethis, the thing about houses
like this, is that no one reallyowns them.
They just get to live in themUntil they don't.
The night John St Moore Ramsdendied.
The air was thick with humidity, the kind that lingers long
(37:14):
after the sun has set, pressingin through the open doors and
making the sweat on the back ofyour neck feel like it'll never
dry.
Inside Caledonia House, theworld was quiet.
John had just finished dinner.
Maybe he was reading in thestudy, flipping through reports
on rubber exports, profits, theendless chess game of colonial
business.
Maybe he was standing on theveranda, a whiskey in hand,
staring out at the plantation,the empire his family had built,
(37:35):
the land he had taken, reshapedand forced into obedience.
Or maybe he was already feelingit that strange electricity in
the air, that creeping sensethat you get before something
big happens.
What we do know is this henever made it upstairs.
The first shot rang out justpast 10 pm, a single sharp crack
(38:00):
that sliced through the night,followed by another by the time
the sound faded into silence,john's body was slumped on the
grand staircase, blood poolingbeneath him on the polished wood
.
Two bullets shot, executionstyle One in the back of the
(38:24):
head and one for certainty.
Whoever did this?
They wanted to ensure he wasdead and they wanted it done
cleanly and deliberately.
There was no signs of astruggle, no frantic chase
through the halls, no overturnedfurniture, no desperate clawing
for survival, just a man whohad been alive one moment and
dead the next.
A death too cold-blooded to berandom.
(38:45):
It's a question that's hauntedthis place ever since, and
depending on who you asked, theanswer was very different.
Ever since, and depending onwho you asked, the answer was
very different.
Outside the walls of the mansion, malaya was at war.
The Malayan emergency had begun, a brutal, bloody struggle
between British colonial forcesand the Malayan National
Liberation Army, a communistguerrilla movement fighting for
(39:10):
independence.
British planters had been primetargets, the revolutionaries.
They weren't just businessmen,they were the symbols of the
occupation.
Was John one of them?
One of the ones, like manyothers, burned out and driven
away, dragged from their homesand shot in the fields they once
ruled?
Had rebels slipped through theplantation that night, stepping
(39:33):
past the neatly planted rows ofrubber trees and moving through
the shadows like the corridorsof the mansion had.
They found him alone, put a gunto his head and pulled the
trigger in the name of a warbigger than him.
That's what the British wantedpeople to believe, because it
made sense to them.
A political killing, a messagescrawled in blood.
(39:55):
But not everyone believed that.
Because if this was a politicalhit, why was nothing else
touched?
No ransacking, no stolen money,no destruction, just a single
silent act of violence.
The kind of precision that feltpersonal.
(40:15):
The rubber industry wasn't justa business.
It was a cutthroat empire builton monopolies, power struggles
and backroom deals.
The kind of industry whererivals didn't just compete, they
destroyed each other.
John was the man in charge ofthe Penang Rubber Estates Group.
He held the contracts, thenumbers, the land, and if
(40:36):
somebody wanted him out of theway, a quiet bullet in the night
would do the job.
Was it a plantation manager?
He crossed A business partnerwith too much to lose.
Or was it even closer than that?
Because the most unsettlingtheory, the one that changes
everything, is the idea thatJohn was killed by someone
inside his own home.
(40:56):
John wasn't alone in themansion.
That night, the house was fullof people servants, family
workers, those who saw him everyday, those who knew his habits
and his routines.
Someone had to have heard thegunshots and yet no one saw
anything.
No sign of forced entry, noreported intruders.
(41:19):
So how did a killer walk intoCaledonia House, execute the
master of the home and walk outunseen, unless they never had to
walk in at all?
The morning after, the colonialnewspapers framed John as a
martyr, a victim of terrorists,radicals.
A senseless assassination.
(41:40):
But in the villages and in theplantations, in the quiet spaces
where the British didn't listen, the story was different.
To some, this wasn't murder, itwas retribution.
A powerful man taken down bythe very land his family had
claimed, a house that had beenbuilt on land never meant to be
tamed.
Finally taking something back,a reckoning, a curse fulfilled.
(42:06):
Then there's one final theory,the kind that doesn't show up in
news reports, the kind thatlingers in the whispers of
workers who refuse to stay pastdark.
What if John's death wasn'tabout war, or business, or
betrayal?
What if it was a manifestationof something older?
What if the mansion itself, theland beneath it, the spirits
(42:29):
that were never meant to bedisturbed?
What if they wanted him gone?
Murder leaves a scar not juston the people left behind but on
the places too, and in all thestories we tell we come back to
this question often.
What happens to a house, a home, a space, when someone dies
(42:50):
inside it like this?
Not a slow death, not a naturalpassing, but something violent,
deliberate, something thatsends shockwaves of energy
through the walls, floors,shaking the very foundation.
John St Mauer Ramsden's bloodsoaked into the wood of that
grand staircase.
There's a bullet hole still inthe walls where a bullet
(43:12):
ricocheted.
His last breath left the housecolder than it had been before.
Did it change that night?
Or was it always waiting tobecome what it is now?
By the time World War II reachedMalaya, the Ramsdens weren't
the only ones who had claimedthis land.
And this is where things getconfusing, because in 1941, the
(43:37):
Japanese Imperial Army sweptthrough the peninsula in a
brutal, fast-moving invasion,pushing the British forces out
in some ways-moving invasion,pushing the British forces out
in some ways and taking controlof nearly everything the Empire
had built, including the 99-doormansion, or at least from the
records that we can find.
This house, once a symbol ofBritish colonial power, was now
(43:58):
used as an outpost for war.
Japanese forces took over themansion, using it as a military
headquarters.
But what happened behind thosedoors during the occupation?
This whole part of historybecomes incredibly murky.
Some locals say it was acommand center, a place where
Japanese officials strategizedand planned their next moves.
(44:20):
Others say it was something fardarker, that the mansion wasn't
just a headquarters but aprison, that interrogations
happened here, that executionshappened here, that not everyone
who entered the house duringthe war walked back out.
One story claims the Ramsdenfamily members who remained in
Malaya were executed inside themansion during the occupation.
(44:43):
But here's where historycontradicts itself.
John St Mauer Ramsden wasn'tkilled until 1948, three years
after the war had ended.
If there was a massacre insidethe mansion, who did actually
die there?
And if the house already heldon to death, on to fear, on to
(45:05):
whatever else had lingered inthe shadows before, what did the
war leave behind?
And not long after John'smurder, someone else arrived at
the mansion, someone who didn'tcome for wealth or power, but
for something deeper, someonewho didn't just walk through the
front door but maybe openedsomething that was never meant
(45:27):
to be.
Because this is where the storyshifts again.
This is where the mansion stopsbeing a crime scene and starts
becoming something else entirely, because if the 99-door mansion
wasn't haunted before, itcertainly was about to be.
We know that there's a patternto houses like this when things
(46:02):
like this happen, they don'tchoose to sit empty, they call
things to them.
John St Mauer Ramsden's bloodhad barely dried on the grand
staircase before the whispersstarted that the house had
changed.
The workers who had alreadyfeared the land now wouldn't go
near it.
And then, not long after,someone else moved in, not a
(46:27):
family and certainly not abusinessman, a Bomo.
At some point after the Ramsdenmurder, an unnamed Bomo, a Malay
shaman, healer and intermediarybetween the seen and unseen,
took up residence in theabandoned mansion.
Took up residence in theabandoned mansion.
Now there's no official recordof him, no names or documents,
just stories.
(46:48):
Some say he was drawn to theplace, sensing the energy left
behind.
Some say he was summoned, thatthe house itself had become
unstable, that something neededto be fixed, and then others say
that he wasn't trying to fixanything at all.
They say he was trying tocontrol what was already there.
Bomos, as we know, in meleeculture were powerful figures
(47:12):
known for their ability to heal,protect and sometimes
manipulate unseen forces.
But this one wasn't here formedicine.
Locals reported seeing lightsflickering through the empty
mansion at night, smoke curlingfrom the windows, strange
chanting drifting out frombehind the doors.
(47:33):
There were offerings left atthe entrance, a clear sign of
rituals being performed, objectsbeing buried around the
property, something many meleeshamans would do to anchor
spirits to a location.
But the real fear came fromwhat people heard inside.
People who walked too closeclaimed they heard muttering
(47:54):
from within the walls, whispersand languages they didn't
recognize.
Others spoke of a low growl,something not quite animal and
not quite human.
And we know that this mansionwas already strange for its
doors, 99 of them leading tonowhere, opening to nothing but
the grand vastness of the jungle.
But the Bomo wasn't interestedin any of those.
(48:16):
He was searching for thehundredth door.
In melee folklore, doors aren'tjust doors, they're thresholds,
portals, openings between realms, between this world and
whatever exists beyond it.
Many believed that the Bomofound a way to create that
hundredth door, a metaphysicalpathway into something no one
(48:40):
was ever meant to access, aspiritual tear in reality.
And once it was opened,something else stepped through
the team behind Destinations ofthe Damned, one of my favorite
shows that's really intrigued mevisited the mansion to
investigate these stories andwhatever happened to them inside
(49:00):
.
It shook them.
A medium entered the mansionand immediately found herself in
a trance, speaking in alanguage no one could recognize.
Some claim it was an ancientdialect, one lost to time.
Others say it was the voices ofsome of the people that had
been there waiting.
Many claim to see her, a younggirl standing in the darkness of
(49:24):
the mansion, the daughter ofJohn St Maurer Ramsden, perhaps
a lost soul trapped by the BowMo's rituals, or something
disguising itself as a child tolure people closer.
Whatever it was, whatever isthere, it left an impression
because the energy in that househas never faded.
(49:46):
If anything, it's only gottenstronger.
Places like this don't goquietly.
Sometimes they crumble,sometimes they rot and sometimes
they burn.
For decades, the 99-door mansionCaledonia House stood like a
(50:06):
skeleton in the jungle Empty anddecayed, but not forgotten.
The land had already taken backmost of it Vines creeping
through doorways, roots crackingthrough the foundation, but
then, in 2020, a fire rippedthrough the mansion, destroying
70% of what remained, and therewas no official cause.
(50:29):
No one came forward.
No strange electrical fault, nolightning strike.
No squatters with an open flame, just fire.
By the time it was over, mostof the structure was gone, just
a charred husk where a grandestate, a crime scene and a
portal to something else hadonce stood.
(50:50):
Was this an accident?
Or was the house trying toerase itself?
Official reports neverpinpointed a cause, but if you
ask the locals, there are threepredominant theories.
Some say this wasn'tdestruction, it was containment,
that the fire was never meantto destroy the house but to seal
(51:13):
something inside the bomosrituals, the 100th door, the
things that had leaked through.
Maybe the house itself wantedpeople to know that it had
become too unstable, too open,and something or someone decided
it was time to cut it off fromthe world.
For years, people whisperedthat the mansion was never meant
(51:35):
to exist, that the British hadbuilt on land that wasn't theirs
and ignored every warning.
And what happens to things thataren't supposed to be?
At some point theyself-destruct.
Or maybe the simplestexplanation is the truth.
Maybe it was just a fire, maybethe house was already falling
(51:56):
apart and the elements, time oreven trespassers finally
finished what nature had started.
But I don't know, becausehaunted places don't just hold
stories, they hold energy, andsometimes, when something
doesn't belong in this worldanymore, it finds its own way to
disappear.
The house is mostly gone now,but the land, the land is still
(52:22):
here, and here's what I keepthinking about always in every
episode I record.
If places absorb history,violence, ritual and tragedy,
does burning them ever reallytruly erase what's there, or
does it just free it?
(52:43):
If the fire in 2020 was thefinal nail in the coffin, what
happened next felt like the landitself refusing to let the
mansion rise again, because evenafter the flames had taken 70%
of the house, even after itsskeletal remains stood
half-burned and broken, therewere still efforts to preserve
it.
It became a heritage site, alandmark wrapped in mystery,
(53:04):
tragedy and superstition.
But the land didn't make it easy.
In March 2024, a crane accidentinflicted even more damage on
the mansion during an attempt toreinforce what was left.
The details I could find arevague, just like the fire.
There was no clear reason forthe failure, no obvious mistake
to point to Just anotherincident, another moment where
(53:33):
the house seemed to resist, likeit wasn't meant to be saved.
But now the authorities arestill pushing for restoration.
The Sibirang-Puray City Councilhas designated it as a heritage
site, but it hasn't beenofficially protected under the
National Heritage Act because itremains in private ownership,
which means its future isuncertain.
Will it be rebuilt, preservedor left to collapse under the
weight of its own history?
(53:54):
Or, like everything else aboutthis place, will it somehow defy
its own explanations?
Some stories haunt you becausethey don't have endings.
Perhaps this story doesn'teither.
The mansion is mostly gone now,just ruins swallowed by the
jungle, the last remnants of aplace that maybe never should
(54:15):
have existed in the first place.
But even though the walls havecrumbled, this story doesn't
feel finished and it drives mecrazy, fascinates me, drives me
wild, trying to findexplanations, solutions, because
we know this was never ahaunted house, we know this was
always something bigger, a housebuilt on land that wasn't meant
(54:38):
to hold it, a house that borewitness to colonialism, murder,
rituals, fire, a house that sawtoo much, held too much,
absorbed too much.
If places absorb this energy,if they hold on to things, then
what happens when a place hasseen this much?
(54:58):
Because that's the pattern,isn't it?
It's not just this house, it'splaces all over the world
Plantations, castles, asylums,battlefields, places where
trauma and violence sink intothe bones of the location, into
the soil beneath it, places thatdon't just hold history.
They hold something heavier,and I keep wondering do we
(55:22):
create the hauntings or do theyfind us?
Did this place become hauntedbecause of what happened inside
it, or was it always somethingmore?
And maybe, in the end, the firewasn't a tragedy, maybe it was
a mercy?
Maybe the most terrifyingplaces are the ones that somehow
(55:43):
both refuse to be forgotten butalso demand to be forgotten.
Tonight, we step through thefirst of 99 doors.
The truth is, some doors, onceopened, refuse to close, and
that's what unsettles me themost about this place.
Not just the murder, not justthe fire, not just the whispers
(56:07):
of untold rituals that may ormay not have cracked something
open.
It's the clawing frustrationthat this story isn't finished,
but its presence in our worldhasn't faded.
The land still holds itssecrets, and if you stand there,
just beyond the ruins, wherethe trees begin to press in,
(56:29):
where the air is thick andwaiting, you might feel it too,
that weight, that pull, thatsense that something is there.
I believe in the supernatural,of course.
I believe that energy lingers,that places absorb it, absorb
what happens inside them, thatsome wounds in history never can
(56:54):
fully close, and I believe thatin places like this, the
boundary between present andpast, between our world and
something else, thins.
What happened in this mansion?
The wealth, violence, ritualsperhaps none of it should have
existed in the first place, andyet it did.
(57:15):
And whatever came from it,whatever still stirs in the
spaces that remain.
I don't think it's something wewere ever meant to understand,
but that's what draws me in,because, even if we'll never
have all the answers, the onlyway to get close is to keep
listening To the stories, to thehistories, the legends, to the
(57:39):
places that still hold theseechoes of the past.
Maybe the mansion burnedbecause it had to, maybe it's
gone, or maybe it's just waitingfor someone to step through one
last door.
Thank you you.
We're always told that doors are supposed to keep
things out or maybe they'remeant to keep things in.
But some doors Some doors don'tcare what you think they're for
they open when they want to andsometimes they don't close.
Deep in the tangled, overgrownwilds of Malaysia, there's a
(00:35):
house that shouldn't be thereanymore.
Most of it isn't.
The walls are crumbling, thefloors have rotted through, but
if you stand outside its remains, if you listen, you might hear
something shifting in the dark.
A house doesn't need walls tohold onto things.
The people who go looking forit ghost hunters, urban
(00:58):
explorers or just the unluckycome back with stories to tell
Doors that slam on their ownVoices, that whisper names they
shouldn't know, growls that comefrom nowhere, and some don't
come back the same at all.
The real question isn't whyit's haunted, it's how it got
(01:19):
this way, because the housewasn't always an abandoned ruin.
Once it was a mansion fit foran empire.
It belonged to a British family, the Ramsdens, back when Malaya
was a land carved up bycolonial wealth, the kind of
house that stood for power, forcontrol.
Then, one night, a man wasmurdered in cold blood on its
(01:42):
grand staircase and somethingabout the house changed.
It sat empty, but never silent.
Locals wouldn't go near itafter dark.
And then someone else moved inNot another wealthy family, not
someone looking to restore it.
A man with rituals, a man withofferings, a man who knew how to
(02:09):
open doors that were nevermeant to be opened.
Some say what he did was amistake.
Some say it was deliberate.
Then, in 2020, as if trying toerase itself, the mansion burned
A fire that no one couldexplain, no known cause.
Nearly gone.
But places like this don't justdisappear, and that's why I
(02:31):
can't stop thinking about it.
The real question isn't whethersomething is still there, it's
whether it ever left.
Tonight, we step through thefirst of 99 doors and let's just
hope we don't open the wrongone.
I'm Jeremy Haig, and this iswhen Walls Can Talk.
(02:53):
I don't recall exactly when Istarted listening.
Maybe I always have.
Some people are drawn to whatthey can see, what they can
(03:16):
prove.
I've never had that luxury.
The world has always spoken tome in ways I couldn't quite
explain, through the heavyweight of a silent, empty room,
through a story no one rememberstelling, through a voice in my
head I'm not entirely sure wasmy own.
I used to wonder if I wasimagining it If I was just
(03:42):
another person looking forpatterns in the noise.
But the older I got, the more Irealized the past doesn't go
quiet just because we stoppedlistening.
I don't know if I'll everunderstand what it all means.
Maybe I'm not supposed to, butI do know this.
I will never stop searching.
This might be my journey, butthese are their stories.
(04:06):
I'm Jeremy Haig, and this iswhen Walls Can Talk, the podcast
, season five.
(04:41):
There's something differentabout certain places.
You don't just see them, youfeel them.
You step forward and the airshifts.
The silence isn't reallysilence.
It's the kind that listens, thekind that waits.
I've always believed that landremembers that long before a
place becomes haunted, beforepeople started whispering about
(05:04):
curses or shadows that move ontheir own, the ground itself has
already been soaked insomething Violence, grief, fear,
maybe even something older thanall of that, something we don't
have a word for.
And that brings me here to thisplace, because before there was
(05:25):
a mansion with 99 doors, therewas this land.
It was here long before thefirst stone was laid, long
before the British, before theplantations, before anyone came
along and thought they couldclaim it as their own.
I can't stop wondering was themansion born haunted, or was it
(05:46):
built on something that alreadywas?
So let's step back for a secondPicture.
(06:06):
It Dense, ancient rainforeststretching endlessly in every
direction, the kind of junglewhere the canopy is so thick,
sunlight barely touches theground.
The air itself is thick, notjust from the humidity, but from
something else, something alive.
The trees here are old, olderthan maps, older than names.
(06:31):
Some of them have stood forcenturies, watching as the world
changed around them, watchingpeople come and go, watching as
someone at some point decided tocut through it all and build
something they shouldn't have.
And the thing is, the peoplewho lived here before the
British, before the mansion,they knew this land wasn't empty
(06:55):
.
They never thought it belongedto them.
They just understood, naturally, that they were sharing it.
I keep coming back to this idea.
Before the 99-door mansionCaledonia House, as it's known
before the British, beforeanyone with maps and deeds tried
(07:16):
to claim this land as their own.
Who was here first?
And, more importantly, what didthis place mean to them?
And, more importantly, what didthis place mean to them?
If you ask the Orang Asli, theindigenous people of the Malay
Peninsula, they'd tell yousomething the British never
(07:36):
bothered to understand.
The Malay Peninsula has beeninhabited for over 40,000 years,
long before borders, beforekings.
The first people here were theNegrito tribes, small-statured,
dark-skinned hunter-gathererswho migrated from what is now
Thailand and Myanmar.
(07:56):
They moved with the seasons,living off the land in ways that
left no scars, tracking animals, fishing along the rivers,
knowing which plants healed andwhich ones could kill.
Thousands of years later,another wave of migration
brought the proto-meleeseafarers from southern China
and Taiwan.
They arrived in dugout canoes,navigating by the stars, their
(08:21):
lives built around the rhythm ofthe ocean.
They were farmers, fishermen,traders.
They knew how to work iron, howto build boats that could
withstand the monsoon winds.
They settled along rivers,carving villages out of the
jungle, but always knowing thisland was never theirs alone.
(08:43):
The world they lived in wasdense and green, thick, with the
sound of insects and thedistant cries of gibbons
swinging through the trees.
Rain was a constant companion,soaking into the earth, feeding
the roots of trees older thanmemory.
The nights were alive with thehum of frogs and the rustling of
(09:05):
unseen creatures, and always,always, there was the jungle, an
endless breathing presence thatsurrounded them, sheltering
them, but never fully theirs.
Life moved with the pulse ofthe land.
Families lived in bamboo stilthouses built high to avoid the
(09:26):
floods and prowling tigers.
Men hunted with blowpipescoating their darts in tree sap
so toxic that even a smallscratch could bring down a deer.
Women gathered wild yams,weaved baskets from rattan, knew
how to read the shifting clouds, to predict when the storms
(09:46):
would come.
Everything had a purpose,everything had a spirit, and if
you asked them where they werefrom, they wouldn't point to a
kingdom or a country.
They'd point to the trees, therivers, the mountains, because
this land wasn't just where theylived, it was who they were.
(10:07):
And to them the land wasn'tjust a resource or something to
be conquered, it was alive.
Every tree, every river, everymountain, it all had a soul.
You didn't own land, youcoexisted with it, and that
meant you respected the otherthings that lived here too.
(10:29):
Because there were spirits here, and some of them had been
there even longer, in the deep,untouched jungles where sunlight
(10:49):
barely reaches the ground.
The Orang Isli believed insomething unseen but deeply felt
.
Spirits, or the Hantu, wereeverywhere.
Some were guardians, some weretricksters, and some some you
never wanted to cross.
Imagine walking alone at duskjust as the sky turns that deep,
(11:14):
inky blue.
The jungle is quiet, too quiet,and then you feel it, a
presence just over your shoulder, not a person, not an animal,
something else that might be theHanturaya, the great ghost.
(11:36):
This wasn't just any spirit, itwas one.
You made a deal with, apowerful entity bound to its
master, carrying out theirbidding in exchange for Well,
that's the thing.
These kinds of deals alwayshave a cost.
And when the master dies, theHantu Raya doesn't go willingly.
(12:01):
It lingers looking for a newhost, a new master, a spirit
like this.
If it were ever left behind onthis land, if it had nowhere to
go, well, that's a terrifyingthought.
Then there were the Panunguspirits that watched over
(12:21):
specific locations.
Not evil, not good, just thereWatching, waiting.
A panungu could guard a tree, ariver, a mountain or a house.
If you treated them withrespect, they let you be.
But if you disturbed them, ifyou cut down a tree that wasn't
(12:42):
meant to be cut, or if you builtsomething where it didn't
belong, bad things happened.
And I keep wondering.
When the British carved aplantation out of this land,
when they built a mansion with99 doors on top of something
that wasn't theirs, what ifsomething was already there.
And then there's her, the onethat makes my stomach not just
(13:08):
thinking about her, thePontianak, the spirit of a woman
who died in childbirth, trappedin the world of the living,
angry, grieving and vengeful.
She lingers in banana trees anddark corners, her presence
marked by the sudden scent offrangipani flowers or, if she's
(13:29):
really close, rotting flesh.
The stories say she rips menapart who have done her wrong,
that she can take the form of abeautiful woman, luring them in
before she turns sharp nails,hollow eyes and teeth ready to
tear into flesh.
And I think about this mansion,this house built by men who
(13:53):
took land, who took labor, whoignored the warnings of those
who came before them.
I wonder if something waswaiting for them.
The Orange Astley didn't seethemselves as owners of this
(14:15):
land.
They were caretakers.
They respected what was herebefore them.
They knew better than to buildwhere they weren't welcome but
the British.
They didn't ask for permission,they didn't believe in spirits
or curses, or the quiet rulesthat had kept this land balanced
(14:35):
for so long.
If they had known what theyknew, if they had listened,
would the 99-door mansion haveever been built at all?
Or would they have walked away,feeling that creeping sensation
on the back of their neck, thatgut instinct that whispers
(14:56):
you're not supposed to be here.
By the time the British arrived,this land already had its own
rulers the jungle, the rivers,the mountains.
They had already been claimed,but not by foreign kings or
European maps, and not even byrule the way that we know it,
(15:19):
but by sultans, spirits and thepeople who knew their names.
The Mele Peninsula was acrossroads, a place where
traders, warriors and mysticshad been passing through for
centuries.
By the 1400s, this land hadtransformed into a powerful
network of sultanates, eachruled by its own sultan, a king
of sorts, whose authority camenot just from wealth or armies,
(15:42):
but by something divine.
Came not just from wealth orarmies, but by something divine.
Islam had taken root here,brought by traders from India
and the Middle East, reshapingthe way people saw the world.
But something strange happenedin this part of the world Islam
didn't erase the older beliefs,it merged with them.
The jungle was still alive, therivers still carried spirits,
(16:09):
the old ways never fully left.
Even as the great mosques rosein the port cities, deep in the
forests, people still whisperedabout the unseen forces that had
been here long ago.
Spirits, jinn curses.
These weren't just stories orlost to time, but remained facts
of life, and no one understoodthis better than the Bomo.
(16:32):
If the Sultans ruled the people, the Bomo ruled the places in
between.
They were the healers, theintermediaries between human and
the supernatural.
You didn't go to a Abomo justfor medicine.
You went to them when youneeded protection or power.
Abomo could cure an illness,break a curse or call upon
(16:55):
spirits for guidance, but theycould also bind spirits to
objects, trap them in places orsummon forces that weren't meant
to be controlled, and some wereeven feared among their own
people.
There were whispers of Abomowho had made packs with the
Hanturaya, great spirits thatacted as their servants or
(17:16):
enforcers.
Others were said to havetrapped jinn inside bottles,
using them for power, and some,the darkest ones, could create a
susuk, a sort of spiritualimplant hidden beneath the skin
that made a person invincible,but at a terrible cost.
These weren't superstitionseither.
(17:39):
Sultans themselves had bomoadvisors, using their abilities
in matters of war, strategy andcontrol.
The supernatural wasn'tseparate from power.
It was power, and I keepthinking what happens when a
shaman calls upon something thatcan't be undone?
(17:59):
What happens when a force thatwas meant to stay buried is
pulled into the land of theliving.
Because if spirits could bebound to places, what kind of
rituals might have beenperformed on the land where the
99-door mansion now stands, anddid they ever truly end?
(18:25):
History has a way of smoothingover the rough edges.
We hear British colonial ruleand it sounds like something
inevitable, something clinical,just a shift in power, a new
administration stepping in.
But that's not what it feltlike.
It was theft, massive,systematic and ruthless.
(18:48):
There's a pattern to the wayempires spread.
They don't start with armies orwar, they start with money
trade Ships pulling into ports,promising silk, tea and
gunpowder, promising alliances.
At first they shake hands, theysign agreements, they talk
(19:11):
about partnerships.
And then, slowly anddeliberately, they sign
agreements, they talk aboutpartnerships and then, slowly
and deliberately, they take.
By the 1800s, the British hadmastered this process.
They had already taken India,hong Kong, australia, south
Africa and more, and now theyhad their eyes on the Malay
(19:31):
Peninsula, not for its history,not even for its people, not
even for its traditions, but forits wealth.
To the British, malay wasn't aland with history, with spirits
and with power.
It was simply a resource, aplace they could mine, extract,
(19:52):
ship and exploit for wealth.
They saw fortune.
Not wonder.
They saw a people who, in theireyes, were lesser people, to be
ruled, controlled and made intoa workforce for the empire.
By the 1800s, the British werealready swallowing Southeast
Asia, claiming lands that hadnever belonged to them, with
(20:15):
treaties signed under duress,manipulation or outright force.
The Malay Sultans, oncepowerful rulers in their own
right, were forced into deals.
They could not refuse tradingtheir autonomy for survival, for
a desperate attempt at keepingsome form of control.
But control was never the goal,domination was, and the proof
(20:45):
of that you can see in the landitself.
For centuries this land hadbelonged to the Malays and the
indigenous Orang Asli.
It was not owned, not in theway the British understood
ownership.
It was passed throughgenerations, shared, respected,
(21:06):
but the British saw untappedwealth.
The jungle was never somethingto be revered, it was something
to be conquered, and so, pieceby piece, they cut it down,
entire forests cleared, riversdiverted and land flattened to
make way for a cash crop empireSugar, coffee and, most of all,
(21:30):
rubber.
At first it happened on paper.
The British signed treatieswith local Mele sultans
(21:50):
promising protection in exchangefor influence.
They presented themselves asadvisors, as allies, but the
contracts were always written intheir language, using their
laws designed to slowly shiftpower away from the people who
had lived there for centuries.
And once they had control ofthe laws, they took the land,
(22:13):
they divided it up, carving therainforest into plantations,
factories and British estates.
Villages that had existed forgenerations were suddenly gone,
their people pushed into laboror driven further into the
jungle.
Land that had once belonged toeveryone spirits, ancestors,
families was now fenced off,claimed and owned.
(22:39):
It didn't matter what the landhad meant before, it didn't
matter that the locals warnedthem that the forest wasn't just
a forest, that the land wasn'tjust land.
The British didn't believe inspirits, they believed in money.
And right in the middle of it,all estates began to rise,
(23:05):
mansions, massive and opulentand impossible to ignore.
And the 99-door mansionotherwise known as Caledonia
House.
It was one of them, a house solarge and so unnatural to this
land that it imposed itself uponthe earth.
It was built to stand as areminder.
I suppose, that this was allBritish land, now that the power
(23:26):
had shifted, that the spiritsand the old ways, the people who
had once lived here, they nolonger mattered.
But the people who, the oldways, the people who had once
lived here.
They no longer mattered.
But the people who did livehere, they knew that was a lie.
(23:52):
By the late 1800s, life inBritish-controlled melee was a
world split in two.
On one side there was theBritish elite, the rubber
tycoons, sugar barons, theofficers of the East India
Company.
They lived in sprawlingplantation estates,
european-styled mansions,dropping into the middle of the
(24:14):
jungle, like they had alwaysbelonged there.
Their lives were filled withimported luxuries, french wines,
hand-stitched suits, grandpianos in drawing rooms where
the humidity warped the wood.
They built tennis courts in thetropics, hosted ballroom dances
under chandeliers brought in bysteamship.
(24:34):
In their minds, this wascivilization.
And then there was the otherside, the melee farmers, the
Indian and Chinese laborers, thefamilies who had lived on this
land for generations becausetheir lives had been rewritten.
When the British took the land,they forced the people into
(24:55):
labor Rubber plantations, tinmines, sugar fields, places
where men, women, even childrenworked from dawn to dusk, hands
blistered, feet sinking into theheat of the earth.
But when night fell, that'swhen the real fear set in.
(25:17):
To the British, the jungle waswild, uncharted and something to
be controlled and contained.
But to the locals it wassomething else entirely.
At night, the jungle belongedto the spirits.
Workers refused to go out aftersundown, terrified of what
(25:37):
lurked beyond the light of theiroil lamps, they whispered about
the Hantu Raya, the greatspirits that roamed in shadow,
and the Pontianak, the vengefulghost of a woman who had died
too violently to move on.
And the thing is strange, thingsdid happen on these plantations
.
Sometimes simple tools woulddisappear, only to be found in
(26:02):
places no one had ever put them.
Strange noises echoed throughthe trees, not animals and not
wild, but something else.
People reported feeling watched, their skin crawling as they
walked home alone, and sometimespeople didn't make it home at
all.
Some said they had been taken,others said they had seen
(26:25):
something standing at the edgeof the trees watching.
The British called itsuperstition, but the workers
knew better.
And here in the jungle, theCaledonia house rose like a
thing that shouldn't exist Ahouse with 99 doors, openings,
passageways, places for thingsto move through, built on land
(26:48):
that had been taken, reshaped,disrespected, a house where the
people who built it refused tostay after dark.
Because if the British hadlistened, if they had paid
attention, maybe they would haverealized they weren't just
taking land, they weredisturbing, something much older
(27:09):
, something much older, andthings like that.
They don't go quietly.
By the time the Ramsden familyarrived in Malaya, the British
Empire was at its peak.
They weren't explorers, not inthe way history romanticizes.
They weren't adventurerscarving civilization out of the
(27:29):
wild.
They were businessmen, andMalaya was a goldmine.
The mid-1900s was an era ofsugar and rubber industries that
were swallowing the land whole.
British investors were floodingin, carving up the jungle into
neatly measured plots ofownership.
The Ramsdens were exactly thatkind of family.
(27:50):
They came from wealth, fromstatus, bringing with them a
certain confidence, the kindthat comes from believing that
land any land, can be bought,tamed and controlled, and that's
truly how the 99-door mansioncame to be.
The Ramsdens didn't want asimple estate, they wanted a
(28:12):
kingdom, and a house like thisdoesn't rise organically, it
doesn't settle into itssurroundings the way villages do
, shaped by the land, growing inthe way things were meant to
grow.
Built in the 1840s, the mansionwas commissioned for the Ramsden
family, one of Britain'swealthiest lineages White walls,
(28:34):
grand archways and imposingcolumns that mimicked the
architecture of Britain.
Dropped like an afterthoughtinto the heart of the Malayan
jungle, the mansion had tenrooms, each designed with five
to six doors, creating alabyrinth of ninety 99 openings
that turned the house intosomething closer to a puzzle
(28:54):
than a home.
Some say this was a designchoice, an attempt perhaps to
cool the house in the relentlessheat of the tropics.
And then there are others whosuggest the design was perhaps
inspired in some abstract orinexplicable way, that the doors
were never meant for the living, that the layout itself a maze
(29:17):
of thresholds, an overabundanceof openings wasn't just an
architectural quirk, butsomething deeper, stranger A
house designed to be impossibleto map, impossible to navigate
or impossible to leave.
And if you consider thispossibility, I have to wonder
(29:37):
did the Ramsdens know what theywere building on?
Or did the house itself startshaping itself into something it
was never meant to be?
Life inside the 99-door mansionwas a world apart from the land
that surrounded it.
It was high societytransplanted into the tropics,
an insulated bubble of wealthwhere parties spilled out onto
(29:58):
the verandas and where dealswere made over whiskey and
cigars.
For the British elite, this wascivilization.
For the local workers, it wassomething foreign and unknown.
It was something foreign andunknown.
They weren't even guests inthis world.
They became its machinery.
Melee and Indian laborersworked the plantations, tending
(30:21):
to the rubber trees andsugarcane fields, their hands
stained with the labor that madeBritish men rich.
The mansion itself was an alienthing to them, a monolith of
foreign wealth built on landthat had once been theirs before
.
The British decided that itwasn't.
The Ramsdens thought they hadbuilt something permanent here.
(30:43):
They thought they had tamedthis land, bent it to their will
.
But you can only ignore thewarnings for so long, because
something was growing beneaththe surface, a resentment, a
shift, a force that had beendisturbed.
And then, in 1948, theunthinkable happened.
(31:06):
John St Mauer Ramsden was founddead on the staircase, shot
Twice, twice, execution style, amurder that was never solved
and a house that would never bethe same.
John had been born intoprivilege, expectation and power
(31:27):
.
His grandfather had arrived inMalaya decades earlier, back
when the land was still untamedin the eyes of the British, back
when fortunes were made bythose bold enough to take it.
The Ramsdens had been one ofthe families that took
everything land, labor, control.
By the time John was born, thefamily empire was already built.
(31:50):
He didn't have to fight for it,he just had to keep it running.
His life was one of comfort androutine.
He woke in the grand estateServants prepared his meals,
washed his clothes, kept thehouse pristine, even as the
jungle outside threatened toreclaim it.
From his study he could see thevast plantation stretching into
(32:12):
the distance, rows of rubbertrees, the endless repetition of
green.
Somewhere out there, dozens ofworkers were already sweating
under the morning sun, tappingthe trees for latex that could
be turned into his wealth, powerand progress.
That is, for the British atleast.
John had inherited the throneof an empire within an empire,
(32:37):
the director of the PanangRubber Estates Group managing
the business that had turned hisfamily into one of the most
powerful in the region.
But while his grandfather hadruled with confidence, john
lived in a different world,because by the late 1940s the
British weren't as untouchableas they once were.
The war had changed everything.
(32:59):
Malaya was no longer just acolony but a battleground, and
John, whether he realized it ornot, was standing in the center
of it.
I imagine a morning at the99-door mansion Caledonia House,
perhaps one of John's lastbefore everything unraveled.
The morning air is thick, withthe scent of damp earth, heat
(33:22):
and burning wood, the distantsound of cicadas humming through
the trees.
The sun rises slowly castinglong shadows over the veranda
where John steps out surveyingthe land his family built.
It's a house that should feellike home to him, but does it?
The halls are too large, theceilings too high.
(33:45):
At night the wind moves throughthe doors in strange ways,
creating whispers, howls thatdon't belong.
The servants say some doorsnever stay closed, that they
wake up to find them open, nomatter how many times they shut
them.
John doesn't believe in ghosts,at least that's what he tells
himself.
The house this morning has beenlong awake servants moving
(34:08):
through the quarters preparingbreakfast, opening windows to
let the jungle air in theBritish elite in Malaya live in
luxury, weighted on by the handsof people their empire has
forced into servitude.
He eats at a long dining tablewith his family Somewhere in the
mansion.
The radio crackles with newsfrom London, talk of politics,
(34:31):
of the slow unraveling ofcolonial power across the land.
But here in this place John isstill a man of influence, still
a ruler of his own privatekingdom.
By mid-morning he is dressed inhis white linen suit, riding
horseback through the plantation, checking on hundreds of rubber
trees that pay for his life.
(34:52):
Somewhere in the fields,workers lower their gaze as he
passes.
They still call him Tuon, atitle of respect or maybe just
obligation.
He nods at the plantationmanager, listens to a report
about production, about trade.
The world is shifting, but therubber business is still strong.
(35:16):
He signs papers, sendstelegrams, makes decisions,
because that's what he wasraised to do, but still there is
unrest in the air.
The Malayan emergency has begun, the guerrilla war between the
British and the anti-colonialresistance is growing bloodier.
There are whispers of attackson planters, of men being
(35:38):
dragged from their homes andexecuted in the fields they had
owned.
But John doesn't think thiswill happen to him.
So who is John really?
That's the thing we don'treally know.
Was he a ruthless businessmanwilling to exploit whoever he
had to in order to keep hisfamily's fortune intact?
(36:00):
Or was he something else, a mancaught in a world that was
shifting too fast beneath hisfeet, unable to adapt to a
future that had no place for him?
What we do know is that he waspowerful, he was wealthy, he was
a target and soon he would bedead.
(36:20):
In the days leading up to hismurder, something around the
plantation had changed.
There were rumors of threats,warnings that British planters
were being hunted, some wereleaving, just abandoning their
estates, retreating to thesafety of Penang or Singapore.
But John had stayed.
Maybe he thought he wasuntouchable, maybe he thought
(36:43):
the land was still his.
But the thing about places likethis, the thing about houses
like this, is that no one reallyowns them.
They just get to live in themUntil they don't.
The night John St Moore Ramsdendied.
The air was thick with humidity, the kind that lingers long
(37:14):
after the sun has set, pressingin through the open doors and
making the sweat on the back ofyour neck feel like it'll never
dry.
Inside Caledonia House, theworld was quiet.
John had just finished dinner.
Maybe he was reading in thestudy, flipping through reports
on rubber exports, profits, theendless chess game of colonial
business.
Maybe he was standing on theveranda, a whiskey in hand,
staring out at the plantation,the empire his family had built,
(37:35):
the land he had taken, reshapedand forced into obedience.
Or maybe he was already feelingit that strange electricity in
the air, that creeping sensethat you get before something
big happens.
What we do know is this henever made it upstairs.
The first shot rang out justpast 10 pm, a single sharp crack
(38:00):
that sliced through the night,followed by another by the time
the sound faded into silence,john's body was slumped on the
grand staircase, blood poolingbeneath him on the polished wood
.
Two bullets shot, executionstyle One in the back of the
(38:24):
head and one for certainty.
Whoever did this?
They wanted to ensure he wasdead and they wanted it done
cleanly and deliberately.
There was no signs of astruggle, no frantic chase
through the halls, no overturnedfurniture, no desperate clawing
for survival, just a man whohad been alive one moment and
dead the next.
A death too cold-blooded to berandom.
(38:45):
It's a question that's hauntedthis place ever since, and
depending on who you asked, theanswer was very different.
Ever since, and depending onwho you asked, the answer was
very different.
Outside the walls of the mansion, malaya was at war.
The Malayan emergency had begun, a brutal, bloody struggle
between British colonial forcesand the Malayan National
Liberation Army, a communistguerrilla movement fighting for
(39:10):
independence.
British planters had been primetargets, the revolutionaries.
They weren't just businessmen,they were the symbols of the
occupation.
Was John one of them?
One of the ones, like manyothers, burned out and driven
away, dragged from their homesand shot in the fields they once
ruled?
Had rebels slipped through theplantation that night, stepping
(39:33):
past the neatly planted rows ofrubber trees and moving through
the shadows like the corridorsof the mansion had.
They found him alone, put a gunto his head and pulled the
trigger in the name of a warbigger than him.
That's what the British wantedpeople to believe, because it
made sense to them.
A political killing, a messagescrawled in blood.
(39:55):
But not everyone believed that.
Because if this was a politicalhit, why was nothing else
touched?
No ransacking, no stolen money,no destruction, just a single
silent act of violence.
The kind of precision that feltpersonal.
(40:15):
The rubber industry wasn't justa business.
It was a cutthroat empire builton monopolies, power struggles
and backroom deals.
The kind of industry whererivals didn't just compete, they
destroyed each other.
John was the man in charge ofthe Penang Rubber Estates Group.
He held the contracts, thenumbers, the land, and if
(40:36):
somebody wanted him out of theway, a quiet bullet in the night
would do the job.
Was it a plantation manager?
He crossed A business partnerwith too much to lose.
Or was it even closer than that?
Because the most unsettlingtheory, the one that changes
everything, is the idea thatJohn was killed by someone
inside his own home.
(40:56):
John wasn't alone in themansion.
That night, the house was fullof people servants, family
workers, those who saw him everyday, those who knew his habits
and his routines.
Someone had to have heard thegunshots and yet no one saw
anything.
No sign of forced entry, noreported intruders.
(41:19):
So how did a killer walk intoCaledonia House, execute the
master of the home and walk outunseen, unless they never had to
walk in at all?
The morning after, the colonialnewspapers framed John as a
martyr, a victim of terrorists,radicals.
A senseless assassination.
(41:40):
But in the villages and in theplantations, in the quiet spaces
where the British didn't listen, the story was different.
To some, this wasn't murder, itwas retribution.
A powerful man taken down bythe very land his family had
claimed, a house that had beenbuilt on land never meant to be
tamed.
Finally taking something back,a reckoning, a curse fulfilled.
(42:06):
Then there's one final theory,the kind that doesn't show up in
news reports, the kind thatlingers in the whispers of
workers who refuse to stay pastdark.
What if John's death wasn'tabout war, or business, or
betrayal?
What if it was a manifestationof something older?
What if the mansion itself, theland beneath it, the spirits
(42:29):
that were never meant to bedisturbed?
What if they wanted him gone?
Murder leaves a scar not juston the people left behind but on
the places too, and in all thestories we tell we come back to
this question often.
What happens to a house, a home, a space, when someone dies
(42:50):
inside it like this?
Not a slow death, not a naturalpassing, but something violent,
deliberate, something thatsends shockwaves of energy
through the walls, floors,shaking the very foundation.
John St Mauer Ramsden's bloodsoaked into the wood of that
grand staircase.
There's a bullet hole still inthe walls where a bullet
(43:12):
ricocheted.
His last breath left the housecolder than it had been before.
Did it change that night?
Or was it always waiting tobecome what it is now?
By the time World War II reachedMalaya, the Ramsdens weren't
the only ones who had claimedthis land.
And this is where things getconfusing, because in 1941, the
(43:37):
Japanese Imperial Army sweptthrough the peninsula in a
brutal, fast-moving invasion,pushing the British forces out
in some ways-moving invasion,pushing the British forces out
in some ways and taking controlof nearly everything the Empire
had built, including the 99-doormansion, or at least from the
records that we can find.
This house, once a symbol ofBritish colonial power, was now
(43:58):
used as an outpost for war.
Japanese forces took over themansion, using it as a military
headquarters.
But what happened behind thosedoors during the occupation?
This whole part of historybecomes incredibly murky.
Some locals say it was acommand center, a place where
Japanese officials strategizedand planned their next moves.
(44:20):
Others say it was something fardarker, that the mansion wasn't
just a headquarters but aprison, that interrogations
happened here, that executionshappened here, that not everyone
who entered the house duringthe war walked back out.
One story claims the Ramsdenfamily members who remained in
Malaya were executed inside themansion during the occupation.
(44:43):
But here's where historycontradicts itself.
John St Mauer Ramsden wasn'tkilled until 1948, three years
after the war had ended.
If there was a massacre insidethe mansion, who did actually
die there?
And if the house already heldon to death, on to fear, on to
(45:05):
whatever else had lingered inthe shadows before, what did the
war leave behind?
And not long after John'smurder, someone else arrived at
the mansion, someone who didn'tcome for wealth or power, but
for something deeper, someonewho didn't just walk through the
front door but maybe openedsomething that was never meant
(45:27):
to be.
Because this is where the storyshifts again.
This is where the mansion stopsbeing a crime scene and starts
becoming something else entirely, because if the 99-door mansion
wasn't haunted before, itcertainly was about to be.
We know that there's a patternto houses like this when things
(46:02):
like this happen, they don'tchoose to sit empty, they call
things to them.
John St Mauer Ramsden's bloodhad barely dried on the grand
staircase before the whispersstarted that the house had
changed.
The workers who had alreadyfeared the land now wouldn't go
near it.
And then, not long after,someone else moved in, not a
(46:27):
family and certainly not abusinessman, a Bomo.
At some point after the Ramsdenmurder, an unnamed Bomo, a Malay
shaman, healer and intermediarybetween the seen and unseen,
took up residence in theabandoned mansion.
Took up residence in theabandoned mansion.
Now there's no official recordof him, no names or documents,
just stories.
(46:48):
Some say he was drawn to theplace, sensing the energy left
behind.
Some say he was summoned, thatthe house itself had become
unstable, that something neededto be fixed, and then others say
that he wasn't trying to fixanything at all.
They say he was trying tocontrol what was already there.
Bomos, as we know, in meleeculture were powerful figures
(47:12):
known for their ability to heal,protect and sometimes
manipulate unseen forces.
But this one wasn't here formedicine.
Locals reported seeing lightsflickering through the empty
mansion at night, smoke curlingfrom the windows, strange
chanting drifting out frombehind the doors.
(47:33):
There were offerings left atthe entrance, a clear sign of
rituals being performed, objectsbeing buried around the
property, something many meleeshamans would do to anchor
spirits to a location.
But the real fear came fromwhat people heard inside.
People who walked too closeclaimed they heard muttering
(47:54):
from within the walls, whispersand languages they didn't
recognize.
Others spoke of a low growl,something not quite animal and
not quite human.
And we know that this mansionwas already strange for its
doors, 99 of them leading tonowhere, opening to nothing but
the grand vastness of the jungle.
But the Bomo wasn't interestedin any of those.
(48:16):
He was searching for thehundredth door.
In melee folklore, doors aren'tjust doors, they're thresholds,
portals, openings between realms, between this world and
whatever exists beyond it.
Many believed that the Bomofound a way to create that
hundredth door, a metaphysicalpathway into something no one
(48:40):
was ever meant to access, aspiritual tear in reality.
And once it was opened,something else stepped through
the team behind Destinations ofthe Damned, one of my favorite
shows that's really intrigued mevisited the mansion to
investigate these stories andwhatever happened to them inside
(49:00):
.
It shook them.
A medium entered the mansionand immediately found herself in
a trance, speaking in alanguage no one could recognize.
Some claim it was an ancientdialect, one lost to time.
Others say it was the voices ofsome of the people that had
been there waiting.
Many claim to see her, a younggirl standing in the darkness of
(49:24):
the mansion, the daughter ofJohn St Maurer Ramsden, perhaps
a lost soul trapped by the BowMo's rituals, or something
disguising itself as a child tolure people closer.
Whatever it was, whatever isthere, it left an impression
because the energy in that househas never faded.
(49:46):
If anything, it's only gottenstronger.
Places like this don't goquietly.
Sometimes they crumble,sometimes they rot and sometimes
they burn.
For decades, the 99-door mansionCaledonia House stood like a
(50:06):
skeleton in the jungle Empty anddecayed, but not forgotten.
The land had already taken backmost of it Vines creeping
through doorways, roots crackingthrough the foundation, but
then, in 2020, a fire rippedthrough the mansion, destroying
70% of what remained, and therewas no official cause.
(50:29):
No one came forward.
No strange electrical fault, nolightning strike.
No squatters with an open flame, just fire.
By the time it was over, mostof the structure was gone, just
a charred husk where a grandestate, a crime scene and a
portal to something else hadonce stood.
(50:50):
Was this an accident?
Or was the house trying toerase itself?
Official reports neverpinpointed a cause, but if you
ask the locals, there are threepredominant theories.
Some say this wasn'tdestruction, it was containment,
that the fire was never meantto destroy the house but to seal
(51:13):
something inside the bomosrituals, the 100th door, the
things that had leaked through.
Maybe the house itself wantedpeople to know that it had
become too unstable, too open,and something or someone decided
it was time to cut it off fromthe world.
For years, people whisperedthat the mansion was never meant
(51:35):
to exist, that the British hadbuilt on land that wasn't theirs
and ignored every warning.
And what happens to things thataren't supposed to be?
At some point theyself-destruct.
Or maybe the simplestexplanation is the truth.
Maybe it was just a fire, maybethe house was already falling
(51:56):
apart and the elements, time oreven trespassers finally
finished what nature had started.
But I don't know, becausehaunted places don't just hold
stories, they hold energy, andsometimes, when something
doesn't belong in this worldanymore, it finds its own way to
disappear.
The house is mostly gone now,but the land, the land is still
(52:22):
here, and here's what I keepthinking about always in every
episode I record.
If places absorb history,violence, ritual and tragedy,
does burning them ever reallytruly erase what's there, or
does it just free it?
(52:43):
If the fire in 2020 was thefinal nail in the coffin, what
happened next felt like the landitself refusing to let the
mansion rise again, because evenafter the flames had taken 70%
of the house, even after itsskeletal remains stood
half-burned and broken, therewere still efforts to preserve
it.
It became a heritage site, alandmark wrapped in mystery,
(53:04):
tragedy and superstition.
But the land didn't make it easy.
In March 2024, a crane accidentinflicted even more damage on
the mansion during an attempt toreinforce what was left.
The details I could find arevague, just like the fire.
There was no clear reason forthe failure, no obvious mistake
to point to Just anotherincident, another moment where
(53:33):
the house seemed to resist, likeit wasn't meant to be saved.
But now the authorities arestill pushing for restoration.
The Sibirang-Puray City Councilhas designated it as a heritage
site, but it hasn't beenofficially protected under the
National Heritage Act because itremains in private ownership,
which means its future isuncertain.
Will it be rebuilt, preservedor left to collapse under the
weight of its own history?
(53:54):
Or, like everything else aboutthis place, will it somehow defy
its own explanations?
Some stories haunt you becausethey don't have endings.
Perhaps this story doesn'teither.
The mansion is mostly gone now,just ruins swallowed by the
jungle, the last remnants of aplace that maybe never should
(54:15):
have existed in the first place.
But even though the walls havecrumbled, this story doesn't
feel finished and it drives mecrazy, fascinates me, drives me
wild, trying to findexplanations, solutions, because
we know this was never ahaunted house, we know this was
always something bigger, a housebuilt on land that wasn't meant
(54:38):
to hold it, a house that borewitness to colonialism, murder,
rituals, fire, a house that sawtoo much, held too much,
absorbed too much.
If places absorb this energy,if they hold on to things, then
what happens when a place hasseen this much?
(54:58):
Because that's the pattern,isn't it?
It's not just this house, it'splaces all over the world
Plantations, castles, asylums,battlefields, places where
trauma and violence sink intothe bones of the location, into
the soil beneath it, places thatdon't just hold history.
They hold something heavier,and I keep wondering do we
(55:22):
create the hauntings or do theyfind us?
Did this place become hauntedbecause of what happened inside
it, or was it always somethingmore?
And maybe, in the end, the firewasn't a tragedy, maybe it was
a mercy?
Maybe the most terrifyingplaces are the ones that somehow
(55:43):
both refuse to be forgotten butalso demand to be forgotten.
Tonight, we step through thefirst of 99 doors.
The truth is, some doors, onceopened, refuse to close, and
that's what unsettles me themost about this place.
Not just the murder, not justthe fire, not just the whispers
(56:07):
of untold rituals that may ormay not have cracked something
open.
It's the clawing frustrationthat this story isn't finished,
but its presence in our worldhasn't faded.
The land still holds itssecrets, and if you stand there,
just beyond the ruins, wherethe trees begin to press in,
(56:29):
where the air is thick andwaiting, you might feel it too,
that weight, that pull, thatsense that something is there.
I believe in the supernatural,of course.
I believe that energy lingers,that places absorb it, absorb
what happens inside them, thatsome wounds in history never can
(56:54):
fully close, and I believe thatin places like this, the
boundary between present andpast, between our world and
something else, thins.
What happened in this mansion?
The wealth, violence, ritualsperhaps none of it should have
existed in the first place, andyet it did.
(57:15):
And whatever came from it,whatever still stirs in the
spaces that remain.
I don't think it's something wewere ever meant to understand,
but that's what draws me in,because, even if we'll never
have all the answers, the onlyway to get close is to keep
listening To the stories, to thehistories, the legends, to the
(57:39):
places that still hold theseechoes of the past.
Maybe the mansion burnedbecause it had to, maybe it's
gone, or maybe it's just waitingfor someone to step through one
last door.
Thank you you.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Good Hang with Amy Poehler
Come hang with Amy Poehler. Each week on her podcast, she'll welcome celebrities and fun people to her studio. They'll share stories about their careers, mutual friends, shared enthusiasms, and most importantly, what's been making them laugh. This podcast is not about trying to make you better or giving advice. Amy just wants to have a good time.