Other kids gathered around him and gazed into the loft. A pair of the bird’s eyes glistened in the dark.
“Our school is kind of spooky, don’t you think?,” a young Mei Ren whispered to her friend.
For a little girl like Mei Ren, Phuket Thaihua School was an imaginary place where illusions could become reality.
Someone who she could not identify might be sitting at the back of a dim classroom, gazing at students who were reading textbooks.
Whenever Mei Ren had to use the damp toilet located down the back of the school, its gloomy atmosphere made her want to leave the place as fast as she could.
The dull environment of her school always encouraged her to think of the bat attached to the school’s gable.
“I don’t like that bat,” she told her friend when she looked up at the bat, who had spread its wings. “It’s the symbol of a dark night. It’s an ominous sign.”
Mei Ren heard the story of a ghost of a Japanese soldier who sometimes appeared in the school’s sick bay on the left wing of the building.
It was said that the Japanese spirit had been homeless until he came across the school, and decided to stay in the gloomy sick bay forever.
Many students warned Mei Ren not to stay at school after 5pm, as the master of the owl might come to haunt her as it could feel her fear.
It’s not just a ghost story that made her felt restless in her own school.
Whenever it was raining, strong winds would blow from the school’s atrium through the classrooms that surrounded it.
Windows would repeatedly flip back and forth, just like a scene in a horror movie.
She would sit still but be distracted from her teacher’s lessons whenever she heard the noise of the creaky windows.
“I’m afraid of the ghost in my school,” Mei Ren told her parents one day. “Can’t you shift me to another school?”
Her parents were puzzled when they heard her plea.
“Do you know that you are in the best, and the only, Chinese school in the island? You should be proud of your school,” her mother said. “Don’t be afraid.”
Mei Ren didn’t quite understand what her mother meant at the time, until 15 years later.
Her old school became part of the heritage of her hometown, and she realised later that the ominous bat was actually a Chinese symbol of luck.
The Chinese school was built by Chinese immigrants in 1934. It became a museum in 2005 and is now part of the island’s heritage.