Seletar Chronicle

As Halloween approaches, I have to recall the last 11 years, when 31 October has been celebrated in a spectacular way – by the living. Halloween festivities have always been very popular in Seletar, followed by the lantern festival. This year’s moon celebration was quieter than some years, but still the little lines of tottering lights along Bayswater denoted a faithful following of lantern fans. But what of Halloween 2008, with so many families having departed the camp?

Each year, Seletar is startled and assaulted by gangs of ghouls, witches, hags, wraiths, caspars, fairies and more at Halloween. Roasted marshmallows, trick or treat, cobweb parties at Haymarket, even dunking for apples (put your hands behind your back and take the apple out of the basin of water with your teeth) were their common pursuits. This year, there won’t be so many treats, but perhaps more tricks. 

Inhabited houses are few and far between on Hyde Park Gate, Haymarket, Park Lane and other roads, with darkness shrouding the vacated homes. With the breakup of our Seletar community, Halloweeners might be trick or treating the real ghosts, for this is the last chance for many spectres to haunt their old houses before the old residences are torn down. And there are ghost stories aplenty – you should drop by 10 Hyde Park Gate some time, where Oliver and Sue will regale you with some of them – some stories with first-hand experience. 

Why would the spirits of the departed want to haunt Seletar? Quite possibly because, like many of the living who have had to move out, they simply found no other lovelier place to live than this blessed plot. And perhaps too because they are indignant that so few of the others living outside Seletar seem to care about the heritage, the wildlife, the trees and the tranquility, allowing the airbase to be changed irrevocably. 

So, when we finally shut the front door for the last time, we will leave behind not only our memories, our last chance to see our houses standing, our magnificent and mature canopy of trees, our friends the parrots, blackbirds, magpie robins and sunbirds, but also the resident ghosts of Seletar past, present and those of Seletar yet to come.