There were many ghosts stories that circulated in Malaya at that time, the fifties. One I remember concerned a newly built school for the local Malay and Chinese population, where the children started to saying the strangest things in English, and not one of them an English speaker, like odd bits verse or colloquialisms such as ‘I could murder a pint and a pie’. It turned out the school had been built on a former Japanese execution centre. The school, so my mother told me, was later torn down.