5.3 | Can Fire Reclaim That Which Was Stolen: The 99 Doors of Caledonia House

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.

Chapters

• 0:15 The Mansion That Shouldn't Exist
• 3:18 Land That Remembers
• 10:45 Spirits of the Malaysian Jungle
• 18:09 British Empire's Bloody Conquest
• 27:40 The Murder on the Staircase
• 42:15 The Hundredth Door
• 49:54 The Fire That Couldn't Erase

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

We're always told that doors are supposed to keep things out or maybe they're meant to keep things in. But some doors Some doors don't care what you think they're for they open when they want to and sometimes they don't close. Deep in the tangled, overgrown wilds of Malaysia, there's a house that shouldn't be there anymore. Most of it isn't. The walls are crumbling, the floors 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 to hold onto things. The people who go looking for it ghost hunters, urban explorers or just the unlucky come back with stories to tell Doors that slam on their own Voices, that whisper names they shouldn't know, growls that come from nowhere, and some don't come back the same at all. The real question isn't why it's haunted, it's how it got this way, because the house wasn't always an abandoned ruin. Once it was a mansion fit for an empire. It belonged to a British family, the Ramsdens, back when Malaya was a land carved up by colonial wealth, the kind of house that stood for power, for control. Then, one night, a man was murdered in cold blood on its grand staircase and something about the house changed. It sat empty, but never silent. Locals wouldn't go near it after dark. And then someone else moved in Not another wealthy family, not someone looking to restore it. A man with rituals, a man with offerings, a man who knew how to open doors that were never meant to be opened. Some say what he did was a mistake. Some say it was deliberate. Then, in 2020, as if trying to erase itself, the mansion burned A fire that no one could explain, no known cause. Nearly gone. But places like this don't just disappear, and that's why I can't stop thinking about it. The real question isn't whether something is still there, it's whether it ever left. Tonight, we step through the first of 99 doors and let's just hope we don't open the wrong one.

Speaker 1: 2:50

I'm Jeremy Haig, and this is when Walls Can Talk. I don't recall exactly when I started listening. Maybe I always have. Some people are drawn to what they can see, what they can prove. I've never had that luxury. The world has always spoken to me in ways I couldn't quite explain, through the heavy weight of a silent, empty room, through a story no one remembers telling, through a voice in my head I'm not entirely sure was my own. I used to wonder if I was imagining it If I was just another person looking for patterns in the noise. But the older I got, the more I realized the past doesn't go quiet just because we stopped listening. I don't know if I'll ever understand what it all means. Maybe I'm not supposed to, but I do know this. I will never stop searching. This might be my journey, but these are their stories. I'm Jeremy Haig, and this is when Walls Can Talk, the podcast, season five.

Speaker 1: 4:41

There's something different about certain places. You don't just see them, you feel them. You step forward and the air shifts. The silence isn't really silence. It's the kind that listens, the kind that waits.

Speaker 1: 4:57

I've always believed that land remembers that long before a place becomes haunted, before people started whispering about curses or shadows that move on their own, the ground itself has already been soaked in something Violence, grief, fear, maybe even something older than all of that, something we don't have a word for. And that brings me here to this place, because before there was a mansion with 99 doors, there was this land. It was here long before the first stone was laid, long before the British, before the plantations, before anyone came along and thought they could claim it as their own. I can't stop wondering was the mansion born haunted, or was it built on something that already was? So let's step back for a second Picture. It Dense, ancient rainforest stretching endlessly in every direction, the kind of jungle where the canopy is so thick, sunlight barely touches the ground. The air itself is thick, not just from the humidity, but from something else, something alive. The trees here are old, older than maps, older than names. Some of them have stood for centuries, watching as the world changed around them, watching people come and go, watching as someone at some point decided to cut through it all and build something they shouldn't have. And the thing is, the people who lived here before the British, before the mansion, they knew this land wasn't empty. They never thought it belonged to them. They just understood, naturally, that they were sharing it. I keep coming back to this idea. Before the 99-door mansion Caledonia House, as it's known before the British, before anyone with maps and deeds tried to claim this land as their own. Who was here first? And, more importantly, what did this place mean to them? And, more importantly, what did this place mean to them? If you ask the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the Malay Peninsula, they'd tell you something the British never bothered to understand.

Speaker 1: 7:36

The Malay Peninsula has been inhabited for over 40,000 years, long before borders, before kings. The first people here were the Negrito tribes, small-statured, dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who migrated from what is now Thailand and Myanmar. 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 and which ones could kill. Thousands of years later, another wave of migration brought the proto-melee seafarers from southern China and Taiwan. They arrived in dugout canoes, navigating by the stars, their lives built around the rhythm of the ocean. They were farmers, fishermen, traders. They knew how to work iron, how to build boats that could withstand the monsoon winds. They settled along rivers, carving villages out of the jungle, but always knowing this land was never theirs alone.

Speaker 1: 8:43

The world they lived in was dense and green, thick, with the sound of insects and the distant cries of gibbons swinging through the trees. Rain was a constant companion, soaking into the earth, feeding the roots of trees older than memory. The nights were alive with the hum of frogs and the rustling of unseen creatures, and always, always, there was the jungle, an endless breathing presence that surrounded them, sheltering them, but never fully theirs. Life moved with the pulse of the land. Families lived in bamboo stilt houses built high to avoid the floods and prowling tigers. Men hunted with blowpipes coating their darts in tree sap so toxic that even a small scratch 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 would come.

Speaker 1: 9:47

Everything had a purpose, everything had a spirit, and if you asked them where they were from, they wouldn't point to a kingdom or a country. They'd point to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, because this land wasn't just where they lived, it was who they were. And to them the land wasn't just a resource or something to be conquered, it was alive. Every tree, every river, every mountain, it all had a soul. You didn't own land, you coexisted with it, and that meant you respected the other things that lived here too. Because there were spirits here, and some of them had been there even longer, in the deep, untouched jungles where sunlight barely reaches the ground.

Speaker 1: 10:51

The Orang Isli believed in something unseen but deeply felt. Spirits, or the Hantu, were everywhere. Some were guardians, some were tricksters, and some some you never wanted to cross. Imagine walking alone at dusk just as the sky turns that deep, 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 the Hanturaya, the great ghost. This wasn't just any spirit, it was one. You made a deal with, a powerful entity bound to its master, carrying out their bidding in exchange for Well, that's the thing. These kinds of deals always have a cost. And when the master dies, the Hantu Raya doesn't go willingly. It lingers looking for a new host, a new master, a spirit like this. If it were ever left behind on this land, if it had nowhere to go, well, that's a terrifying thought.

Speaker 1: 12:17

Then there were the Panungu spirits that watched over specific locations. Not evil, not good, just there Watching, waiting. A panungu could guard a tree, a river, a mountain or a house. If you treated them with respect, they let you be. But if you disturbed them, if you cut down a tree that wasn't meant to be cut, or if you built something where it didn't belong, bad things happened.

Speaker 1: 12:49

And I keep wondering. When the British carved a plantation out of this land, when they built a mansion with 99 doors on top of something that wasn't theirs, what if something was already there. And then there's her, the one that makes my stomach not just thinking about her, the Pontianak, the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth, trapped in the world of the living, angry, grieving and vengeful. She lingers in banana trees and dark corners, her presence marked by the sudden scent of frangipani flowers or, if she's really close, rotting flesh. The stories say she rips men apart who have done her wrong, that she can take the form of a beautiful 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 took land, who took labor, who ignored the warnings of those who came before them. I wonder if something was waiting for them.

Speaker 1: 14:12

The Orange Astley didn't see themselves as owners of this land. They were caretakers. They respected what was here before them. They knew better than to build where they weren't welcome but the British. They didn't ask for permission, they didn't believe in spirits or curses, or the quiet rules that had kept this land balanced for so long. If they had known what they knew, if they had listened, would the 99-door mansion have ever been built at all? Or would they have walked away, feeling that creeping sensation on the back of their neck, that gut instinct that whispers you're not supposed to be here.

Speaker 1: 15:00

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 by rule the way that we know it, but by sultans, spirits and the people who knew their names. The Mele Peninsula was a crossroads, a place where traders, warriors and mystics had been passing through for centuries. By the 1400s, this land had transformed into a powerful network of sultanates, each ruled by its own sultan, a king of sorts, whose authority came not just from wealth or armies, but by something divine. Came not just from wealth or armies, but by something divine. Islam had taken root here, brought by traders from India and the Middle East, reshaping the way people saw the world. But something strange happened in this part of the world Islam didn't erase the older beliefs, it merged with them. The jungle was still alive, the rivers still carried spirits, the old ways never fully left. Even as the great mosques rose in the port cities, deep in the forests, people still whispered about the unseen forces that had been here long ago.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Spirits, jinn curses. These weren't just stories or lost to time, but remained facts of life, and no one understood this better than the Bomo. If the Sultans ruled the people, the Bomo ruled the places in between. They were the healers, the intermediaries between human and the supernatural. You didn't go to a Abomo just for medicine. You went to them when you needed protection or power. Abomo could cure an illness, break a curse or call upon spirits for guidance, but they could also bind spirits to objects, trap them in places or summon forces that weren't meant to be controlled, and some were even feared among their own people. There were whispers of Abomo who had made packs with the Hanturaya, great spirits that acted as their servants or enforcers. Others were said to have trapped jinn inside bottles, using them for power, and some, the darkest ones, could create a susuk, a sort of spiritual implant hidden beneath the skin that made a person invincible, but at a terrible cost. These weren't superstitions either. Sultans themselves had bomo advisors, using their abilities in matters of war, strategy and control. The supernatural wasn't separate from power. It was power, and I keep thinking what happens when a shaman calls upon something that can't be undone? What happens when a force that was meant to stay buried is pulled into the land of the living. Because if spirits could be bound to places, what kind of rituals might have been performed on the land where the 99-door mansion now stands, and did they ever truly end?

Speaker 1: 18:25

History has a way of smoothing over the rough edges. We hear British colonial rule and it sounds like something inevitable, something clinical, just a shift in power, a new administration stepping in. But that's not what it felt like. It was theft, massive, systematic and ruthless. There's a pattern to the way empires spread. They don't start with armies or war, they start with money trade Ships pulling into ports, promising silk, tea and gunpowder, promising alliances. At first they shake hands, they sign agreements, they talk about partnerships. And then, slowly and deliberately, they sign agreements, they talk about partnerships and then, slowly and deliberately, they take.

Speaker 1: 19:18

By the 1800s, the British had mastered this process. They had already taken India, hong Kong, australia, south Africa and more, and now they had their eyes on the Malay Peninsula, not for its history, not even for its people, not even for its traditions, but for its wealth. To the British, malay wasn't a land with history, with spirits and with power. It was simply a resource, a place they could mine, extract, ship and exploit for wealth. They saw fortune. Not wonder. They saw a people who, in their eyes, were lesser people, to be ruled, controlled and made into a workforce for the empire.

Speaker 1: 20:08

By the 1800s, the British were already swallowing Southeast Asia, claiming lands that had never belonged to them, with treaties signed under duress, manipulation or outright force. The Malay Sultans, once powerful rulers in their own right, were forced into deals. They could not refuse trading their autonomy for survival, for a desperate attempt at keeping some form of control. But control was never the goal, domination was, and the proof of that you can see in the land itself. For centuries this land had belonged to the Malays and the indigenous Orang Asli. It was not owned, not in the way the British understood ownership. It was passed through generations, shared, respected, but the British saw untapped wealth.

Speaker 1: 21:09

The jungle was never something to be revered, it was something to be conquered, and so, piece by piece, they cut it down, entire forests cleared, rivers diverted and land flattened to make way for a cash crop empire Sugar, coffee and, most of all, rubber. At first it happened on paper. The British signed treaties with local Mele sultans promising protection in exchange for influence. They presented themselves as advisors, as allies, but the contracts were always written in their language, using their laws designed to slowly shift power away from the people who had lived there for centuries. And once they had control of the laws, they took the land, they divided it up, carving the rainforest into plantations, factories and British estates. Villages that had existed for generations were suddenly gone, their people pushed into labor or driven further into the jungle.

Speaker 1: 22:28

Land that had once belonged to everyone spirits, ancestors, families was now fenced off, claimed and owned. It didn't matter what the land had meant before, it didn't matter that the locals warned them that the forest wasn't just a forest, that the land wasn't just land. The British didn't believe in spirits, they believed in money. And right in the middle of it, all estates began to rise, mansions, massive and opulent and impossible to ignore. And the 99-door mansion otherwise known as Caledonia House. It was one of them, a house so large and so unnatural to this land that it imposed itself upon the earth. It was built to stand as a reminder. I suppose, that this was all British land, now that the power had shifted, that the spirits and the old ways, the people who had once lived here, they no longer mattered. But the people who, the old ways, the people who had once lived here. They no longer mattered. But the people who did live here, they knew that was a lie.

Speaker 1: 23:52

By the late 1800s, life in British-controlled melee was a world split in two. On one side there was the British elite, the rubber tycoons, sugar barons, the officers of the East India Company. They lived in sprawling plantation estates, european-styled mansions, dropping into the middle of the jungle, like they had always belonged there. Their lives were filled with imported luxuries, french wines, hand-stitched suits, grand pianos in drawing rooms where the humidity warped the wood. They built tennis courts in the tropics, hosted ballroom dances under chandeliers brought in by steamship. In their minds, this was civilization. And then there was the other side, the melee farmers, the Indian and Chinese laborers, the families who had lived on this land for generations because their lives had been rewritten.

Speaker 1: 24:52

When the British took the land, they forced the people into labor Rubber plantations, tin mines, sugar fields, places where men, women, even children worked from dawn to dusk, hands blistered, feet sinking into the heat of the earth. But when night fell, that's when the real fear set in. To the British, the jungle was wild, uncharted and something to be controlled and contained. But to the locals it was something else entirely. At night, the jungle belonged to the spirits. Workers refused to go out after sundown, terrified of what lurked beyond the light of their oil lamps, they whispered about the Hantu Raya, the great spirits that roamed in shadow, and the Pontianak, the vengeful ghost of a woman who had died too violently to move on.

Speaker 1: 25:52

And the thing is strange, things did happen on these plantations. Sometimes simple tools would disappear, only to be found in places no one had ever put them. Strange noises echoed through the trees, not animals and not wild, but something else. People reported feeling watched, their skin crawling as they walked home alone, and sometimes people didn't make it home at all. Some said they had been taken, others said they had seen something standing at the edge of the trees watching. The British called it superstition, but the workers knew better. And here in the jungle, the Caledonia house rose like a thing that shouldn't exist A house with 99 doors, openings, passageways, places for things to move through, built on land that had been taken, reshaped, disrespected, a house where the people who built it refused to stay after dark. Because if the British had listened, if they had paid attention, maybe they would have realized they weren't just taking land, they were disturbing, something much older, something much older, and things like that. They don't go quietly.

Speaker 1: 27:17

By the time the Ramsden family arrived in Malaya, the British Empire was at its peak. They weren't explorers, not in the way history romanticizes. They weren't adventurers carving civilization out of the wild. They were businessmen, and Malaya was a goldmine. The mid-1900s was an era of sugar and rubber industries that were swallowing the land whole. British investors were flooding in, carving up the jungle into neatly measured plots of ownership. The Ramsdens were exactly that kind of family. They came from wealth, from status, bringing with them a certain confidence, the kind that comes from believing that land any land, can be bought, tamed and controlled, and that's truly how the 99-door mansion came to be. The Ramsdens didn't want a simple estate, they wanted a kingdom, and a house like this doesn't rise organically, it doesn't settle into its surroundings the way villages do, shaped by the land, growing in the way things were meant to grow.

Speaker 1: 28:25

Built in the 1840s, the mansion was commissioned for the Ramsden family, one of Britain's wealthiest lineages White walls, grand archways and imposing columns that mimicked the architecture of Britain. Dropped like an afterthought into the heart of the Malayan jungle, the mansion had ten rooms, each designed with five to six doors, creating a labyrinth of ninety 99 openings that turned the house into something closer to a puzzle than a home. Some say this was a design choice, an attempt perhaps to cool the house in the relentless heat of the tropics. And then there are others who suggest the design was perhaps inspired in some abstract or inexplicable way, that the doors were never meant for the living, that the layout itself a maze of thresholds, an overabundance of openings wasn't just an architectural quirk, but something deeper, stranger A house designed to be impossible to map, impossible to navigate or impossible to leave. And if you consider this possibility, I have to wonder did the Ramsdens know what they were building on? Or did the house itself start shaping itself into something it was never meant to be?

Speaker 1: 29:46

Life inside the 99-door mansion was a world apart from the land that surrounded it. It was high society transplanted into the tropics, an insulated bubble of wealth where parties spilled out onto the verandas and where deals were made over whiskey and cigars. For the British elite, this was civilization. For the local workers, it was something foreign and unknown. It was something foreign and unknown. They weren't even guests in this world. They became its machinery. Melee and Indian laborers worked the plantations, tending to the rubber trees and sugarcane fields, their hands stained with the labor that made British men rich. The mansion itself was an alien thing to them, a monolith of foreign wealth built on land that had once been theirs before. The British decided that it wasn't.

Speaker 1: 30:41

The Ramsdens thought they had built something permanent here. They thought they had tamed this land, bent it to their will. But you can only ignore the warnings for so long, because something was growing beneath the surface, a resentment, a shift, a force that had been disturbed. And then, in 1948, the unthinkable happened. John St Mauer Ramsden was found dead on the staircase, shot Twice, twice, execution style, a murder that was never solved and a house that would never be the same.

Speaker 1: 31:23

John had been born into privilege, expectation and power. His grandfather had arrived in Malaya decades earlier, back when the land was still untamed in the eyes of the British, back when fortunes were made by those bold enough to take it. The Ramsdens had been one of the families that took everything land, labor, control. By the time John was born, the family empire was already built. He didn't have to fight for it, he just had to keep it running. His life was one of comfort and routine. He woke in the grand estate Servants prepared his meals, washed his clothes, kept the house pristine, even as the jungle outside threatened to reclaim it. From his study he could see the vast plantation stretching into the distance, rows of rubber trees, the endless repetition of green. Somewhere out there, dozens of workers were already sweating under the morning sun, tapping the trees for latex that could be turned into his wealth, power and progress. That is, for the British at least. John had inherited the throne of an empire within an empire, the director of the Panang Rubber Estates Group managing the business that had turned his family into one of the most powerful in the region. But while his grandfather had ruled with confidence, john lived in a different world, because by the late 1940s the British weren't as untouchable as they once were. The war had changed everything. Malaya was no longer just a colony but a battleground, and John, whether he realized it or not, was standing in the center of it.

Speaker 1: 33:08

I imagine a morning at the 99-door mansion Caledonia House, perhaps one of John's last before everything unraveled. The morning air is thick, with the scent of damp earth, heat and burning wood, the distant sound of cicadas humming through the trees. The sun rises slowly casting long shadows over the veranda where John steps out surveying the land his family built. It's a house that should feel like home to him, but does it? The halls are too large, the ceilings too high. At night the wind moves through the doors in strange ways, creating whispers, howls that don't belong. The servants say some doors never stay closed, that they wake up to find them open, no matter 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 been long awake servants moving through the quarters preparing breakfast, opening windows to let the jungle air in the British elite in Malaya live in luxury, weighted on by the hands of people their empire has forced into servitude. He eats at a long dining table with his family Somewhere in the mansion.

Speaker 1: 34:26

The radio crackles with news from London, talk of politics, of the slow unraveling of colonial power across the land. But here in this place John is still a man of influence, still a ruler of his own private kingdom. By mid-morning he is dressed in his white linen suit, riding horseback through the plantation, checking on hundreds of rubber trees that pay for his life. Somewhere in the fields, workers lower their gaze as he passes. They still call him Tuon, a title of respect or maybe just obligation. He nods at the plantation manager, listens to a report about production, about trade. The world is shifting, but the rubber business is still strong. He signs papers, sends telegrams, makes decisions, because that's what he was raised to do, but still there is unrest in the air. The Malayan emergency has begun, the guerrilla war between the British and the anti-colonial resistance is growing bloodier. There are whispers of attacks on planters, of men being dragged from their homes and executed in the fields they had owned. But John doesn't think this will happen to him.

Speaker 1: 35:46

So who is John really? That's the thing we don't really know. Was he a ruthless businessman willing to exploit whoever he had to in order to keep his family's fortune intact? Or was he something else, a man caught in a world that was shifting too fast beneath his feet, unable to adapt to a future that had no place for him? What we do know is that he was powerful, he was wealthy, he was a target and soon he would be dead. In the days leading up to his murder, something around the plantation had changed. There were rumors of threats, warnings that British planters were being hunted, some were leaving, just abandoning their estates, retreating to the safety of Penang or Singapore. But John had stayed. Maybe he thought he was untouchable, maybe he thought the land was still his. But the thing about places like this, the thing about houses like this, is that no one really owns them. They just get to live in them Until they don't.

Speaker 1: 36:59

The night John St Moore Ramsden died. The air was thick with humidity, the kind that lingers long after the sun has set, pressing in through the open doors and making the sweat on the back of your neck feel like it'll never dry. Inside Caledonia House, the world was quiet. John had just finished dinner. Maybe he was reading in the study, flipping through reports on rubber exports, profits, the endless chess game of colonial business. Maybe he was standing on the veranda, a whiskey in hand, staring out at the plantation, the empire his family had built, the land he had taken, reshaped and forced into obedience. Or maybe he was already feeling it that strange electricity in the air, that creeping sense that you get before something big happens. What we do know is this he never made it upstairs.

Speaker 1: 37:55

The first shot rang out just past 10 pm, a single sharp crack 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 pooling beneath him on the polished wood. Two bullets shot, execution style One in the back of the head and one for certainty. Whoever did this? They wanted to ensure he was dead and they wanted it done cleanly and deliberately. There was no signs of a struggle, no frantic chase through the halls, no overturned furniture, no desperate clawing for survival, just a man who had been alive one moment and dead the next. A death too cold-blooded to be random. It's a question that's haunted this place ever since, and depending on who you asked, the answer was very different. Ever since, and depending on who you asked, the answer was very different.

Speaker 1: 38:54

Outside the walls of the mansion, malaya was at war. The Malayan emergency had begun, a brutal, bloody struggle between British colonial forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army, a communist guerrilla movement fighting for independence. British planters had been prime targets, the revolutionaries. They weren't just businessmen, they were the symbols of the occupation. Was John one of them? One of the ones, like many others, burned out and driven away, dragged from their homes and shot in the fields they once ruled? Had rebels slipped through the plantation that night, stepping past the neatly planted rows of rubber trees and moving through the shadows like the corridors of the mansion had. They found him alone, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger in the name of a war bigger than him. That's what the British wanted people to believe, because it made sense to them. A political killing, a message scrawled in blood.

Speaker 1: 39:55

But not everyone believed that. Because if this was a political hit, why was nothing else touched? No ransacking, no stolen money, no destruction, just a single silent act of violence. The kind of precision that felt personal. The rubber industry wasn't just a business. It was a cutthroat empire built on monopolies, power struggles and backroom deals. The kind of industry where rivals didn't just compete, they destroyed each other.

Speaker 1: 40:29

John was the man in charge of the Penang Rubber Estates Group. He held the contracts, the numbers, the land, and if somebody wanted him out of the way, a quiet bullet in the night would do the job. Was it a plantation manager? He crossed A business partner with too much to lose. Or was it even closer than that?

Speaker 1: 40:49

Because the most unsettling theory, the one that changes everything, is the idea that John was killed by someone inside his own home. John wasn't alone in the mansion. That night, the house was full of people servants, family workers, those who saw him every day, those who knew his habits and his routines. Someone had to have heard the gunshots and yet no one saw anything. No sign of forced entry, no reported intruders. So how did a killer walk into Caledonia House, execute the master of the home and walk out unseen, unless they never had to walk in at all?

Speaker 1: 41:31

The morning after, the colonial newspapers framed John as a martyr, a victim of terrorists, radicals. A senseless assassination. But in the villages and in the plantations, in the quiet spaces where the British didn't listen, the story was different. To some, this wasn't murder, it was retribution. A powerful man taken down by the very land his family had claimed, a house that had been built on land never meant to be tamed. Finally taking something back, a reckoning, a curse fulfilled.

Speaker 1: 42:06

Then there's one final theory, the kind that doesn't show up in news reports, the kind that lingers in the whispers of workers who refuse to stay past dark. What if John's death wasn't about war, or business, or betrayal? What if it was a manifestation of something older? What if the mansion itself, the land beneath it, the spirits that were never meant to be disturbed? What if they wanted him gone? Murder leaves a scar not just on the people left behind but on the places too, and in all the stories we tell we come back to this question often. What happens to a house, a home, a space, when someone dies inside it like this? Not a slow death, not a natural passing, but something violent, deliberate, something that sends shockwaves of energy through the walls, floors, shaking the very foundation. John St Mauer Ramsden's blood soaked into the wood of that grand staircase. There's a bullet hole still in the walls where a bullet ricocheted. His last breath left the house colder than it had been before. Did it change that night? Or was it always waiting to become what it is now?

Speaker 1: 43:25

By the time World War II reached Malaya, the Ramsdens weren't the only ones who had claimed this land. And this is where things get confusing, because in 1941, the Japanese Imperial Army swept through 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 control of nearly everything the Empire had built, including the 99-door mansion, or at least from the records that we can find. This house, once a symbol of British colonial power, was now used as an outpost for war. Japanese forces took over the mansion, using it as a military headquarters. But what happened behind those doors during the occupation?

Speaker 1: 44:10

This whole part of history becomes incredibly murky. Some locals say it was a command center, a place where Japanese officials strategized and planned their next moves. Others say it was something far darker, that the mansion wasn't just a headquarters but a prison, that interrogations happened here, that executions happened here, that not everyone who entered the house during the war walked back out. One story claims the Ramsden family members who remained in Malaya were executed inside the mansion during the occupation. But here's where history contradicts itself. John St Mauer Ramsden wasn't killed until 1948, three years after the war had ended.

Speaker 1: 44:54

If there was a massacre inside the mansion, who did actually die there? And if the house already held on to death, on to fear, on to whatever else had lingered in the shadows before, what did the war leave behind? And not long after John's murder, someone else arrived at the mansion, someone who didn't come for wealth or power, but for something deeper, someone who didn't just walk through the front door but maybe opened something that was never meant to be. Because this is where the story shifts again. This is where the mansion stops being a crime scene and starts becoming something else entirely, because if the 99-door mansion wasn't haunted before, it certainly was about to be. We know that there's a pattern to houses like this when things like this happen, they don't choose to sit empty, they call things to them. John St Mauer Ramsden's blood had barely dried on the grand staircase before the whispers started that the house had changed. The workers who had already feared the land now wouldn't go near it. And then, not long after, someone else moved in, not a family and certainly not a businessman, a Bomo.

Speaker 1: 46:35

At some point after the Ramsden murder, an unnamed Bomo, a Malay shaman, healer and intermediary between the seen and unseen, took up residence in the abandoned mansion. Took up residence in the abandoned mansion. Now there's no official record of him, no names or documents, just stories. Some say he was drawn to the place, sensing the energy left behind. Some say he was summoned, that the house itself had become unstable, that something needed to be fixed, and then others say that he wasn't trying to fix anything at all. They say he was trying to control what was already there.

Speaker 1: 47:08

Bomos, as we know, in melee culture were powerful figures known for their ability to heal, protect and sometimes manipulate unseen forces. But this one wasn't here for medicine. Locals reported seeing lights flickering through the empty mansion at night, smoke curling from the windows, strange chanting drifting out from behind the doors. There were offerings left at the entrance, a clear sign of rituals being performed, objects being buried around the property, something many melee shamans would do to anchor spirits to a location. But the real fear came from what people heard inside. People who walked too close claimed they heard muttering from within the walls, whispers and languages they didn't recognize. Others spoke of a low growl, something not quite animal and not quite human. And we know that this mansion was already strange for its doors, 99 of them leading to nowhere, opening to nothing but the grand vastness of the jungle. But the Bomo wasn't interested in any of those. He was searching for the hundredth door.

Speaker 1: 48:21

In melee folklore, doors aren't just doors, they're thresholds, portals, openings between realms, between this world and whatever exists beyond it. Many believed that the Bomo found a way to create that hundredth door, a metaphysical pathway into something no one was ever meant to access, a spiritual tear in reality. And once it was opened, something else stepped through the team behind Destinations of the Damned, one of my favorite shows that's really intrigued me visited the mansion to investigate these stories and whatever happened to them inside. It shook them. A medium entered the mansion and immediately found herself in a trance, speaking in a language no one could recognize. Some claim it was an ancient dialect, one lost to time. Others say it was the voices of some of the people that had been there waiting. Many claim to see her, a young girl standing in the darkness of the mansion, the daughter of John St Maurer Ramsden, perhaps a lost soul trapped by the Bow Mo's rituals, or something disguising itself as a child to lure people closer. Whatever it was, whatever is there, it left an impression because the energy in that house has never faded. If anything, it's only gotten stronger. Places like this don't go quietly. Sometimes they crumble, sometimes they rot and sometimes they burn.

Speaker 1: 50:02

For decades, the 99-door mansion Caledonia House stood like a skeleton in the jungle Empty and decayed, but not forgotten. The land had already taken back most of it Vines creeping through doorways, roots cracking through the foundation, but then, in 2020, a fire ripped through the mansion, destroying 70% of what remained, and there was no official cause. No one came forward. No strange electrical fault, no lightning strike. No squatters with an open flame, just fire. By the time it was over, most of the structure was gone, just a charred husk where a grand estate, a crime scene and a portal to something else had once stood. Was this an accident? Or was the house trying to erase itself?

Speaker 1: 50:59

Official reports never pinpointed a cause, but if you ask the locals, there are three predominant theories. Some say this wasn't destruction, it was containment, that the fire was never meant to destroy the house but to seal something inside the bomos rituals, the 100th door, the things that had leaked through. Maybe the house itself wanted people to know that it had become too unstable, too open, and something or someone decided it was time to cut it off from the world. For years, people whispered that the mansion was never meant to exist, that the British had built on land that wasn't theirs and ignored every warning. And what happens to things that aren't supposed to be? At some point they self-destruct. Or maybe the simplest explanation is the truth. Maybe it was just a fire, maybe the house was already falling apart and the elements, time or even trespassers finally finished what nature had started.

Speaker 1: 52:03

But I don't know, because haunted places don't just hold stories, they hold energy, and sometimes, when something doesn't belong in this world anymore, it finds its own way to disappear. The house is mostly gone now, but the land, the land is still here, and here's what I keep thinking about always in every episode I record. If places absorb history, violence, ritual and tragedy, does burning them ever really truly erase what's there, or does it just free it? If the fire in 2020 was the final nail in the coffin, what happened next felt like the land itself refusing to let the mansion rise again, because even after the flames had taken 70% of the house, even after its skeletal remains stood half-burned and broken, there were still efforts to preserve it. It became a heritage site, a landmark wrapped in mystery, tragedy and superstition.

Speaker 1: 53:06

But the land didn't make it easy. In March 2024, a crane accident inflicted even more damage on the mansion during an attempt to reinforce what was left. The details I could find are vague, just like the fire. There was no clear reason for the failure, no obvious mistake to point to Just another incident, another moment where the house seemed to resist, like it wasn't meant to be saved. But now the authorities are still pushing for restoration. The Sibirang-Puray City Council has designated it as a heritage site, but it hasn't been officially protected under the National Heritage Act because it remains in private ownership, which means its future is uncertain. Will it be rebuilt, preserved or left to collapse under the weight of its own history? Or, like everything else about this place, will it somehow defy its own explanations?

Speaker 1: 54:02

Some stories haunt you because they don't have endings. Perhaps this story doesn't either. The mansion is mostly gone now, just ruins swallowed by the jungle, the last remnants of a place that maybe never should have existed in the first place. But even though the walls have crumbled, this story doesn't feel finished and it drives me crazy, fascinates me, drives me wild, trying to find explanations, solutions, because we know this was never a haunted house, we know this was always something bigger, a house built on land that wasn't meant to hold it, a house that bore witness to colonialism, murder, rituals, fire, a house that saw too much, held too much, absorbed too much. If places absorb this energy, if they hold on to things, then what happens when a place has seen this much? Because that's the pattern, isn't it? It's not just this house, it's places all over the world Plantations, castles, asylums, battlefields, places where trauma and violence sink into the bones of the location, into the soil beneath it, places that don't just hold history. They hold something heavier, and I keep wondering do we create the hauntings or do they find us? Did this place become haunted because of what happened inside it, or was it always something more? And maybe, in the end, the fire wasn't a tragedy, maybe it was a mercy? Maybe the most terrifying places are the ones that somehow both refuse to be forgotten but also demand to be forgotten.

Speaker 1: 55:50

Tonight, we step through the first of 99 doors. The truth is, some doors, once opened, refuse to close, and that's what unsettles me the most about this place. Not just the murder, not just the fire, not just the whispers of untold rituals that may or may not have cracked something open. It's the clawing frustration that this story isn't finished, but its presence in our world hasn't faded. The land still holds its secrets, and if you stand there, just beyond the ruins, where the trees begin to press in, where the air is thick and waiting, you might feel it too, that weight, that pull, that sense that something is there.

Speaker 1: 56:40

I believe in the supernatural, of course. I believe that energy lingers, that places absorb it, absorb what happens inside them, that some wounds in history never can fully close, and I believe that in places like this, the boundary between present and past, between our world and something else, thins. What happened in this mansion? The wealth, violence, rituals perhaps none of it should have existed in the first place, and yet it did. And whatever came from it, whatever still stirs in the spaces that remain. I don't think it's something we were ever meant to understand, but that's what draws me in, because, even if we'll never have all the answers, the only way to get close is to keep listening To the stories, to the histories, the legends, to the places that still hold these echoes of the past. Maybe the mansion burned because it had to, maybe it's gone, or maybe it's just waiting for someone to step through one last door. Thank you you.