This is not a ghost story, but it's a true story, for what that's worth.

It's also a story that's hard to tell to people from outside my city. I heard this first from a retired town planner, on whom the implications were largely lost; I'll try my best to adapt it for you here.

The highway that runs down the east coast of our island is built on new land. Everyone knows this; our parents have told us this. Driving from west to east towards the airport, they'd tell you that to the left lies the old shore, buried under the new condominiums. To the right lies the false shore, on which the government has built a beautiful seaside park. And beneath the rumbling highway: a hundred million tons of sand and rock, where there once was gaping sea.

"Have you ever heard of Bukit Bedok?" he asked. A strange question to ask a local. The word 'bukit' conjures the rolling terrain of the west, its quarries and forested peaks: Bukit Timah, Bukit Batok. Our island's east is as flat as flat goes. I asked him: where's this hill that you speak of?

Truth is—he told me—the east once had hills, rolling out towards the sea, ending in a set of red cliffs so stark that a village was named for its thundering waters. The land must have been beautiful, then, for mosques dotted the valleys, and the sound of their drums at dawn gave rise to the area's namesake: be-dok, be-dok. One hill must have stood out to warrant the title of Bukit Bedok—it's recorded as the site of an obscure wartime massacre—though by now we can only guess, for those features have been lost to time.

Lost—because in 1966, they started digging. The new city needed new land; the new airport needed a new highway. They dug out the forests with excavators, then dug out the hills with great bucket-wheeled machines. Conveyor belts, running twenty-four hours a day, carried broken earth to sea. Artificial headlands sprung up along the new coast, trailing new shores; basins were drained; sediment filled coral beds.

By 1977, the hills were gone.

The digging continued. It was discovered by chance that the hills had been resting on an immense quantity of sand: sand for concrete, for the great highway that had yet to be built. So they mined sand by the kilotons, hauling it up from the ground into immense dunes that sat by the highway behind tall metal fences. They dug and they dug until they had enough for the new highway and the new roads that led from it. They even had some leftover for the beautiful new flats. This was how our city grew: by turning its heart inside-out.

When they were done, all that was left of the eastern hills was a hole. Seasons passed, and the hole filled with rain. The town planners put a park around the hole and called it Bedok Reservoir.

The man who told me this story paused at this point, and asked us if we had heard of the reservoir in the news.

See, a few years back, they found the lower half of a man in the water. He had been missing for a few months. The coroner's report showed that he had drowned himself. I remember his mother on the news, recounting how she had identified him from the denim fabric stuck to his rotted skin. I remember how her voice tightened when she mentioned the reservoir, how she had searched for him in its dense woods for days. I wonder much she had cried.

There would be five more bodies in the water that year.

I don't believe in ghost stories, but I believe in echoes. Sometimes there is a power in scars. The hole left by a drum-beating heart beneath the island's concrete-paved floorboards. The smothered red cliffs, their forests, and their sea.

There isn't an ending to this story. I don't think there'll ever be one. They've put a fence around the reservoir since then, put up signs as well: suicide hotline and all that. So far, I think it's been working. But the damage has been done: I know locals who can't help but flinch at the mention of its name. Who knows? Maybe in a few decades, all this will be forgotten, and we can all start to heal again in time.

For now, we have these stories and their telling. I hope you've enjoyed this one, too.