When you're confined and restricted, themes and quests become important.

So, on the first day of the year, we resolved to track down the Impiana Hotel, the third of the supposedly haunted buildings mentioned in this article (the other two, if you're interested, are featured here and here).

Google Maps has the Impiana in completely the wrong place, but by following the description in the article, we located it -- and it proved to be none other than that highly photogenic ruin that we snapped a number of times from our hospital quarantine location...

We weren't able to identify it at that point (probably because it's in the wrong place on the map).

According to what I've read, it was built on the site of an old graveyard, and is connected with a very strange story about a disappearing foetus and the suicide of the infant's mother... 

You can buy it for just over MYR 4 million...



I've mentioned a few times Tony Sebastian's account of Kuching's "spirit road", and this area, of course, is on that route: "As Kuching grew, so did the graveyards, extending to Crookshank road, then Batu Lintang, and eventually spreading outwards almost the entire distance of Rock road to 7th mile, and beyond."


This is also the route of the erstwhile railway. The first phase went as far as 3rd Mile Bazaar, running alongside Jalan Keretapi (Railway Road -- now incorporated into Jalan Tun Ahmad Zaidi Adruce). Before you got to 3rd Mile, though, there was another railway station. And what we didn't realize until that Impiana trip, when we walked home past our quarantine site, was that our accommodation was named after this now-disappeared landmark. It was the Station Hostel, and boasted a Station Cafe...

Anyway, back to my spirits... Sebastian refers to the ghost of a soldier, dressed in uniform and armed with a gun and bayonet, standing in front of the old Printing Office:


This photo was taken back in 2018, when we knew even less about anything than we do now. But the white building with the pointy tower in the middle, situated across the Padang from St Thomas's, became the Printing Office on its completion in 1908.

In 1951, the Printing Office moved to a site at the junction of Jalan Rock and Jalan Tun Abg Haji Openg:


There's a lot more exploration to be carried out along the "spirit road", I think, if we can stay out of lockdown long enough to do it...