Old Changi Hospital

The blocks on the hill above Changi Point began life not as a hospital but as barracks. Between 1929 and 1935 the British built Changi Cantonment to house the gunners and engineers defending Singapore’s eastern approaches; the future hospital’s Block 24 and Block 37 were part of Kitchener Barracks. After Singapore fell in February 1942, the barracks became part of the vast Changi prisoner-of-war complex, holding Allied prisoners until 1943, and later housed Japanese units building an airstrip.

After the war the Royal Air Force turned the buildings into RAF Hospital Changi (1947), which treated British, Australian and New Zealand servicemen and UN troops from the Korean War. A large connecting wing, Block 161, was added in 1962. As British forces withdrew, it became the ANZUK Hospital, then the Singapore Armed Forces Hospital, and from 1976 Changi Hospital, serving the public. It closed in 1997, when it merged with Toa Payoh Hospital to form the new Changi General Hospital at Simei.

Empty, the hospital acquired its ghosts. Through the 2000s trespassers came to hunt spirits, film and vandalise, and it was widely named Singapore’s most haunted building. The most common story says the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, used the hospital as a torture centre during the occupation, and that the victims still roam the wards. The record is less certain: research summarised on Wikipedia, drawing on British military records, finds no sign that a working hospital existed at Kitchener Barracks during the war, and the documented use was as a POW camp. The suffering of prisoners at Changi was real, but the torture-chamber detail may be borrowed from other sites.

The Singapore Land Authority, which owns the buildings, offered them for lease in 2006; a planned spa resort never materialised, and since 2010 the site has been fenced and monitored with cameras and motion sensors. In 2021 a proposal to reuse it as a stargazing observatory and aviation viewing deck won an SLA–URA ideas competition for Changi Point. Trespassing is an offence – visitors can see the buildings only from outside.

Stories describe a nurse figure in an old-style uniform walking or running down corridors, sometimes carrying a baby; a ghostly patient or soldier at the windows; screams, footsteps and slamming doors; and lights moving in the empty blocks at night. A 2017 video shared online and reported by Stomp claimed to show a figure in a nurse’s uniform running along a corridor. None of the claims has been substantiated.

Tales centre on the old operating theatre with its tiled walls, the former mortuary (since demolished), the corridors of Blocks 24 and 161, and rumoured tunnels beneath the hill.

The hospital inspired the 2010 mockumentary Haunted Changi, appeared in MediaCorp series such as Incredible Tales, and was recreated as a haunted attraction for Universal Studios Singapore’s Halloween Horror Nights. It tops most lists of Singapore’s haunted places.