Pic above: API Tour Participants peering at the gates of the mysterious Hillview Mansion that was rumoured to be haunted.

INTRODUCTION TO THE HILLVIEW MANSION AND HILLVIEW ESTATE

Visit Hillview Estate now and you will encounter a bustling private estate enclave bursting with new housing developments like new condominiums, SOHOs, landed properties and a MRT now under construction. 

But like all other parts of Singapore in the past, it wasn’t always so. 

Hillview Estate is built around the Bukit Gombak hill, where in the past, it was an industrial area, factories dotted the foot of the hill while granite quarries occupy the hilltop.

By the 1960s the quarries were gone, and rubber plantations took its place. Factory lands too changed hands and landed houses started making its presence. Nearby a car assembly plant, the Cycle & Carriage Assembly Plant was being built, and accordingly to those who knew this Urban Legend, was the start of the story of a mysterious house known as the Hillview Mansion.

Urban Legends has it that the Chairman of Cycle & Carriage, built himself a big mansion at the top of the hill, for either his wife or mistress, who while surveying the construction of the House, accidentally fell to her death. Saddened by her death, the C&C Chairman abandoned the construction of the House and there it lies, in its half-constructed state, on a land the size of 9,000 sq metres.

The House and the land it stood passed through many hands, and was the favourite haunt of many urban explorers and ghost hunters, until the year 2006, when the owner demolished the whole house, leaving the rubbles behind and the gates unlocked, as if to let everyone see that the House was no more.

Some months later, heavy rain hit Singapore, and the Hillview Mansion’s land caused a landslide and damaged the houses below the hill. The land was levelled and improvement made to ensure that the land will never cause a landslide again.

API investigation revealed that the truth is as strange as fiction. In the 1970s, the House was already known to the C&C Chairman’s relatives as very haunted and construction frequently stopped by the hauntings. An urban Explorer in the early 1980s had already visited the House, and it was already in its half-constructed state. A long-time resident referred to the Hillview Mansion as the C&C Chairman’s Memorial House. What was even more unusual was that there was no authority’s building record of the Hillview Mansion. It appears to be an illegal structure.

The below story is dedicated to the HILLVIEW MANSION, 1 of the most mysterious house that ever existed in Singapore.

This article was written some years ago. In June 2004 the New paper also published an article on this place.

Hillview Mansion has been demolished since 2006, and has in fact passed from most memories.

Looking back over the period that I have followed on the scent of uncovering the mystery of the Hillview House, I learnt that too many things have been steeped in mystery and urban legends when it shouldn’t be. Landmarks, like human, carry with them the memories of a better time when life was good. 

I cannot vouch for the authencity of the information I found in my research. In setting out to unravel this mystery I was merely trying to solve and de-myth an urban legend of purportedly one of the most haunted houses in Singapore .

I do apologise if I had made an unintentional error in my assumptions but I must say that at best these are based on my personal research and observations. I have no intention to bring back past memories if they had been sad ones.

As I engage myself more in Paranormal Activities, I hope to discover more of the old world, discarded memories forgotten by a generation obsessed with money making, pubbing, good looks, monetary pursuit and corporate ladder climbing.

I seek to preserve the true memories of people and places before they vanishes off the face of this planet. In Singapore , where the urban landscape is constantly changing, whether people travel from Point A to Point B only just to get to their point of destination.

Will anyone pause to look, and see, and wonder about the beauty and wonder of a certain place, or people before they pass on or get demolish?

I seek the people and places with memories.

For what is left in the end, after everything is gone.
Are but the memories, that must surely pass on?

UNCOVERING THE MYSTERY OF HILLVIEW MANSION

Pic above: View from my window in Hillview. The blue rooftop of Hillview Mansion could just be seen with the naked eye, somewhere above the water tank tower in the center of this photograph.

I was introduced to the Hillview Mansion when I moved into Hillview estate.

“So you live in Hillview area?” I remembered Kenny, my ex-Paranormal Investigator exclaimed. “Then you must have seen the Hillview Mansion.”

I replied in the negative. I was a newbie in Hillview.

“Let’s go then, let me show it to you!”

And so half hour later, I drove up that incredible slope of Jalan Dermawan and first lay my eyes upon the gates of Hillview Mansion.

“It’s has been called many names.” Kenny said. “Some call it the Blue House because the roof tiles are blue; others called it the Green House because of the huge greenery that kept it from our roving eyes.
  
              

Pic above: The gates of Hillview Mansion. There was no house number. Further search in Street Directories dating back to 1980s did not reveal any house number or even an indication there was a house there.
  
              

Pic above: The steep slope up to the Hillview Mansion.

I like to think this is the shortest and steepest road in Singapore. 

The gate was padlocked and tried as we could to peer inside, we could not see beyond the bend that curved ahead.

“So why was this place deserted?” I asked innocently.

“Don’t know.” Kenny replied. “That’s the mystery about this place. You have walk 2 minutes up a winding road before you reach the house. From the pictures I saw on the internet, it was 1 big double-storied house sitting in a land big enough or a condo to be built.”

He paused as I pressed my face against the cold bars of the gate.

“From what I read, the House was under renovation halfway when something happened and the renovation was stopped and left halfway. The House now stands with its renovation materials still lying around.”

“Why?” I had to ask.

“Don’t know.” Kenny replied. “There are many stories floating around in the internet, but the most famous one was that it belonged to Cycle & Carriage Chairman. But the lady whom he bought the house for, accidentally fell while supervising the renovations and died.”

Kenny then looked at me. “Since then the House has been abandoned because the Owner was too sad to return to this place.”

I left that day, a changed man. I remembered in the years that I have been driving I had passed by many houses and gates that seemed forlorn, forgotten.

As I stared at Hillview Mansion gates I realised that there are many such houses abandoned in Singapore . Each carrying with them their own stories, lost in the passage of Time. How many years must go by before the actual stories get forgotten and they get steeped in the myths and urban legends that grew up among the newer group of Singaporeans that came and went like the tide of the sea?

I don’t know. But I always believe that One should always try to preserve the legacy of Oneself.

So many memories, so many sights and sounds that remain trapped in the minds of old people and places that when they pass on, they get forgotten, and are lost to Man.

Yes, the sight of those gates set me thinking. A lot. I was a changed man that day. But then I was busy with my new work, and soon forgot about that place, though each night as I looked from window at the green expanse and wondered.