YES 933 DJ Kunhua's Spooky Toilet Incident At Caldecott: He Was Alone After Midnight When The Flush Went Off By Itself

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You'd think radio DJs on late-night shifts would be used to how eerie it can seem. But nothing quite prepares you for the night you have to make it to the loo in the wee hours of the night...with no lights on. 

And yes, especially when the washroom you're about to enter is located at the end of a corridor in the old Caldecott Broadcast Centre. 

Speaking to 8days.sg during Hungry Ghost Month, YES 933 radio DJ Kunhua recalled an unexplained encounter from around 2013, when he was only in his second year with the station and was on a late-night shift that ended at 2am (these days, listeners can catch him on The Shuang, Kunz and Jia Trio (双节坤佳 ) from 4pm to 8pm).

On one particular night, it was already past midnight and, according to him, everyone else had gone home.

In the middle of his shift, he needed the loo and it was the DJs' regular toilet, so Kunhua was familiar with it.

Usually, there was nothing particularly scary about the place.

Except that night, the lights weren't working, and the switch was on another level. “To get to the toilet, you had to walk all the way to the end of a corridor, then climb a flight of stairs up half a level,” Kunhua tells us.

So Kunhua did what a person who urgently needed the loo would do.

He propped the toilet door open with a dustbin, allowing just enough moonlight from a window outside to enter the toilet.

"Poor thing, right? Otherwise, it was literally pitch dark inside,” he laughs.

But while Kunhua was standing at a urinal, he heard the toilet flush. The sound came from the row of cubicles directly behind him.

"[I'm] very certain, 'cos the flushing sound was very loud," he says. 

Once the flush stopped, Kunhua could even hear water rapidly filling the cistern again.

Still, he tried to stay rational.

"[I remember thinking] 'Wah, the auto sensors very sensitive hor," he says. 

He then went to wash his hands, and that's when he heard the toilet flushing again. 

At this point, we had to ask: Did Kunhua dare call out to see if someone was inside one of those dark cubicles?

"The toilet was so dark and so were all the cubicles. I was pretty sure there was no one else in there,” he recalls.

All the cubicle doors were also half-closed, though Kunhua wasn't about to start checking them.

"I told myself maybe I was just being paranoid. Perhaps it was just the auto sensor acting up,” he tells us.

He admits he was only half-convinced by his own explanation.

"If you ask me whether I dared to call out... definitely not. I would've totally freaked out if someone, or something, actually replied!" he adds.

The next day, Kunhua had work again, and, unfortunately for him, needed to use the same toilet.

At least this time it was in broad daylight.

Curiosity got the better of him, so he decided to inspect the cubicles properly.

And that's when his reassuring explanation from the previous night fell apart.

There were no automatic flushes in the toilet. 

"The flushing system was the old-school pulley system leh," he recalls.

In other words, the toilets weren't supposed to automatically flush themselves.

Who, or what, had flushed the toilet twice the night before?

Then again, Kunhua isn't ruling out a considerably less exciting explanation.

"Maybe the flushing system was faulty?" he proffers.

Kunhua only shared the office ghost lore with colleagues years later when they were swapping supernatural stories about the old Caldecott campus.

And apparently, there were plenty.

"There were rumours about this 'Lady S' who supposedly lived in the Radio Building. But till this day, I'm still not sure if she was the one I encountered,” he says.

8days.sg also spoke to several Mediacorp old-timers, who declined to be named but said they were familiar with tales of "Lady S".

According to the stories passed around back then, she was said to be a female spirit associated with the old Radio Building.

Some staff apparently avoided saying her name or discussing her on air, believing that doing so might attract her attention or cause disturbances in the studios.

Kunhua, for his part, has always preferred to err on the respectful side when it comes to the supernatural.

"I'm the kind who'd rather believe than not. I respect all beings, seen and unseen,” he says.

So did the mysterious toilet flushing make him avoid that toilet forever?

Not quite. Remember, when nature calls...

"Yes, I'd use it at night... when the lights were on," he laughs. And when the lights went out again, he'd "just mutter a little prayer under my breath and carry on using the toilet”.

Brave.

His reason was considerably more practical than spiritual, though

"Bopian, I didn't have many options. We had to quickly get back to the [studio in between breaks]," he says.

"And the lights in the other toilets were off too anyway, so it didn't really make much of a difference."

Ghost or no ghost, when you gotta go, you gotta go.