abandoned in a forest here?

Mr Ho, now retired, left the village in 1978 and moved to a Housing Board flat in Telok Blangah. “I miss the open space and the fresh air,” he muses. “And the peace of the graveyard.”

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With their former playground along Whitley Road now paved over with modern developments, places like Bukit Brown, with its still-towering fruit trees and stubborn kampung walls, are the closest things the family has to a remnant of their old way of life.

And it is this material link to the past that makes Singapore interesting, says Mr Goh’s brother Charles, a regional safety manager in a construction firm. He stumbled upon the cars nearly two decades ago, when he was leading ghost tours around Bukit Brown and looking for ways to spice up the journey to this “underworld”.

“People always talk about wanting to leave Singapore, but there is heritage here, there are stories to be told,” says the 57-year-old.

“When we bring people to these places, we want to tell them about Singapore's past. It’s something we can be proud of, something that should be treasured and conserved if possible.”

BUKIT BROWN IS NOT DEAD

What does it mean to keep Bukit Brown alive? Is its legacy anchored in the dedication of individuals like 59-year-old researcher Khoo Ee Hoon? She can often be found hunched over burial records at the National Archives, painstakingly working out the number of graves in Bukit Brown, or mapping out the layout of the village with the help of former villagers.

Or is conservation a community effort - atBB and its faithful band of self-proclaimed “Brownies” leading weekly tours, putting together a self-guided trail of 32 graves, complete with QR code essays and an Instagram campaign?

Bukit Brown is unique in the devotion it inspires. Clearing cemeteries to house the living is par for the course in Singapore – Bidadari and Bishan are a few examples, but neither has a Facebook group with over 12,000 members and daily posts. So why is Bukit Brown the exception?