“You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the ‘News of the World’,” he wrote. “In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”

In Malaya a few years later, tastes in Sunday-afternoon reading went well beyond choice true-life murders to ghosts and demonic fare. In 1952, Othman Wok was working as a reporter under Yusof Ishak, the future president of Singapore. Yusof commissioned him to write Sunday horror stories for “Utusan Zaman”, the weekly he had founded and edited.

“Malays just love stories like this,” Othman later said. Evidently they did, because the newspaper’s circulation soon tripled.

“He would spend the next four years spinning these tales for both ‘Utusan Zaman’ and the entertainment magazine ‘Mastika’, making him a household name in Singapore and the Malay peninsula – even before he joined the People’s Action Party in 1954,” writes Ng Yi-Sheng, editor of “A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok”, in his introduction to this collection of 24 short ghost stories.

Othman was a significant independence figure. He became Singapore’s first minister for social affairs in 1963, lasting until 1977. He also served as ambassador to Indonesia, and on the boards of the Singapore Tourism Board and Sentosa Development, before retiring from public life in 1981.

So why did one of Singapore’s founding fathers – a good friend of prime minister Lee Kuan Yew – write horror?

A Malay Muslim schooled in English at Raffles Institution, Othman acquired a taste for mystery novels. A schoolmate, Latiff Arman, later fondly recalled that Othman “loved scaring his friends with ghostly tales as a teenager”.

Othman’s tales are vivid and imaginative – the corpse who arrives to have his picture taken, the mosque refuge in a crocodile-infested swamp – and regional overlaps are an interesting element.

Ng writes that Malay intellectuals at that time had begun to favour realism in their writing: “Many of them viewed ghost stories as shameful artefacts of a less civilised age, best to be abandoned as the community progressed into the future…

“Othman’s horror writing stems from a diametrically opposed impulse: the desire of the Malay public to celebrate their heritage, without censorship of its spookier, non-rational face.”

But is all this really so Malay? Surely Latiff’s observation of young Othman describes a universal teenage delight in scaring the living daylights out of one another with tales of creepy, otherworldly happenings.

Who in the world has not sat near a flickering fire listening to tall tales of the supernatural that require virtually total suspension of disbelief? As with urban myths, the origins of many such tales are probably oral.

Regional overlaps

Belief in ghosts and spirits is certainly deeply entwined with daily life in Southeast Asia, perhaps more than most other parts of the world. Myanmar has its ancient nat worship, with 37 main spirits that died horrible deaths as humans. Cambodian witchcraft is reputed to be world-class.

Meanwhile, no Thai home is complete without a spirit house, where inconvenienced spirits are provided alternative accommodation. Indeed, some of the most animated conversations you are ever likely to have in Thailand are about ubiquitous “phii” – ghosts.

Ghost stories are also popular in Indonesia and, of course, in Malaysia. Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan’s “Man Tiger” was good enough to make the prestigious Man Booker International longlist in 2016.

Regional overlaps are an interesting element in Othman’s stories. For example, in “The Eyes of Mak Long Memah,” an old lady has terrifying eyes that survive her murder.

“The whites in those eyes could not be seen,” he writes. “They were covered in blood-red veins, masses of them, crawling, expanding and contracting, writhing like thousands of fine worms.”

Red eyes pop up elsewhere, including in “Monster Catch,” with its frog demon. They are also a firm fixture in Thai horror, bloody glowing pin pricks in the blackness.

Othman’s tales are vivid and imaginative, curious and compelling – the corpse who arrives to have his picture taken, the mosque refuge in a crocodile-infested swamp – but they are sometimes let down by weak endings as gothic horror gets the better of what the story might be all about.

But there are plenty of successes. “The Sound in the Wall” works well by combining a haunting with a love story. In “Sweet Suriati”, Othman pushes the envelope with a surprisingly racy description of sex with a beautiful ghost.

Then there’s the account of a terrible noisy murder in a hotel that a guest is convinced he heard – but of which there is no trace afterward.

Stories that are plausible but inexplicable tend to be much spookier than full-on gothic horror tales. For that reason, Othman’s best story in this collection just might be the last.

Set in London rather than Asia like all the others, “Her Dead Husband Hasn’t Left Home” tells the story of a Polish refugee who has become the landlady in a boarding house for foreign students in post-war England. She receives a personal letter from a suicide victim, her late husband.

The story is not bathed in horror and has a vividness of detail quite unlike anything preceding it. Othman won a scholarship to study journalism in London in 1949 – which will leave you wondering whether this was actually the most personal of his ghost tales.

‘A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok’ can be purchased from Lit Books by clicking here.