I heard so much about the myth surrounding Kellie’s Castle when I was a child. My schoolmates would return from school break and share stories of their family gallivant to the castle. They recounted how eerie the corridors were and the halls too decrepit with age. The souls of the original Scottish owners of the castle roamed down the hallway at nights, or so they claimed. They also mentioned the steep staircases and how all of them lead to hidden rooms and secret underground tunnels. Their accounts intrigued me enough to make a trip there…only twenty years later.
In truth, the castle is more of a majestic half-completed mansion of Anglo-Indian architecture that rests on a hill surrounded by aging palm trees. The building appeared hauntingly romantic the moment we catch a glimpse of it. One could imagine it being the setting of a Victorian love story and strange that some part of its history isn’t far from that at all. Kellie’s Castle was erected by William Kellie Smith, a man of excessive wealth who bestowed his wife the mansion after she finally bore him a son in 1910s British Malaya. With the help of some Indian workers, Kellie had his mansion built for right in front of his residence known as the Kellas House. The ending to this story, however, is far from happy. During construction, the Spanish influenza caused many of his workers to perish. Kellie, unbeknownst to many at the time, took a detour to Lisbon while on a trip back to the British Isles and died of pneumonia. The Smiths sold their Kellas home before returning to Scotland and eventually left the mansion in its incomplete state.
I wondered about the man himself as I toured the space of both buildings. Kellie was certainly creative in envisioning the entire mansion: it incorporated the first elevator in Malaya and hidden passageways that would lead to the nearby Hindu temple for evacuation purposes. But was he a true family man? Why didn’t he celebrate the birth of his older daughter as grandiose as he did with his son? Was the mansion supposed to be a way of swaying his wife to continue staying in colonial Malaya? It was incredible to see how Kellie’s Castle and the ruined Kellas House were the only buildings standing in the middle of a sea of palm trees. While on the rooftop, I saw a slither of lightning thundering to the earth in the sky. I looked at N, and asked myself if I would’ve built something this grand to prove my love for him. Perhaps, but sometimes I believe in smaller gestures as more meaningful.
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