The Missing Fried-Rice Seller of Pondok Indah

Pondok Indah is a district of South Jakarta. On Jalan Metro Pondok Indah, in Kebayoran Lama, stood a house that had been empty for a long time. It is usually given as No. 83. A 970 m² lot, about five houses past the Pondok Indah roundabout.

Sunday, 22 September 2002. A story began to spread. A tukang nasi goreng, a man who pushed a fried-rice cart, had been serving customers at night outside the empty house. A woman from inside ordered fried rice. She asked him to bring it in. He went in. He never came out. His cart, people said, was left standing in front of the house. Some said police from the Kebayoran Lama sector had taken it away.

Crowds of residents and passersby gathered outside. Traffic backed up along roughly 1 km of road, between Pondok Indah Mall and the Lebak Bulus flyover roundabout. The gathering lasted at least from Sunday night into the morning of 24 September. Police were sent to deal with the traffic. Most local residents, according to accounts quoting detikcom, believed the seller really had vanished.

Komisaris Polisi Yaya Ahmudiarto, the sector police chief of Metro Kebayoran Lama, was blunt. "Itu hanya isu yang sengaja dihembuskan," he told Liputan6. It's just a rumour deliberately spread. The house was empty for an ordinary reason. Its owner had defaulted on bank debts, and a notice on the front placed the property under Bank Mandiri's control. The police tape around the corrugated-iron fence was there for security, "not because someone was missing." As for the cart, police denied taking it. "There was no such thing in front of the house."

The authorities later hung a banner on the house stating the ghost tale was only a rumour. Liputan6 took the police account as the reliable one.

Years later, blogs collected stories from people who lived and worked nearby, some under pseudonyms. An unnamed security guard at a house behind it reportedly said that at about 03:00 on Monday he saw the ground split open. A very large snake coiled around the fried-rice seller and carried him down into the earth. Nurdin, a 32-year-old seller of curry and soup, reportedly saw a figure like an older man walking back and forth in the front yard. People sitting outside heard strange sounds, or were hit by stones thrown by someone they could not see.

Other tales attached themselves. A middle-aged man. A woman who often wears white robes. Seven foreign spirits said to harm no one. And behind it all, a legend of a foreign family of seven killed in a robbery in 1983, for which no primary record has been found.

No trader's family ever reported anyone missing, detik noted in 2012. A long-time local trader known as "Parjo" gathered the traders and found that none were missing. Later accounts went further and said the story had been deliberately made up to strengthen the house's haunted image. The Jakarta historian Asep Kambali saw such tales as urban legends, hard to verify and carrying a message about respecting the environment.

The house paid for its fame. Its asking price fell from Rp 50 million to Rp 10 million. The building was demolished in 2008, leaving weeds and a banana tree. In 2021 an agent's sign stood on the cleared lot. The story lived on regardless. It inspired the 2006 horror film Rumah Pondok Indah, and it still appears in lists of Jakarta's haunted places beside Rumah Kentang and Jeruk Purut Cemetery.