The Bukit Timah Monkey Man taxi collision on Upper Bukit Timah Road

Bukit Timah Nature Reserve sits in the heart of Singapore. For generations it has carried a legend. The Bukit Timah Monkey Man, often shortened to BTMM, is said to be an upright, monkey-faced primate with greyish fur. The earliest claimed report dates to about 1805, from a Malay elder. Japanese soldiers reportedly saw it during the Second World War.

In 2007 the Singapore tabloid The New Paper ran a feature gathering recent sightings. One came from a taxi driver.

He was 48. He lived in the area. It was the middle of the night, and he was driving past the fire station on Upper Bukit Timah Road. "When driving my taxi past the fire station on Upper Bukit Timah Road in the middle of the night I hit what I thought was a child that ran out in the middle of the road," he said.

It was not a child. "It was on the car bonnet and then snarled at me," he recalled. "It was like a monkey but so big!" "It ran off injured covered in blood, and holding its arm which was broken." One later retelling says it fled into the woods.

His account is brief. A figure small enough to pass for a child, yet big for a monkey. A snarl, blood, and an arm held as if broken. A 2023 retelling by Coconuts adds that it was primate-like and covered with greyish hair. Nobody described its face.

The driver was never named. No source mentions a police report, a photograph, hair or blood. None says whether the taxi was damaged. The original 2007 article has not been found. The account survives in retellings published between 2017 and 2023, and they agree closely.

There is a puzzle of timing too. The only fire station on that road in the sources is the Former Bukit Timah Fire Station, at the junction with Old Jurong Road. It reportedly ceased operations in 2005. Either the collision happened before then, or the driver used the closed building as a landmark, as locals still do. The date of the collision itself is unknown.

In 2008 the Chinese-language Shin Min Daily News sent a journalist into the reserve, but found nothing. NParks and the reserve attributed the sightings to long-tailed, or crab-eating, macaques, with a body length of about 38 to 55 cm. MustShareNews added that the reserve covers under 1.6 km², small ground for a large unknown primate. Others see the Monkey Man as folklore, a story told to keep children out of the forest. No source has called this particular taxi account a hoax.

The driver's story sits beside others from the same feature. A 29-year-old housewife waiting for bus service 171 on a cold, foggy morning saw what she took for a tramp at a rubbish bin. It gave a loud animal call and ran into the forest. A 65-year-old retiree recalled childhood warnings, footprints and a urine smell.

Later came a 2012 YouTube clip, widely judged fake, and purported photos in 2020. Writers compare the creature to the Orang Pendek of Sumatra, and some call it Singapore's Bigfoot. It has surfaced in an episode of Bones, a Goethe-Institut sound project and a children's book. Yet few moments in its story are as vivid as that night on Upper Bukit Timah Road.