The Crocodile Hole

 

Sometimes dead is better. Sometimes the past won’t stay buried, no matter how deep you dig the hole.

The military truck crawled through the Indonesian night like something diseased, its headlights cutting twin scars through darkness thick as blood. Inside that metal coffin, the kidnapped generals sat with their hands bound behind them—zip ties cutting circulation until their fingers turned the color of old bruises. Their eyes had that thousand-yard stare you see in trauma wards, the look that says I’ve seen the monster and it’s real.

The soldiers riding guard were just kids, really. Eighteen, nineteen years old, holding their rifles like rosaries and trying not to think about what was coming next. But the darkness has a way of getting inside your head, doesn’t it? Whispering all the things you don’t want to know about yourself.

The boots stomped a funeral march on wet earth. Commands passed between the shadows in voices thin as razors. And somewhere in the back of every mind present—soldier and prisoner alike—a single thought pulsed like a tumor: This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whisper in the dark.

In that modest building (and aren’t the worst places always modest? Always ordinary?), they tied the generals to chairs that had held a hundred other doomed men. The interrogation was brief—not because they were in a hurry, but because the outcome had been decided long before the first question was asked.

One by one, they were dragged outside. The camera—yes, there was always a camera, because monsters love an audience—lingered at that low angle, drinking in every detail. The razor blade caught what little light remained, gleaming like a promise of pain. It drew across skin with the precision of a surgeon and the mercy of a shark.

The audience couldn’t look away. That was the genius of it, wasn’t it? The way horror works on you. First it whispers, then it screams, and finally it makes you complicit. Makes you part of the machine.

The bodies tumbled into that old well—seventy-five centimeters wide, twelve meters deep. A throat in the earth, swallowing secrets. The well sat on the outskirts of East Jakarta, in a place with a name that would become synonymous with nightmare: Lubang Buaya. The Crocodile Hole.

The film Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI would play in theaters and schools for decades after, drilling the horror into every Indonesian skull like a lobotomy in reverse. Memory became weapon. Truth became whatever served power. And Lubang Buaya? It became the monster under the national bed, the thing that goes bump in the collective night.

But here’s what they don’t tell you in history books: every monster has an origin story.

The Naming of Nightmares

Long before it swallowed generals, Lubang Buaya swallowed crocodiles. Back when the world was younger and Jakarta Bay still remembered being ocean, the Sunter River cut through swampland like a vein through flesh. Crocodiles nested in the muddy banks, their jaws wide enough to snap a man in half, their eyes like amber coins floating in black water.

Lubang—the word tastes like clay and secrets. It means hole, hollow, den. The kind of place where predators wait. Where things disappear.

According to Lilie Suratminto (and she should know, being the kind of researcher who digs up bones most people prefer stayed buried), this was how the old Betawi people named their world: by what could kill you. Practical folks, the Betawi. They understood that geography was destiny, and destiny was usually hungry.

But there’s another story, older and stranger. It reaches back to the 7th century, to a time when Islam was still new in these parts and the spirits of the old religion hadn’t quite given up their hold.

Enter Prince Syarif bin Sheikh Abdul Rahman—though most folks called him Datok Banjir, which means something like “Flood Master.” Names have power, and his carried weight. He was one of those religious men who seem to exist in the spaces between worlds, equally at home with prayer beads and sword hilts.

The villagers came to him with a problem that would have made Stephen Hawking pack his bags and head for safer dimensions. A white crocodile—not just any crocodile, mind you, but a demon crocodile—had taken up residence in the deepest part of the Sunter River. This wasn’t your garden-variety man-eater. This was something that ate souls for breakfast and sanity for lunch.

People who tried to cross the river didn’t just die. They vanished. Completely. Like they’d never existed at all. The kind of disappearance that makes survivors question their own memories.

So Datok Banjir rolled up his sleeves (metaphorically speaking) and went to war with hell itself. The battle took place in realms where physics go to die, where prayer and terror dance together until one of them falls down. When the smoke cleared—if there was smoke, if “clearing” has any meaning in spaces between spaces—the white crocodile was gone.

From that day forward, the place carried its name like a scar: Lubang Buaya. The hole where the crocodile died. The den where monsters go to be unmade.

Datok Banjir didn’t stop there. When Dutch soldiers came sniffing around, looking to add another patch of ground to their empire, he pulled another miracle from his bag of holy tricks. He prayed until the invaders saw floods where there was dry land, water where there were roads. They turned tail and ran, convinced that nature itself was against them.

Maybe it was.

The locals buried Datok Banjir in their sacred cemetery, and pilgrims still visit his grave. Still ask for his protection. Still remember that some places are more than geography—they’re battlefields where the invisible war never ends.

The Geography of Ghosts

In the kingdom days, before nations and flags and the machinery of modern horror, Lubang Buaya sat at the crossroads of commerce and faith. Ships from across the archipelago docked at Sunda Kelapa, and from there the rivers carried people and goods into the heart of Java. The Ciliwung and Sunter rivers were highways then, and Lubang Buaya was a rest stop on the road to everywhere else.

Portuguese maps from the 12th century show Sunda Kelapa as a port of significance, the kind of place where fortunes were made and lost on the turn of a tide. Islamic missionaries followed the trade routes inland, carrying the word of Allah and the weight of change. Lubang Buaya was part of that network, a node in the web that connected coast to hinterland, present to future.

By the early 20th century, when the Dutch had their bureaucratic claws deep in everything, Lubang Buaya appeared on official maps as “Loebangboeaja” or “Loebangboewaja”—the colonial spelling adding its own kind of strangeness to an already strange name. The 1902 Topographical Bureau map shows it as wilderness: bamboo groves, swampland, the kind of empty space where anything might be hiding.

The railroad came in 1909, bringing Klender Station and the promise of connection. Steam trains carried passengers and goods wagons (pikoenlanwagen, which sounds like a curse in any language), linking the rural folk to Batavia and Bekasi. Progress had arrived, wearing overalls and smelling of coal smoke.

But progress is a funny thing. It builds roads and stations and airfields (Cililitan opened in 1924, eventually becoming Halim Perdana Kusuma Airport), but it can’t build away the past. The swamps remained swamps. The crocodile holes remained holes. And something about the place—call it atmosphere, call it karma, call it the weight of accumulated history—kept whispering that this was not ordinary ground.

By 1940, development had crept in around the edges. More roads, better rail connections, the infrastructure of civilization spreading like a rash across the landscape. But at its heart, Lubang Buaya remained what it had always been: a place apart. A place where the normal rules didn’t quite apply.

World War II changed everything and nothing. The Japanese came and went, leaving their own layer of trauma on ground already thick with ghosts. Military training exercises began, because every generation needs its own way of teaching young men to kill efficiently.

After independence, the administrative shuffle began. In 1949, Lubang Buaya split from Jati Rahayu Village like a cell dividing. By 1976, it had been reassigned from Bekasi to East Jakarta, passed around like an unwanted responsibility. But the moves were just paperwork. The essence of the place remained unchanged.

In the early independence years, only thirteen houses stood scattered across the area. Thirteen—a number that would make any horror writer smile grimly. The families who lived there were rubber plantation workers mostly, people who understood that some places are meant to be lived in lightly, without too much attachment or expectation of permanence.

Then came May 31, 1965.

The Fifth Force

President Sukarno had an idea. Like most ideas that end in mass graves, it seemed reasonable at the time.

He wanted to create a “fifth force”—armed workers and peasants to balance the power of the regular military. The concept was simple: give the people guns, train them to use those guns, and trust that democracy would sort itself out. What could possibly go wrong?

The Army leadership knew exactly what could go wrong. They’d seen this movie before, in China and Russia and Cuba. They knew how it ended: with purges and midnight arrests and unmarked graves. So they did what militaries do when threatened—they struck first.

Lubang Buaya became the training site for Sukarno’s fifth force, which was like holding a barbecue in a munitions depot. You might get through the evening without incident, but the smart money was on spectacular disaster.

The disaster came on September 30, 1965.

What happened that night has been told and retold so many times that truth and fiction have blended into something unrecognizable. The official version became gospel, reinforced by annual film screenings and museum displays and textbooks that brooked no dissent. But even the most carefully crafted myths have cracks, and through those cracks, questions leak.

The forensic evidence didn’t match the horror stories. The timeline had holes you could drive a truck through. The confessions came from people who had every reason to say whatever their captors wanted to hear.

But facts are fragile things, especially when they stand between power and its preferred narrative. The truth became whatever served the moment, and the moment demanded blood.

The Monument to Forgetting

In 1967, President Suharto decided that Lubang Buaya needed a facelift. Fourteen hectares were cleared of their residents (because progress always requires sacrifice, and the sacrifice is never voluntary), and construction began on the Pancasila Sakti Monument complex.

The monument opened on October 1, 1973, as a shrine to official memory. Visitors could walk through dioramas showing the kidnapping, the torture, the murder. They could stare into the reconstructed well and imagine bodies tumbling into darkness. They could read plaques that explained exactly what they were supposed to think and feel.

The 1982 film became mandatory viewing for schoolchildren, a ritual as regular as morning prayers. Generation after generation sat in darkened auditoriums, watching generals die in carefully choreographed agony. The horror was domesticated, packaged, served with popcorn and propaganda.

But here’s the thing about trying to control memory: it’s like trying to hold water in your hands. No matter how tightly you squeeze, something always leaks through.

Scholars like Yoseph Yapi Taum began asking uncomfortable questions. If the torture was so systematic, where were the forensic traces? If the confessions were reliable, why did the timelines keep shifting? If the official story was complete, why did so many witnesses tell different versions?

The answers were uncomfortable for everyone involved. Truth, it turned out, was more complex than any monument could contain.

The Living Present

Today, Lubang Buaya bustles with the energy of urban growth. The population has exploded from 62,000 in 2021 to over 78,000 in 2024. Twelve community units, 117 neighborhood divisions, the full infrastructure of modern Indonesian life.

The swamps are gone, filled in and paved over. The rubber trees have given way to housing developments and shopping centers. The crocodile holes have been covered with concrete and forgotten.

But forgetting is harder than it looks. The monument still stands, still draws visitors who come to remember—or to try to understand what they’re supposed to remember. The sacred cemetery remains, where pilgrims still visit Datok Banjir’s grave and ask for protection from dangers both visible and hidden.

And sometimes, late at night when the city sleeps and the traffic dies to a whisper, you can almost hear them: the crocodiles in their holes, the generals in their well, the ghosts of all the stories that were never allowed to be told.

Because the thing about places like Lubang Buaya—places where history and horror intersect—is that they never really let go of their dead. They just learn to live with them.

The crocodile hole remembers. It always remembers.

And memory, as any resident of Lubang Buaya or Cipayung will tell you, has teeth of its own.