In 1934, Agnes Newton Keith married Harry Keith, a British official responsible for forest conservation in Sandakan, then the capital of British North Borneo. Harry had a house waiting for them, a government quarters perched on a hill above the town. Agnes, born in Illinois and educated at the University of California, was an unlikely resident of colonial Borneo, but she threw herself into the life with the curiosity of a born writer. Her first book, "Land Below the Wind," published in 1939, won the Atlantic Monthly nonfiction prize and introduced Western readers to a corner of the world most had never heard of. She wrote about the jungle, the people, the strangeness and beauty of a place that was simultaneously exotic and domestic. Then the Japanese invasion of 1942 shattered everything. Agnes, Harry, and their young son were interned in separate camps. Their house was destroyed.

After the war ended, the Keiths chose not to rebuild on the site of their original home. Instead, between 1946 and 1947, they constructed a new house on the ruins of a different hilltop residence, one that had belonged to a man named M.M. Clark before the war destroyed it. The new house became the first permanent timber government dwelling built in post-war Sandakan. They named it Newlands. Agnes lived there for several years, writing her second and third books -- "Three Came Home," about her internment, and "White Man Returns," about the return to Borneo after the war. "Three Came Home" was adapted into a 1950 Hollywood film starring Claudette Colbert. Eventually the Keiths returned to the United States, and the house passed through other hands before falling vacant.

Agnes was not the last person to see the apparition. After the Keiths departed, a woman named Rosemary, wife of G.L. Carson, lived in the house from 1955 to 1967. Sleeping alone one night, Rosemary was awakened by the sound of a door at the far end of the house closing repeatedly in the pre-dawn darkness. Footsteps grew louder, moving toward her room. When she opened her eyes, an unrecognizable female figure stood at the foot of her bed, staring at her. Rosemary fainted. A housemaid who worked in the house from 1967 to 1968 reported seeing a similar figure on the stairs. The consistency of these accounts across decades and different occupants gave the house a reputation that persists to this day. Whether the ghost is connected to the house's wartime destruction, to the earlier Clark residence on which it was built, or to something older remains a matter of local speculation.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, Newlands stood empty. In 2001, the Sabah Museum Department and the Federal Department of Museum and Antiquities began a collaborative restoration. On 26 April 2004, the Agnes Keith House opened to the public as a heritage museum. The restoration preserved the timber frame and colonial character of the building while furnishing it with reproductions of period furniture and antiques. A gallery on the first floor tells the story of Agnes, her books, and her family, placing her personal narrative within the broader history of British North Borneo. The museum sits high enough above Sandakan to catch the breeze and the view -- the same view Agnes wrote about in books that made this distant corner of Borneo real to readers half a world away. Sandakan itself has changed enormously since the 1930s, but the hill remains, and the house on it still draws people who want to understand what life was like when Borneo was the edge of the world.