Elephant strolls through Johor neighbourhood at 2am

Groggy-eyed residents in the Taman Seri Impian neighbourhood in Kluang, Johor in Malaysia were treated to a surreal sight on Jan. 27, 2025.

Those peering out their windows at about 2:13am saw an elephant meandering through their estate, staggeringly near their doorsteps.

The Star described the elephant as "one-storey tall".

A 40-second video, uploaded to the Kluang Hari Ini Facebook page, showed the elephant strolling through the neighbourhood:

Some commenters on the video compared the elephant sighting to a scene from the 1995 fantasy-adventure flick, "Jumanji".

In one iconic scene in the film, a supernatural board game ends up summoning a stampede of animals onto a street in Brantford, New Hampshire, including an elephant that ends up crushing a car:

Habitat loss to blame

Other commenters expressed concerns about the animal and its safety.

A few also wondered if the elephant had somehow been displaced by habitat loss:

Another commenter wrote: "This is where [the elephant] was... it used to be a forest. Swamp... planting oil palms... then building housing."

It is not clear if the elephant spotted in Kluang was indeed a victim of habitat loss, with little information available on where it came from or how it arrived in the neighbourhood.

However, habitat loss is a serious issue facing elephants in the Johor region.

According to The Star, "forest fragmentation and rapid infrastructure, agriculture and plantation expansion" have been affecting elephant populations in Johor for the past three decades.

Habitat loss has, in turn, led to an increase in instances of human-elephant interactions, the New Straits Times reported.

Such interactions can be dangerous for both humans and elephants, with over 646 human-elephant conflicts recorded in Johor alone between 2020 and May 2024.

Top photo from KHI/Facebook.