'It's a ghost story': GrabFood rider delivers order to Depot Lane address, arrives at abandoned building

A GrabFood rider was puzzled when he arrived at a customer's address only to find that it was an abandoned industrial building.

The entire place was empty, and the door of the unit he was supposed to deliver to was padlocked.

He messaged and called the customer, but no one answered, he told Shin Min Daily News.

The building was Depot Lane, an industrial estate scheduled to be vacated by the fourth quarter of 2025 for new housing developments, The Straits Times reported in June 2025.

No one around

The rider, Nur Alfian, told Shin Min he had received the order around 4pm on Jan. 24.

He picked up the order at Din Tai Fung, then got to Depot Lane at 5:25pm.

When he arrived, the industrial estate was completely empty, with no one in sight.

He finally met an elderly man in the car park, who told him that the building had long been vacated.

The man asked Alfian why he was there, as there was no longer anyone staying there, Alfian recounted in a Tiktok video about the strange incident.

"This block, whole stretch, is already abandoned," he said in the video. "It’s a scary thing. It’s a ghost story."

No response

After finding the unit padlocked, Alfian immediately called the customer four to five times, but they did not pick up.

As he still had another order to deliver at the time, he decided to leave the Din Tai Fung food on a ledge outside the unit, and take a photo of it to mark his delivery complete.

The order had already been paid for in advance through the Grab app, and Alfian later received payment for it as well, he told Shin Min.

It was the first time he had encountered something like this in the 10 months he had been working as a GrabFood rider.

He explained that usually if there was a mistake in the address, Grab would inform the rider, but there was no such notification in this case.

"Sometimes I really do not know if the customer is pulling a prank," he told Shin Min. "I don't know what is their purpose for doing something like this."

A prank or a scam?

A few commenters under Alfian's video believed it was a prank, while one wondered if it was a scam.

That user suggested Alfian make a police report and stay cautious for his safety.

According to another user, this was apparently not the first such incident at the unit in Depot Lane.

"Go check out the history of 04-04," they wrote, but did not explain further.

Some also remarked on the eeriness of the unit number, as the number "four" sounds like the word "die" in Mandarin.

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