24 Haunted Places in China
Every case file on record in China — each with the full legend, the documented sightings spine and the skeptic’s file. Browse the archive below, or open the world map.
The 330 Bus — The Last Run from Yuanmingyuan
C · Beijing, China — On the night of November 14, 1995, a last bus left Yuanmingyuan for Fragrant Hills with a driver, a conductor and a handful of passengers — and, says the most widely circulated modern Chinese urban le…
Beixinqiao — The Locked Dragon Well
B · Beijing, China — Under a crossroads in inner-north Beijing, old Beijing placed a dragon. When the city was planned, the telling goes, a flood dragon churned in a sea-eye spring here; the master builder trapped it in t…
Bride's Pool — The Wedding That Never Crossed the Stream
B · Tai Po, Hong Kong, China — In the stream country of the Plover Cove hills behind Tai Po, a waterfall drops into a deep pool the map still names Bride's Pool: on her wedding journey — the story runs — the sedan chair lost its fo…
Caishikou — The Vegetable Market Execution Grounds
B · Xicheng, Beijing, China — The Qing dynasty's chief execution ground — where the 1898 reformers died — now a busy crossroads whose ghost stories older Beijingers still trade.…
Chaonei No. 81 — The House That Never Dies
A · Beijing, China — Beijing's most famous haunted house: a three-storey French Baroque mansion minutes from the CBD, emptied for decades while the city grew around it, wearing a Republican-era legend of a woman hanged be…
Fengdu Ghost City
A · Chongqing, China — A temple complex on the Yangtze dedicated to the entire Chinese underworld — not one haunted house but a whole city of the dead, with a Gate of Hell, a Last-Glance-to-Home tower and judges who weigh e…
Fenghuang and the Xiangxi Corpse Roads — Where the Dead Walked Home
A · Fenghuang County, Xiangxi, Hunan, China — Fenghuang, the river town at the heart of Xiangxi — the Miao and Tujia highlands of western Hunan — is the capital of gan shi, the corpse-driving trade: for roughly two centuries a guild profession wa…
Fengmen Village — China's Ghost Village
B · Qinyang, Henan, China — An abandoned hamlet deep in the Taihang mountains — roughly 39 collapsed farmhouses around a 500-year-old tree, emptied by 2007 and reborn online as the 'No.1 Ghost Village of China' with its fatal Qi…
Guia Hill — The Incense-Stick Patrol
B · Macau, China — Macau's green hill above the old city, once so crowded with Chinese graves that its footpaths ran between tombstones, keeps the enclave's best-told ghost tradition: night runners warned never to look …
The Cat-Face Granny — Harbin's Winter Panic of 1995
A · Harbin, Heilongjiang, China — In the winter of 1995-96, a story ran through Harbin faster than any radio bulletin: an old woman in the city's east had died, and come back wrong — with a cat's face, stealing children in the dark. S…
High Street Ghost House
B · Hong Kong, China — A granite facade and arched veranda stranded on a modern community centre in Sai Ying Pun — all that remains of an 1892 nurses' quarters that Hong Kong called its haunted house for thirty years.…
Laoye Temple Waters — The Narrows That Keep Poyang's Boats
A · Duchang County, Jiujiang, Jiangxi, China — Where Poyang Lake — China's largest freshwater lake — squeezes past Laoye Temple at Duchang into its narrowest throat, the water has taken boats for as long as records exist and given almost none back…
Leifeng Pagoda — The Tower That Held the White Snake
B · West Lake, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China — On the south shore of West Lake, the pagoda built in 977 to shelter a hair relic of the Buddha became, in China's most-told legend, the prison of the Lady White Snake — entombed under its bricks until…
Linjiazhai No. 37 — The House Where Nobody Was Found
B · Wuning South Road, Jing'an District (formerly Putuo), Shanghai, China — Number 37, Linjiazhai — a lane of worker housing off Wuning South Road in 1950s Shanghai — is the address of the founding ghost story of the Chinese internet: a phone call placed from inside the house…
Liwan Plaza — The Coffin Mall of Old Xiguan
A · Guangzhou, Guangdong, China — When this vast twin-tower mall opened over old Xiguan in 1996 it was the largest urban-renewal project Guangzhou had ever seen, and for a few golden years it was the city's proudest shopping address. …
Nalenggele Valley — The Kunlun Gate of Hell
B · Haixi Prefecture, Qinghai, China — Where the northern edge of the Kunlun range folds down toward the Qaidam Basin, the valley of the Nalenggele River — a hundred kilometres of grass, marsh and gravel under six-thousand-metre peaks — is…
Nam Koo Terrace — The Wan Chai Haunted House
A · Wan Chai, Hong Kong, China — A red-brick 1915 merchant villa, Grade I listed, that Hong Kong folklore insists is thick with the ghosts of the Japanese occupation.…
Qiu Family Mansion — The House That Swallows Its Residents
B · Weihai Road, Shanghai, China — A colonial-era mansion on Weihai Road, long sealed and empty amid downtown Shanghai, and the city's most retold haunted-house legend.…
Tat Tak School — The Classroom Nobody Reclaimed
B · Hung Shui Kiu, Yuen Long, Hong Kong, China — In Hung Shui Kiu, a village primary school that closed in 1998 and never reopened — two storeys of empty classrooms, a silent assembly courtyard, a campus reclaimed by moss and gravity — and in the de…
Tianjin Daily Tower — The Fourteenth Floor
B · Hexi District, Tianjin, China — Tianjin's 34-storey newspaper headquarters, completed in 1997 on the triangle where Xiaoweidi Road meets Dagu South Road, gave northern China's internet decade a haunted address of its own: a fourteen…
Tuen Mun Road — Hong Kong's Highway of Death
B · Ting Kau stretch, Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong, China — Hong Kong's first expressway, opened in 1978 through the hills between Tuen Mun and the city, earned the name Highway of Death through decades of crashes — and built the corresponding ghost canon: nig…
Tung Tei Tsai — The Resort of the Woman in Red
A · Cheung Chau, China — A terrace of low holiday flats between Cheung Chau's east beach and the hill — raised, the island's oldest residents say, over salt pans cut into older ground still holding bones — became Hong Kong's …
Yongfang Hall — The Tomb-Shaped Hall of Sun Yat-sen University
C · Guangzhou, Guangdong, China — On the south campus of Sun Yat-sen University stands a hall shaped like nothing else on campus: a round chamber flanked by two straight wings, fronted by a long stair and eighteen bronze sages. Studen…
The Pearl Concubine's Well
B · Beijing (Forbidden City), China — A plain palace well inside the Zhen Shun Gate of the Forbidden City, where the Guangxu Emperor's favourite concubine was thrown and drowned on imperial orders in 1900 — its mouth now choked with a hol…