727 Trần Hưng Đạo — The President Building
A 530-room, thirteen-floor apartment block finished in 1960, where eight construction deaths supposedly led a shaman to bury four virgins at the corners as a foundation sacrifice — and where three decades of residents reported screams, ghost parades and a G.I. walking hand in hand with a Vietnamese woman, until the decaying block was demolished in 2016.
Case File No. 285
FILE 01 The Legend
Businessman Nguyễn Tấn Đới commissioned it and the President Building opened in 1960: six blocks, thirteen floors, 530 rooms in Chợ Quận, District 5. A French architect is said to have warned Đới about the thirteenth floor; when eight workers died during construction, a shaman was called who — the legend says — bought the bodies of four virgins from a local hospital and buried them at the four corners. The US Army rented the whole complex during the war. After 1975 the state divided it into family housing and locked the twelfth floor, abandoning the thirteenth entirely; the building decayed into one of Saigon's most famous haunted addresses, its oral rumours hardening into print and television through the 1990s as the structure rotted. The block appeared in the films Scandal (2012) and Chợ Lớn (2013), and was finally demolished in late 2016 after the city cleared out the last ten holdout households.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Residents described screams and the sound of a military parade passing through the corridors at night, and the silhouettes of an American G.I. walking hand in hand with a Vietnamese woman. A coffee seller at the entrance told Saigoneer in 2015 that joss paper kept turning up among her banknotes — always on full-moon nights, when the same young woman came to buy orange juice; neighbours said a woman had killed herself in the building years before. The empty thirteenth floor drew urban explorers and ghost-hunting television crews until the end.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
Nothing documents the four burials, and the foundation-sacrifice motif is a stock trope of Southeast Asian building legends rather than a local record. The top two floors were shut because they were unusable, not cursed; the building's real problems were structural decay, theft and drug use — exactly what the city cited when it cleared the site. Officials treated 727 as a dangerously dilapidated housing block and a compensation dispute (ten households refused to leave over money), not a haunting.
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