High Street Ghost House
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.
Case File No. 105
FILE 01 The Legend
Built in 1892 as staff quarters for the Government Civil Hospital, the building became a mental hospital for female patients in 1939. During the Japanese occupation of 1941–45, local tradition insists it served as an execution site, with bodies buried across the street in what is now King George V Memorial Park. Mental services closed in 1971; two decades of abandonment and two fires later, 'High Street Ghost House' was the most feared address in the city.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Trespassers in the empty decades told of headless figures walking the veranda, shadows of patients at the windows, and wooden shutters that opened and closed in windless air. The reputation survived even the 2001 rebuild — a night security guard of the new complex died on shift there, instantly reviving the story.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
Official records say little about the wartime period, and historians treat the execution-ground claim as community memory rather than documentation. After 2001 the site became the Sai Ying Pun Community Complex — a busy government building — and the 2010s guard death was natural, with heart medication found on his body. The facade was declared a monument in 2015: heritage, not haunting.