Linjiazhai No. 37 — The House Where Nobody Was Found
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, a police entry that found violence and no bodies, an owner never seen again, and a case that surfaced forty years later as one retired detective's memory. The house is long demolished; the story declined to be.
Case File No. 448
FILE 01 The Legend
The story always arrives with its date — 1956 — and its address: 37 Linjiazhai, off Wuning South Road in Shanghai's western districts. In the most-circulated telling, the police switchboard takes a call placed from the house itself; a patrol is sent; neighbours speak of screams going back nights. The officers force the door and find the interior wrecked and no one in it — no family, no bodies, only what the telling calls signs enough of violence to know the household had come to an end. The owner, a book-keeper named Ye Xianguo in the story's own cast-list, is never seen again — not that week, not that decade. In the weeks that follow, the story supplies its signature image: a pit beneath the floor of the main room, discovered when the house is finally taken apart, going down further than any house on that lane had reason to dig, and cold. The case, in the telling, was filed unsolved and the house sealed; children who crossed the lane afterwards reported a woman at an upstairs window for years; the demolition crews, when the block was finally cleared decades later for redevelopment, were said to have refused to enter and taken the house down from outside. The vehicle for all of this — the reason a neighbourhood story became a national one — was the early-2000s Chinese internet: a long first-person account attributed to a retired detective of the original investigation, posted to the era's great forums, which adopted the case as its own Roswell. Within years, Linjiazhai 37 headed every list of Shanghai's haunted places, was retold across blogs, radio and television ghost segments, and in 2017 gave its name to a feature film. The honest ledger is stark: the digitised Shanghai newspaper record for 1956 holds no such case; the municipal archives hold no file; the name Ye Xianguo appears nowhere but inside the story; and no surviving map of the lane confirms which of its small houses was number 37 — or that the lane numbered past the thirties at all. This entry is written as what it is: the founding document of Chinese internet horror, anchored to a real road by a story that understood exactly how real roads make ghosts credible.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The afterlife is the sighting record: two decades of forum threads and ranked lists, urban explorers hunting the lane off Wuning South Road and finding only post-redevelopment housing blocks, the retired-detective post itself — reprinted, translated, argued over — and a film that returned the address to the fiction it came from.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
Every layer of this canon descends from a single uncorroborated source: the detective's post, which arrives conveniently after every participant would be dead, from an author never identified, carrying details no case file could contradict because no case file exists. The 1956 Shanghai press — fully digitised, and hungry for crime in a quiet decade — printed nothing. The pit, the screams and the window-woman are unfalsifiable furniture. What is real: Linjiazhai existed as a place-name off Wuning Road; lanes like it were demolished and redeveloped on schedule; and the early internet needed a Chinese ghost with a street address. This is that ghost — a story a medium told itself about itself, which is why it will not die.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT