Nam Koo Terrace — The Wan Chai Haunted House
A red-brick 1915 merchant villa, Grade I listed, that Hong Kong folklore insists is thick with the ghosts of the Japanese occupation.
Case File No. 151
FILE 01 The Legend
Built between 1915 and 1921 for a wealthy Shanghai merchant family named To, the two-storey red-brick villa at 55 Ship Street became known simply as 'the red house'. During the Japanese occupation of 1941–45, the persistent local story holds that the villa was used as a military brothel — a 'comfort house' — a claim the official heritage appraisal records while noting it remains subject to verification. The To family held it until 1988; it passed to Hopewell Holdings in 1993 and has stood vacant for decades behind hoardings, one of the best-known Grade I historic buildings in the city and, by common consent, Hong Kong's most famous haunted house.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Passers-by and former trespassers describe a woman's weeping from the upper floor, figures in white at the windows, and the smell of flowers drifting from the empty house. Among the most retold stories is an early-2000s incident in which a group of students who broke in was found by police — one reportedly incoherent, claiming he had been kissed and bitten by a woman in cheongsam. Skeptics answer that squatters lit real fires inside for years, which explains the lights and shadows that fed the legend.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The brothel story is flagged as unverified even in the building's own heritage appraisal, and Wikipedia notes the 'ghosts' witnessed at several points in the building were 'most likely the result of actual fires lit by local vagrants'. A boarded-up, century-old, war-shadowed mansion in a dense city needs no actual dead to earn its reputation — imagination, war memory and trespass supply everything.