Tunghai University Ghost Bridge — The Question on the Bridge
The footbridge on Tunghai University's Taichung campus where a girl who drowned waiting for a midnight elopement stops passers-by to ask the time — and where the wrong answer, the wrong department, or a count of thirteen steps at midnight, is fatal.
Case File No. 307
FILE 01 The Legend
The legend is campus oral canon since the 1970s-80s — a 1983 university publication already locates it on the old bridge. A female student arranged to elope with her boyfriend at midnight; through a misunderstanding of the hour she waited alone on the bridge, and drowned herself in the campus lake (a hanging variant also circulates). The haunting that grew from the death is interrogative: late at night a long-haired girl stops those crossing and asks what time it is — any answer survives, the true time does not — and asks what department the walker studies, where 'chemical engineering' marks you as the man who left her. The old bridge itself was buried in 2002-04 when the humanities building was built over it, and the legend migrated to the new bridge beside it — a documented case of a ghost changing address. In 2020 the story became a feature film, 'The Bridge' ('女鬼橋', NT$58 million domestic box office, Netflix's most-watched Taiwanese film of the year), which fixed the twelve-steps-become-thirteen motif for a national audience.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The campus corpus is specific: the girl with the time question, the thirteen steps counted at midnight, the streetlights by the bridge turning green from eight in the evening, the chemical-engineering trap. The 2018 episode is the modern carrier — a student, 'junior Li', livestreamed an overnight stay on the bridge to mock the legend; viewers saw a white figure in the tree behind him and flooded the chat, and he deleted the video after watching the replay. The film crew's own accounts of disturbances during the 2019 shoot circulate as production lore. University walkthroughs and student-orientation retellings keep the variants alive; the story is the campus's best-documented piece of unofficial heritage.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The legend's own anatomy is the debunk. UDN's reporting carries the academic observation that the story is a near-exact transplant of Tamkang University's 'palace-lamp lane' girl — itself traced in campus lore to a professor scaring juniors decades ago; the motif (midnight appointment, misread clock, drowned girl, questions on the bridge) is the standard Chinese campus-ghost template applied to a specific footbridge. The decisive detail is logistical: the original bridge no longer exists — it was buried under the humanities building and the ghost simply moved next door, which is the behaviour of a story, not a spirit. No drowning matching the tale appears in university records, and the 2018 livestream figure was never independently examined before deletion. The bridge remains the strongest kind of campus legend: institutionally ancient, cinematically amplified, and physically replaceable.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT