The usual domain of ghost stories might be the idle minds of young school and university students, but occasionally a story comes along that grips Hong Kong and sends a collective shudder through the city.
It happened in 1983 when a rumour spread that the faces of foxes could be seen on the marble exterior of an office block in Causeway Bay. At the same time, the story went, staff of a restaurant in the building were dying mysteriously. Crowds flocked to the scene and police had to be called in to contain them. An exorcism was conducted and the fox spirit - linked to female fox fairies, which lure men to their doom in traditional Chinese ghost stories - allegedly escaped into the MTR network.
Last year an e-mail circulated saying that if you took the lift to the eighth floor of the Sogo department store in Causeway Bay you would see nothing but white walls and mirrors. It had been the furniture section but the store allegedly had been forced to relocate the department because every morning staff found the furniture had inexplicably moved. The story was picked up by the Chinese press, and Sogo issued a statement denying it, pointing out that the eighth floor was home to the administrative offices.
But the ghost story that caused the greatest sensation emerged in 1992 and centred on a seemingly innocuous KCRC television advertisement showing a group of children playing a game of trains in a woodland clearing. The advertisement, meant to capture the innocent excitement children feel about rail travel, was filmed outside Beijing using children from a kindergarten in the capital.
Soon after the commercial stopped airing in October 1992, a rumour emerged that if you looked closely at the advertisement blood could be seen coming from one of the girl's mouths, and that the children's feet did not touch the ground. The story was seized upon by the Chinese-language press, which began reporting fresh rumours that the children were disappearing and dying, and how an extra girl or shadow at the end of the line was killing them. Some people claimed they had seen blood running down the children's faces.
For weeks the story was a city-wide obsession. One story claimed the ghost was one of the youngsters who had not been selected to take part in the commercial. He was scolded by his mother for his failure and killed himself, returning as a ghost to take revenge on the other children. Another variation said a woman whose daughter died two years earlier saw her child in the commercial. She consulted a shaman who said her child was lonely and wanted to join the train game. The other children wouldn't let her so she took revenge by killing them.