5 Hong Kong ghost stories and creepy tales, from the phantom of Bride’s Pool to the girl on the tracks at Yau Ma Tei MTR station
- As the Hungry Ghost Festival draws near, and the spirits prepare to roam the Earth, we share five scary Hong Kong urban legends
- Find out how Bride’s Pool got its name, learn about the faceless girl who haunts a university campus, and the teen who jumped in front of a train and vanished
During the Hungry Ghost Festival, which falls in the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar, the gates of hell are said to open to allow spirits from the netherworld to roam the realm of the living.
On the day of the festival – August 30 in 2023 – observers of tradition will burn incense and joss paper, and prepare food offerings on the streets to appease these wandering souls. But no amount of ritual can lay to rest some of Hong Kong’s most haunting urban legends.
These dark and spooky tales arise not only from local superstition but also Hong Kong’s culture and history, from its colonisation by Britain to its wartime occupation by Japanese troops. Here are the sites associated with five of the most enduring ones.
1. Bride’s Pool
Bride’s Pool in the northeast New Territories is known for its scenic 15-metre waterfall and clear plunge pool. It is not too far from Mirror Pool, which has a 35-metre waterfall.
Legend has it that both pools owe their names to a tragedy. A bride-to-be was being carried in a sedan chair through a rainstorm to meet her groom when one of the bearers slipped. The bride fell into the pool and drowned.
According to another version of the story, the bride was forced to marry and decided to throw herself into Bride’s Pool as the sedan chair passed the waterfall.
The nearby Mirror Pool was said to have been so named because the dead bride used it as a mirror.
She is said to have haunted the scene of her death ever since, sometimes revealing herself in a red cheongsam as she brushes her hair by the water.
2. Chinese University of Hong Kong
Students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) will know this one.
A girl with braided hair has been seen wandering alone at night, seemingly lost. When approached, she turns around to reveal her face – only, it is not a face, but a head of braided hair. In another version of the story, her face is bloody with the skin torn off.
Founded in 1963 at Ma Liu Shui in the New Territories, CUHK is relatively close to Hong Kong’s border with mainland China. Because of the campus’ proximity to the tracks of the former Kowloon-Canton Railway, in the 1960s and ’70s, illegal immigrants from China who made it across the border would jump off the train there before making their way to the city.
Rumour has it that one night, as a girl jumped off the train at Ma Liu Shui, her braid was caught in the train door. The speeding train yanked her braid, and with it, the skin off her face.
Not wanting to be caught by the police, she kept walking and finally died on the university grounds, where her ghost continues to roam, directionless, sometimes crying.
In 1995, Hong Kong filmmaker Wilson Yip Wai-shun brought this story to the big screen in the movie 01:00 A.M.
3. Yau Ma Tei MTR station
On November 10, 1981, long before safety screen doors were installed on the platforms of the city’s MTR subway network, news media reported that a teenage girl dressed in a school uniform was seen leaping in front of an oncoming train at Yau Ma Tei station.
Several people on the platform were reported to have seen the girl falling onto the tracks and shouted to the driver, but too late.
The station, and the adjoining ones to the north and south, Jordan and Mong Kok, were out of service for over an hour as the emergency services investigated the incident, but no body was found.
4. Tat Tak School in Ping Shan, Yuen Long
The former Tat Tak School in Ping Shan was founded in 1931 as one of the New Territories’ first educational institutions, and the site has been the source of some of Hong Kong’s oldest ghost stories.
When, a year after China ceded them to Britain, troops entered the New Territories to confront local clans in what became known as the “Six-Day War of 1899”, some 500 indigenous Chinese villagers were killed. Then, in 1941, Japanese troops killed numerous people in the area and turned the site into a mass grave during the occupation.
It was also rumoured that a headmistress wearing a red dress committed suicide by hanging in one of the school’s bathroom stalls. The school closed in 1998.
In 2011, a group of 12 secondary school students reportedly visited the derelict site on a daredevil adventure and heard mysterious whispers and saw a woman dressed in red. One of the girls became hysterical and when she was later admitted to hospital, she claimed she had visions of people dying horrible deaths.
Tat Tak School was featured in a 2013 TV series, I Wouldn’t Go in There, on the National Geographic channel that delved into the stories behind Asia’s most notorious haunted sites.
5. A flat in Nathan Road, Yau Ma Tei
In 1953, four friends playing mahjong in a Yau Ma Tei flat got up from the table and ran for their lives.
After one of the players won a round, it was said that an extra pair of hands reached out to collect the winner’s money while another pair started shuffling the tiles on the table. The players looked at each other as the hair on the backs of their necks stood up, then ran downstairs to call the police.
The story was reported in the now-defunct Kung Sheung Daily News on March 6, 1953. The news report pointed out that the incident might have been the result of someone trying maliciously to lower the value of the property where the mahjong party took place.
