City of Ghosts

The Girl with Braided Hair

In the 70s, it was a lot harder to get into Hong Kong. If you were an illegal immigrant, you either swum across the South China Sea or you snuck onto a train and jumped off across the border. The story goes that a boy from the mainland and his girlfriend stowed away on a train to Kowloon, meaning to start a new life in Hong Kong. When they reached the Chinese University in Sha Tin the boy jumped, shouting at the girl to follow. She jumped, but her braided hair caught in the train door. It ripped her face from her skull.

Fast-forward to one fine night at the Chung Chi College campus in Chinese University. A wandering student sees a girl with braided hair sitting alone in a public square, with her back to him. Thinking she’s crying, he taps her on the shoulder: she turns around, and a flayed, skinless face stares back at him. It’s crying blood. A loose flap of skin – nostrils, ears, eyelids, lips – hangs down from her head by a single braid of hair. The student is found unconscious in the square the next morning, and the area becomes known as "One-Braid Road."

Femme Fatale

Late one night in 1982, a policeman is catching up on some paperwork alone in Tseun Wan Police Station when a beautiful woman rushes in, her red dress filthy and scratched. She shouts, “There’s been a car accident on Castle Peak Road. You’ve got to go.” The policeman scrawls down the address, but when he looks up to ask for details the woman has disappeared. Surprised, the officer thinks it might be a prank but files the emergency report nonetheless.

When the officer’s shift is over, he heads home via Castle Peak Road, but he’s held up by a car accident – and the only casualty is a beautiful and familiar woman wearing a ripped red dress, lying with a snapped neck in the middle of the road. Tseun Wan Police Station was later relocated, and the building is now home to the transport police.

Three Sticks of Incense

Over on Lockhart Road in Wan Chai is the East Town Shopping Arcade, now home to a Pacific Coffee. Many decades ago, it was the East Town Cinema. Rumor has it that each night, after selling only five or six tickets for the late-night shows, staff would look in and see the cinema packed full of people. Afterwards, no cinema in the city would sell all the tickets to an evening show – three rows of seats were always reserved for any “one” that might want to watch. But there’s another, more horrifying story:

Two friends go to watch a movie at the East Town Cinema. Sitting down in the full house, one of the men notices that everyone else in the room has three sticks of incense floating above their heads –three sticks of incense are used to show respect to the dead. He turns to tell his friend – above whose head floats the same three sticks of incense. Spooked, the man runs to the bathrooms, and can see nothing above his own head in the mirror. Then he hears a blood-curdling scream: “Fire!” This is in the days when the cinemas locked their doors to stop trespassers. Desperate, the man climbs into the sewage cistern and hides, listening to the screams of the entire cinema burning to death. He is found amongst the debris hours later, the only survivor.