A ‘haunted’ Hong Kong flat: American tenant tries to get to the bottom of some ghostly goings-on
- The smell of cigarettes, jammed locks, a collapsed bookshelf: messages from beyond the grave or just bad luck?
- A writer investigates after a series of unexplained occurrences at his Prince Edward flat, whose previous resident had committed suicide
We were stranded, late one Sunday night, outside the Kowloon flat we had just moved into – the front-door key broken off in the lock. The landlord arrived with his tools but, unable to remove the heavy-duty bolt, he called a friend who brought bigger tools. They wrestled with the lock, hammering so loudly the neighbours came out to see what was going on. Finally, it came out.
The next day a replacement lock was installed. To test the new keys, I went outside and my husband locked the door from inside. I inserted the key and it got stuck in the lock and wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t open the door from the outside and he couldn’t open it from the inside. I went around to the building’s back door, climbed eight flights of stairs and entered the flat through the kitchen. Once inside, I tried the front-door handle and it swung open easily. The lock was once again replaced.
We shrugged off the incident, neither of us addressing the elephant in the room: we had rented a flat in which the previous resident had committed suicide, leaping from the window – and in Hong Kong, such places are considered ominous. Could the flat be haunted?
The listing for a large apartment in Prince Edward at a low price had appeared in a neighbourhood real estate office while we were house-hunting. Upon inquiry, the broker immediately revealed that the below-market rental was due to the fact there had been an “unnatural death” at the property – a murder or a suicide. Hong Kong law requires property agents to disclose such information.
Among my husband’s colleagues in academia, those from Hong Kong were aghast that we would even consider taking the flat. We did give it some serious thought, visiting on several occasions to see if we “sensed” anything before signing the lease. It felt fine. We hadn’t found anything else nearly as nice, and the location was perfect for us. Other places we had looked at were taken within days; this one had been vacant for months.
“It’s like it’s just sitting there waiting for us,” I told my husband. In New York, we had lived in places that were much older. “Who knows who may have died there through the years,” I pointed out.
