Ghost Stories, Legends, and Folk Anecdotes

[Important note] Except where explicitly marked "verified," the content on this page is folk-circulated material (unofficial history / dramatised retelling), without official confirmation, and does not represent factual events. Some of these stories circulate across multiple Hong Kong universities and are not unique to HKUST. The following is recorded purely as an archive of campus folk culture — please do not take it as fact. Wherever a :::lore box appears below, the content is word-of-mouth transmission with no reliable source; where the body text carries an inline citation, it is background fact with documentary support. For the official origin of the campus landmarks themselves, see the companion article Landmark Legends and Campus Lore^※; the feng shui of the site selection and the "lift-as-address" routing puzzle are covered in a separate piece, Feng Shui Ridges, the World Fountain, and the "Lift-as-Address" Maze^※.

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# I. The Dormitory "Peephole Ghost" (The Red Eyes / Red Black Red)

Editor's note (sourced): This story circulates widely among multiple Hong Kong universities (including HKU), and is also known in folk circles as the "Red Black Red" legend — it is not unique to HKUST. According to a survey of Hong Kong university ghost stories collected by The Honeycombers (The Honeycombers)^※, this "peephole / red eyes" motif recurs across versions at multiple campuses. Its narrative prototype is also typical of Hong Kong urban ghost stories generally — see CUHK anthropologist Mr. Joseph Bosco's (博素高) academic study of Hong Kong young people's ghost stories, Young People's Ghost Stories in Hong Kong (CUHK collection, PDF)^※: the same motif being retold and "localised" across different campuses is precisely the transmission pattern typical of such legends, and readers are advised not to take it as a factual event specific to any one campus.

Separately, according to a list of ghost stories from Hong Kong's eight publicly funded universities compiled by the Hong Kong lifestyle outlet GoTrip.hk, 《14個不能不知的大學鬼故怪談》^※, the "peephole / red eyes" story is likewise recorded independently as HKUST's sole ghost-story entry, with a plot largely matching the version recorded on this page (reversed peephole, a male student watching, the female student's death by hanging, her eyes facing the peephole) — suggesting this version has become relatively fixed rather than freshly invented. That two independently compiled folk lists arrive at the same plot corroborates the transmission pattern Mr. Bosco describes, in which a motif circulates across campuses and is "claimed" by each school's students as a real event of their own — the more similar the details, the more it indicates a text circulating across campuses rather than an authentic record from any one specific dormitory.

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# II. "HKUST Has No Ghosts": The Particularities of the Campus Location

A frequently made observation is that, compared with HKU (situated on Hong Kong Island's Mid-Levels, with numerous historic buildings) and CUHK (whose constituent colleges such as New Asia and United College are already decades old), HKUST has a noticeably lower number of stories on Hong Kong's university "ghost-story map." According to The Honeycombers' survey of university ghost stories^※, older schools such as HKU and CUHK have far more campus-legend entries than HKUST; this impression is not merely intuitive — the next section checks it against concrete figures from two independent folk-compiled surveys.

Common folk explanations for this (all speculative, none conclusive):

• Short institutional history: According to HKUST's milestones, the university was founded in 1991^※, making it one of the later-founded large comprehensive universities in Hong Kong, with a relatively thin "historical sediment."
• Location and land use: The campus sits on the Clear Water Bay Peninsula, built on land once planned for military use and eventually converted to educational use (see the Kohima Camp section of the "Landmark Legends" page for details); it lacks the old wartime hospitals, old-style wards, and other common "haunted site" motifs for stories to attach to.
• New buildings: The great majority of campus buildings are modern structures completed after the 1990s^※, lacking the "old building" atmosphere of old-style dormitory or medical buildings that tends to generate legends.
• Open sea views: Folk feng shui claims hold that a sunlit sea view and open airflow prevent "yin energy" from accumulating — this is purely a folk claim with no basis whatsoever, recorded here only for completeness.

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# III. The Ghost-Story Landscape Across Hong Kong's Eight Universities: A Numerical Comparison

The claim that "HKUST has few ghost stories" is not asserted solely on this page's authority. According to GoTrip.hk's list of ghost stories at Hong Kong's eight universities, 《14個不能不知的大學鬼故怪談》^※ (hereafter the "GoTrip list"), the eight publicly funded universities in Hong Kong together account for 14 ghost stories, with per-institution counts as follows:

The figures are compiled respectively from the GoTrip.hk list^※ and The Honeycombers survey^※. The two folk-compiled lists were written independently, with different scope and style, but agree closely that HKUST's ghost-story entry count is tied for lowest in Hong Kong: in the GoTrip list HKUST ties with Baptist University at 1 entry, ahead only of EdUHK's zero; in The Honeycombers survey HKUST likewise records only 1 entry, tying with CityU and lower than HKU and CUHK. That two independent sources reach the same conclusion is more persuasive than an impressionistic account drawn from a single source.

It should be noted that lists of this kind are not academic statistics — the entry counts depend on each compiler's editorial choices rather than an exhaustive survey. This should therefore not be read as "HKUST has in fact experienced only one supernatural incident," but rather as "among the widely circulated, publicly available ghost-story texts, the number of entries attributed to HKUST is comparatively low" — which aligns with the structural explanations listed in Section II, such as short institutional history and newer buildings.

# Representative Stories from Other Institutions (for comparison, all folk legend)

To help readers sense the difference in "narrative density" behind the raw story counts, the following excerpts list the titles and one-line summaries of the most frequently reprinted folk stories from neighbouring institutions (all unverified, provided for cultural comparison only, and not a narrative focus of this site):

According to an article on Medium, The Seven Mysteries of CUHK, (The Seven Mysteries of CUHK)^※, and The Honeycombers survey^※, the neighbouring-institution stories listed above tend to be built around "long-established colleges/dormitory buildings plus specific place names and physical features" (for example, CUHK's college system dates back decades, and HKU's University Hall was built in 1864 and incorporated into the university's estate in 1954) — giving them far more narrative anchoring points than HKUST has. This corroborates the "historical sediment" theory from Section II: older institutions not only have more stories, but individual stories also tend to have a higher density of physical detail.

# Founding Year and Story Count: A Rough Comparison

If the "historical sediment" theory holds, institutions with a longer history should, in theory, have more ghost-story entries. The following is a rough ranking by publicly available founding/renaming years (each institution's history is complex; only the most commonly cited key year is given here for reference, and this is not a rigorous institutional-history study):

This comparison partly bears out the "historical sediment" theory: HKU (1911) and PolyU (predecessor 1937) have the most stories, roughly matching the founding-year ranking with HKUST (1991) and EdUHK (1994) having the fewest. EdUHK, however, is an exception — its teacher-education lineage traces back to several 19th-century normal colleges, yet it records "zero entries" in the folk lists. This suggests that "founding year" is not the only variable; the scale and density of dormitory culture, whether a campus has concentrated old-style dormitory buildings, and even the happenstance of media/online reprinting likewise affect how thick or thin a school's "ghost-story repository" is. The "historical sediment" theory should not be applied as a single determining factor; this page presents it only as one common folk explanation, not as a conclusion.

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# IV. Legends of Campus Off-Limits Areas

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# V. Clear Water Bay's "Historical Ground": Tai Po Tsai Village

[Historical background, verified]

The plot of land HKUST occupies (Tai Po Tsai) was, before the university was built, land intended for a British military camp — Kohima Camp — that was planned but never completed. The full history of the camp and the architectural competition surrounding the site selection is detailed in the companion article Landmark Legends and Campus Lore^※, in the section "The Site's Former Life: From Kohima Camp to a University of Science and Technology."

According to public sources, Tai Po Tsai is a documented village, recorded by the the English Wikipedia "Tai Po Tsai" entry^※ as founded in 1629^※. Administratively it lies in Sai Kung District on the Clear Water Bay Peninsula — not Sha Tin District; its villagers belong to the Punti (Cantonese) lineage system (the original inhabitants were predominantly surnamed Wan, 溫), not a Hakka village. Historically the village belonged to the cross-village alliance known as "Ho Chung Tung," i.e. the Ho Chung Seven Villages, centred on Ho Chung; according to the the English Wikipedia "Ho Chung" entry^※, member villages included Ho Chung, Nam Pin Wai, Mok Che Ha, Tai Lam Wu, Man Yee, Tai Po Tsai, Sheung Yeung, and other Punti villages. The 1911^※ census recorded a population of roughly 172 in Tai Po Tsai. Whether the original village layout in the area was affected by HKUST's construction, or whether any villagers were relocated, is not detailed in the currently available public literature.

Correction note: This page previously misidentified Tai Po Tsai as a "Hakka village" "under Sha Tin's jurisdiction." Having checked the Wikipedia entries and their citations, it is in fact a Punti village in Sai Kung District, part of the Ho Chung Seven Villages, and has now been corrected accordingly.

Archaeological and historical remains: Based on currently available public sources, there is no verifiable evidence that prehistoric or wartime artifacts have been found at the HKUST site itself. Other locations on the Clear Water Bay Peninsula (such as Lung Ha Wan) have records of Neolithic rock carvings/sites, but these are not directly connected to the HKUST plot, and no reports of artifact discoveries on the HKUST plot itself have been found — so claims of "deep historical ground" have no archaeological basis for this specific plot.

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# VI. The "Folk Memory" of Memorial Sites

[Events related to 2019, per this site's §6.2 rule, are presented only as a directory of source links; this article does not recount the course of events, name individuals, or speculate about cause of death]

This site treats campus-related events from 2019 with a links-only, no-narrative policy: the factual course of events and the accounts of various parties are consolidated in Module 14's directory of source links, and this page does not recount them. Readers may go to Module 14's directory, "Sources on 2019 and Related Sensitive Content"^※ to consult external sources and form their own judgment; the same module also contains a companion article, Academic Freedom, Student Union Disciplinary Action, and Speech Controversies^※, which records related historical material on the campus speech environment of the same period, provided for further reference only.

The following records only the cultural dimension of "campus folk memory," and consists of unverified oral folk transmission:

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# VII. Why Campuses "Produce" Ghost Stories: An Anthropological Perspective

Although HKUST has few ghost stories, the question of "why ghost stories circulate on university campuses" in itself has been the subject of serious academic research — which also provides a "verified" explanatory framework for this page's "folk" content. In the same research series, Mr. Bosco has a companion paper, The Supernatural in Hong Kong Young People's Ghost Stories, (CUHK collection)^※, from the same scholar and the same fieldwork lineage as the paper cited in this section; interested readers may consult it alongside for comparison.

According to CUHK anthropologist Mr. Joseph Bosco's (博素高) academic study of Hong Kong young people's ghost stories, Young People's Ghost Stories in Hong Kong (CUHK collection)^※, campus ghost stories are not simply "superstition," but a folk narrative practice with a social function. From this perspective, the contrast between HKUST's "few" ghost stories and older Hong Kong institutions' "many" can be understood as follows:

First, ghost stories require "historical sediment." The generation and transmission of ghost stories typically attach themselves to material such as "old buildings, old spaces, historical events" that can be woven into a story. HKUST was founded in 1991^※, and its buildings are mostly modern new construction, lacking the "historical sediment" of older institutions — which objectively reduces the "raw material" ghost stories rely on to grow.

Second, ghost stories are "localised" texts in circulation. The "peephole/red eyes" motif recurring across HKU, CUHK, HKUST, and other campuses (see Section I of this page) shows that such stories are not "real events" unique to any one school, but rather a narrative template that circulates among different campuses and is rewritten through "localisation." The same core plot is "claimed" by students at different schools as "our dormitory's story" — this is precisely the transmission mechanism revealed in Mr. Bosco's research. Explaining this mechanism clearly is itself a form of demystifying the misconception that "ghost story equals a real supernatural event."

Third, ghost stories carry collective emotion. Campus ghost stories often centre on scenes such as dormitories, late nights, and solitude, reflecting to some degree the loneliness, stress, and anxiety about the unknown that young people experience after leaving home to live on campus. They are "containers" for collective emotion rather than objective records of supernatural phenomena. According to a retrieved abstract of the paper, Mr. Bosco further notes that Hong Kong university students' ghost stories are often a projection of a subconscious anxiety about "tension between romantic relationships and academic pressure" — the paper's examples of couple-tragedy-type ghost stories such as "Oxtail Soup" (the same motif as the CUHK "Oxtail Soup" legend listed in the table in Section III of this page) are the most common narrative form this anxiety takes. This account is relayed from a publicly retrieved abstract; readers may consult the original paper (CUHK collection, PDF)^※ to verify the specific argumentation in detail.

Fourth, the story count itself is also an observable cultural indicator. The two folk-compiled lists cited in Section III show that HKUST's entry count is tied for lowest among Hong Kong's eight universities — taking the "historical sediment" theory seriously, this numerical difference is itself an indirect confirmation: older institutions' story density is, to some degree, a reflection of the depth of their "historical raw material," rather than purely a matter of incidental omission from the lists.

Placing this anthropological perspective within this site's compilation philosophy confirms the principle that "even unofficial history needs traceable sources": even a subject as "unscientific" as "ghost stories" can be explained, as to "why it circulates," using "verified" academic research — clarifying a legend's "mechanism of generation" is far more valuable than debating whether the legend "is true." This is also the reasoning behind this page's insistence on distinguishing between ":::lore folk" content and content with inline-cited, verified sources.

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This page marks its content by source level: a :::lore box = word-of-mouth transmission with no documentary basis; body text with an inline citation = supported by documentary or official sources. Readers are asked to judge and weigh accordingly.