Baron Empain Palace

Édouard Empain was a Belgian engineer and industrialist who made his fortune in railways and tramways – including work on the Paris Métro – and was made a baron by King Leopold II in 1907. In 1906 he bought a great stretch of desert north-east of Cairo and built a new garden city on it, Heliopolis, with its own tramway, hotels, cathedral and villas. For himself he commissioned the French architect Alexandre Marcel to design a residence unlike anything in Egypt: a reinforced-concrete palace modelled on the temples of Angkor Wat and Odisha, covered with carved elephants, snakes, monkeys and Hindu deities, finished in 1911.

The baron died in 1929 and was buried in the crypt of the Heliopolis basilica he had built; his son Jean followed in 1946. After the 1952 revolution the family left Egypt and the palace was sold in 1957. For half a century it stood empty, tangled in ownership disputes, rented out now and then as a film set, while its gardens ran wild and its statues and fittings were stripped.

An empty, exotic mansion on a busy boulevard was bound to collect stories. People said the main tower once revolved to follow the sun; that a woman of the family – called his wife or his sister, usually named Helena – died in a fall from the tower or in the palace’s service lift; that a daughter, Miriam or Mariam, with a mental illness fell down the spiral stairs; that tunnels led to the basilica; and that lights and screams came from the empty rooms. The accounts contradict one another, no evidence of a revolving mechanism has been found, and the deaths are not supported by any published record.

In the 1990s young people broke into the ruin for parties, and an unauthorised black-metal party there helped feed a national scare about “devil worship”. In January 1997 police swept homes across Cairo and detained around 70 young heavy-metal fans, mostly from well-off families; three weeks later the public prosecutor dropped the charges for lack of evidence. The palace’s reputation for satanism dates from that moral panic. The Egyptian government acquired the building in 2005, listed it as a monument in 2007, and after a restoration costing about 100 million Egyptian pounds reopened it to visitors in 2020, with exhibitions on the history of Heliopolis.

Folklore, rather than first-hand reports, dominates: lights moving in empty windows, screams and furniture moving at night, the ghosts of a woman and a girl who supposedly died in falls, and in the 1990s claims by trespassers of blood smeared on mirrors. Since the restoration, writers note, there have been no new reports.

The central tower and its balcony, the spiral staircase and the old service lift are the focal points of the legends, along with the basement and the supposed tunnels.

The Baron Palace has been called Egypt’s most haunted building in countless articles and lists, and it is a landmark of Heliopolis and a favourite setting for photographers, film crews and weddings. Its restoration was a project of national pride, and it now houses exhibitions on Heliopolis and the Empain family.