Chaonei No. 81

Behind a wall on Chaoyangmen Inner Street, a few hundred metres inside Beijing’s Second Ring Road, stand two grey-brick buildings in the French Baroque manner, with mansard roofs and stone-framed windows – survivors of the early 20th century in a district of glass towers. For decades they stood empty and overgrown, and they became what The New York Times called “arguably Beijing’s most celebrated ‘haunted house.’”

The house’s early history is genuinely murky, because pre-1949 property records are patchy. Its current owner, the Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing, says it was built around 1910 for the North China Union Language School, which taught Mandarin to Western missionaries and later became the California College in China. Other historians think it was the residence of the French manager of the Beijing–Hankou railway, or a building given to a church mission around 1900. By the late 1930s and 1940s it was in the hands of Catholic and Protestant missions, including a group of Belgian nuns who ran a clinic there.

The ghost story most often told is that a Kuomintang officer lived here and fled to Taiwan in 1949, abandoning his wife or mistress, who then took her own life in the house; her crying is said to be heard on stormy nights. Church officials say there is no record of any Kuomintang officer living there, and the property’s known occupants at the time were missionaries. After 1949 the new government used the buildings as offices; during the Cultural Revolution Red Guards briefly occupied them, and a local story says they left in a hurry because they were frightened. From then on the house fell into ruin, and other tales attached to it – such as construction workers who supposedly vanished after breaking through a basement wall in 2001.

The property was returned to the Catholic Church in 1994 and listed as a historic building by the city in 2009. Interest exploded in 2014 with the 3D horror film The House That Never Dies (Jingcheng 81 Hao), inspired by the house, which became China’s highest-grossing horror film at the time; hundreds of visitors a day turned up at the gate, and the diocese closed it to control crowds. The buildings have since been restored and offered for rent.

Stories describe a woman crying inside during thunderstorms, a figure at the windows, cold air at the doorway even in summer, and people who entered and were never seen again. None of these claims has been documented.

The main two-and-a-half-storey house and the larger outbuilding behind the wall at 81 Chaoyangmen Inner Street, especially the basement and upper rooms, at night.

Chaonei No. 81 inspired Raymond Yip’s The House That Never Dies (2014) and its 2017 sequel, and appears in Chinese ghost-story websites, urban-exploration videos and TV features. It is a rare case of a modern Chinese urban legend attached to a specific, well-known building.