Hui Bon Hoa Mansion (Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts)

Hui Bon Hoa – known to Saigon as Chú Hỏa, born Huỳnh Văn Hoa – arrived from Fujian around 1863 and, according to the legends, started out collecting scrap bottles. His company became one of the great property empires of French Indochina, said to own many thousands of houses, and the family built or funded landmarks still standing today, including the Majestic Hotel and Từ Dũ maternity hospital. Chú Hỏa himself died in 1901 while visiting China, but his sons kept the business intact.

The yellow mansion at 97 Phó Đức Chính was designed by a French architect named Rivera and built between 1929 and 1934 for the family, in a blend of European and Chinese styles with walls up to 60 cm thick. Local lore says it was planned with a hundred doors, but the governor-general made the owners remove one so it would not outshine his palace – so it has ninety-nine. Since 1987 it has housed the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts, with collections of lacquer painting, woodcuts and Cham sculpture.

As Saigon’s Sài Gòn Giải Phóng newspaper recounted in 2007, rumours that the house was haunted circulated well before 1975: people spoke of a white shape gliding along the corridors at night and of a ghost weeping. The most popular version, retold by Saigoneer in 2014, says the family’s only daughter fell ill with leprosy, was kept hidden in a closed room where servants passed food through a hatch, and died alone; her grief-stricken father had her placed in a stone coffin in the house, and her crying could still be heard. The story inspired a pre-1975 film, Con ma nhà họ Hứa (“The Ghost of the Hứa Family”), directed by Lê Mộng Hoàng.

No record supports the tale of a hidden daughter, and its usual form – with Chú Hỏa as the grieving father – is chronologically impossible, since he died nearly thirty years before the mansion was built. The legend also reflects the fear and stigma that once surrounded leprosy (Hansen’s disease), a curable illness whose patients were often isolated. Today the building is visited above all as one of Saigon’s finest colonial-era interiors.

Stories describe a white figure moving through the corridors and past windows after dark, a girl’s sobbing or screaming from an upper room, and – in some versions – a ghostly young woman in a white dress. Staff and visitors occasionally repeat the stories, but no documented incident has been reported.

The upper floors and long corridors of the main building, and a room said to have been sealed, at night when the museum is closed.

The legend inspired Lê Mộng Hoàng’s film Con ma nhà họ Hứa, one of the early Vietnamese ghost films, and it appears in Vietnamese ghost-story features and Saigon walking tours. The mansion is a favourite location for photo shoots and a symbol of the city’s Chinese-Vietnamese heritage.