Lawang Sewu

Lawang Sewu – Javanese for “a thousand doors” – was built as the head office of the Nederlandsch-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij, the first railway company of the Dutch East Indies. Designed in the New Indies style by architects of the firm Klinkhamer and Quendag, its L-shaped main block, Building A, rose between 1904 and 1907 on a corner of what is now the Tugu Muda roundabout, with twin water towers, great stained-glass windows and endless arcades of doors. Building B behind it, finished by 1919, has a basement designed to hold water as an early form of cooling.

The building’s darker reputation comes from the 1940s. After the Japanese invasion in 1942, the occupying army took over the complex, and according to local accounts and the historian Michael G. Vann, the flooded basement of Building B was used to hold and torture prisoners, some of whom were executed. In October 1945, during the Five-Day Battle for Semarang – fought at the start of Indonesia’s revolution between Indonesian security forces and youth fighters and the Japanese garrison, which had refused to hand over its weapons – fighting reached Lawang Sewu and several young railway employees were killed; a monument outside honours them.

After independence the complex passed to the army and then back to the state railway, but it slowly decayed. As Vann wrote in Inside Indonesia in 2013, “ghost stories multiplied” as it came to look the part: young men tested their courage by spending the night inside, and in Javanese spiritual tradition (kejawen) violent death is closely tied to the place where it happened. The ghosts named most often are a headless Dutchwoman, said to have been executed by the Japanese, and a kuntilanak (the Indonesian pontianak). The 2007 horror film Lawang Sewu: Dendam Kuntilanak and a run of TV ghost-hunting shows fixed the building in the national imagination.

The national railway company restored the complex and First Lady Ani Yudhoyono opened it on 5 July 2011; in 2013 Semarang announced plans to shed its “spooky image” and promote it as a heritage and cultural venue. Today it is a railway museum run by KAI Wisata, and one of Central Java’s busiest attractions – visited for its architecture and history as much as for its ghosts.

Visitors, guards and TV crews report a headless woman in Dutch dress, a kuntilanak in white, figures in the corridors and stairwells, and footsteps, voices and screams from the basement. Photos posted online often claim to show faces at windows. The accounts are anecdotal.

Most stories concern the half-flooded basement of Building B, the long corridors and doorways of Building A, the stained-glass stairwell and the old tunnels said to lead under the city.

Lawang Sewu is Indonesia’s best-known haunted building, the setting of the film Lawang Sewu: Dendam Kuntilanak (2007), many TV mystery programmes and countless social-media ghost hunts. It is also a symbol of Semarang and a favourite backdrop for wedding and graduation photos.