Minxiong Haunted House

In the Japanese colonial era, the farming township of Minxiong in Chiayi County had three wealthy landowners known locally as the “three great masters.” One of them, Liu Rong-ru, built this mansion in 1929 – in a spirit of rivalry, according to local lore, after another magnate put up a fashionable Western-style villa nearby. Family descendants add a feng shui reason: a geomancer warned that the new north–south railway threatened the area’s “dragon vein,” and a tall house backed by a hill would protect it. The result was a blend of Baroque and Taiwanese styles: three linked three-storey wings with French windows, a courtyard with a fountain and pond, and an ancestral shrine on the top floor.

The Liu family moved out around 1945 – because the house was far from town, they have said. In the late 1940s Nationalist troops newly arrived in Taiwan were billeted in the area, some in the empty mansion. A former staff member of nearby Xingzhong Elementary School, Hsu Chiang-chuan, later recounted hearing a company commander report that his soldiers had seen a white figure drifting past the windows at night; when it appeared again, the officer fired and a young soldier was killed. The account was recorded in the school’s history, and bullet holes are still pointed out in the walls. Liu descendants give a similar version, in which a soldier going to the toilet at night was shot by mistake.

From that real tragedy the ghost stories grew: a maid said to have died in the courtyard well, Japanese soldiers who turned on each other, a homesick soldier, curses hidden in the walls by the builders. Family members and neighbours have said none of these tales has any basis, and that people nearby live normal lives. The family removed the roofs and upper floors to avoid property tax, the 1999 Jiji earthquake left the shell unsafe, and banyan roots now grip the walls.

Minxiong embraces the legend: the haunted house, the Daishiye (Ghost King) temple and its great Ghost Month festival are promoted as the township’s “three treasures,” and every seventh lunar month students come to explore. In 2020 part of the land and building was put up for sale. The ruin is private property and structurally dangerous, so visitors should look from the road.

Visitors describe a white figure at the third-floor windows, footsteps and voices in the empty rooms, and a heavy atmosphere around the well. A 1991 TV news feature reported the claim that travellers who sheltered there for the night woke up outside. Japanese TV crews and spiritual mediums have visited and reported seeing a woman in white. The reports are anecdotal and some have been questioned as staged for television.

The roofless main wings, the windows of the upper floors, and the old well in the courtyard. Activity is said to peak during Ghost Month, the seventh lunar month.

The house inspired the TV drama Da Mao Yuanwai (1973), Yao Feng-pan’s film Gui Wu Jin Di (1981), the 2022 feature The Haunted House of Minxiong and the indie game Pa Gui. It is promoted with the Daishiye festival as one of Minxiong’s “three treasures.”