81 Chaoyangmen (Chaonei No. 81)
A French-style mansion on Chaoyangmen Inner Street in Beijing, which the New York Times called perhaps the city's best-known haunted house. Its ghost story drew crowds after a 2014 film, though English Wikipedia says it is accepted that no Kuomintang officer ever owned the house.
Chinese Wikipedia says the house, numbered 69 until 1965, was the home of Zhu Derong, a Chinese Catholic of French nationality born in Guangzhou in 1885. She married a Frenchman, named in Chinese as Pu Yiya, who was 20 years older and then chief engineer of the Pinghan railway. About ten years after the wedding they bought the plot, and he designed and built two three-storey French-style buildings with a large front garden, finished early in 1921. English Wikipedia gives a different picture: the records are incomplete, and there is disagreement over who built the house and why. Records are more consistent after 1949, and the same article says government agencies used the building as offices for most of the early years of the People's Republic.
The New York Times described the mansion in 2014 as long empty and run down, visited for years by a steady trickle of people after a scare, urban explorers and history enthusiasts. The best known of its legends, the paper said, holds that a Kuomintang official's mistress hanged herself in the house after he abandoned her when the Communists won in 1949. The Hollywood Reporter told the same story that year. English Wikipedia says it is accepted that no Kuomintang officer ever owned the house, and so none left a wife or mistress behind in it on fleeing to Taiwan.
The 2014 film The House That Never Dies drew on the house. The Hollywood Reporter and the New York Times reported crowds coming to the mansion after the film's release. China.org.cn said the producer paid for a real house, built in the style of the original, for the film.
"Due to incomplete historical records, there is disagreement about who built the house and for what purpose; however it is accepted that, contrary to one frequently cited legend, the house was never the property of a Kuomintang officer who left a woman, either his wife or a mistress, behind there when he fled to Taiwan in 1949. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) that year, records are more consistent. It was used as offices for various government agencies for most of the PRC's early years."
- Haunted or Not, Film Has Crowds Swarming to Beijing House, The New York Times, Sinosphere blog (2014)
- 朝阳门内大街81号, Chinese Wikipedia
- Haunted House in Beijing Attracts Visitors Following Release of 'The House That Never Dies', The Hollywood Reporter (2014)
- Francis Ng, Ruby Lin star in 'The House That Never Dies', China.org.cn (2014)