Tat Tak School

A closed school in the Ping Shan area of Yuen Long, Hong Kong, surrounded by graves, that the National Geographic Channel listed among Asia's ten most frightening places. Villagers have said they heard no ghost stories about it.

Create Hong Kong's Film Services Office describes the former Tat Tak Public School as a two-storey, U-shaped building on Nam Pak Road, Ping Shan, in Yuen Long, with a hall in the middle, classrooms in the two wings and a basketball court in front. The Oriental Daily News noted in 2013 that the school had been closed for more than fifteen years and was surrounded by graves.

HK01 says the school is closely tied to the Tang clan of Ping Shan. Tang Tat-chi told HK01 that the name Tat Tak comes from Confucius, and that many things in Ping Shan share it, including the Tat Tak Communal Hall, which once took in the school's extra pupils. In 1899 villagers met in that hall and put out a notice calling for armed resistance to British rule. HK01 says 81 people in Ping Shan died in the end, and suggests this may be where the story of the school sitting on a mass grave comes from. English Wikipedia says some 500 Ping Shan villagers were killed and are said to be buried on the hillside where the school stands, and that in 1941 Japanese troops killed many people and made the site a mass grave. The article adds that none of these claims has been verified, and that villagers said they had heard no ghost stories. HK01 reports that the rumours could never be proven.

The reputation spread through the media. The Oriental Daily News reported in 2013 that the National Geographic Channel had listed the school among Asia's ten most frightening places, citing years of ghost rumours, including one about a woman in red, and even taxi drivers who refused to go there. On.cc reported in 2018 that in September 2011 twelve junior secondary students went to explore the abandoned site at midday. One girl cried out that she saw a woman in red on a grave beside the building. After the group fled, she became acutely distressed and her friends had to restrain her.