Properties on the Peak, a rich neighbourhood in Hong Kong, are among the world’s most desirable. But nobody lives in Dragon Lodge, an Italianate mansion built in the 1920s. It was abandoned shortly after it sold, for HK$118m ($15m), in 1997. Rumour has it that nuns were beheaded there during the Japanese occupation in the second world war; they haunt the shadowy halls.
Dragon Lodge is known in Cantonese as a hongza, or “calamity house”. In Hong Kong’s expensive property market that label can make even the swankiest homes places to avoid. A paper in 2020 by Utpal Bhattacharya of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and fellow academics said ghost-inhabited homes in the city lose a fifth of their value on average; the prices of flats on the same floor as one drop by 9%. Murders can kill prices by 34%.