10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China

Part I: The Author's Own True Tales

Chapter 2: Japanese Ghosts at the Hong Hu Walmart--洪湖沃尔玛有日本的饿鬼

After the Delter program closed down at the Youth College, we were forced to find our own dwellings and new jobs. Jeff Lewenthal, God rest his soul, the former director at Delter, picked up the program and moved it to a local vocational high school. This was the school for the kids who rode the short bus. They don’t actually have short buses in China, but these were the kids who hated school or who had “behavioral issues.”

Jeff brought his three ace teachers, Simon, Up All Night Stan, and me with him along with familiar staffers Joey, Annika and Vivian. We were given new higher paying jobs and a less convenient location. Meanwhile, a parallel English program with an American and two Canadians shared the administration office. The American guy, Jamon, would later become one of my best friends in China and birding buddy, but that is for another book, which I am considering calling Babes, Birds, and Bondage: English Teaching Adventures in the Far East. Another time, perhaps!

Chris and Chris, the two Canadians, were just two of four Canadians I’ve known here named Chris. One of them was a Nationals fan because the new Washington, DC, Major League team had moved there from Montreal. Having been a former Expos fan, he thought he should follow the team to DC. We had a bet going on who would have the better season, the O’s or the Nats.

I still have his hat. I bought it at his request on a trip home. It’s an inaugural season Nationals cap that’s never been worn. He went back to Canada before I could give it to him. He stayed two years to get his Master’s degree and when he came back to China, he took a job at a Canadian school in Qingdao. It’s been in a plastic bag since 2005 and is still bright shiny red and still has the official Major League Baseball collectors seal.

Chris also had a really hot girlfriend he ended up marrying. Absofuckinglutely gorgeous. She owned a coffee shop/bar in Luohu District where we went after hours to watch the World Cup in 2006. It was only interesting to me because the US was doing better than expected and Italy was tearing it up. When one grows up in an Italian family, one never really loses their love for the Old Country. We got to see Italy whoop France’s ass and the infamous Zidan head butt that dominated soccer culture for the next four years while eating pizza and drinking anything we wanted. I forget now what we paid, but it was a bargain for what Chris and his wife served up during the games.

Every day in the halls of that school, precocious high school girls would approach the foreign teachers. “Handsome boy” they would invitingly coo to us as we smoked in the hallway outside the office, as if we’d be interested in delinquent 16-year-olds. We weren’t. And "handsome boy," a direct translation from the Chinese "shuai ge" ( 帅哥), doesn't sound as cool in English as they thought it did as it does in Chinese.

The hallway was actually an external walkway with a wall of sliding glass windows that opened outside. In the subtropics of Shenzhen, all the architecture was geared towards maximum ventilation and air flow. All schools, residential buildings and even some office buildings were devoid of internal corridors. The only thing I can think of in the US that would be similar is a beach condo.

These 16-year-olds thought they were pretty tough, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you need a totally hands-off policy in that sort of environment. I was lucky. The crew I worked with had enough sense to know not to mess with the student body. Even teaching adults it’s a good rule of thumb to fraternize somewhere else and with someone other than your students. Unfortunately, a lot of foreign teachers in China had no common sense at all and took every opportunity to indulge themselves. Like my Sicilian grandmother used to say, "Don't shit where you eat."

After we all had left that school and Delter behind and Jeff had moved on to a more appropriate job in international sales, the owner of the Delter program hired some wild Aussie guy called JD who’d actually spent time living in a park in China, in a box, homeless. I swear I'm not making this up. His drug-addled mind just wasn’t the best match for teaching troubled but precocious youth at the short bus school. It wasn’t long till he got fired after he was busted snorting K with a group of students at lunch. Through a mutual friend, I heard that he went back to Australia and turned his experience into a popular and raucously funny one-man show. I don't know. I never saw it. He died about a year later.

It was this job in this surreal situation that paid the bills for my new digs above the very first Walmart in China. That's right. It was an historic location: site of the very first Walmart in China in 1996. It's still there today.

Recent photo of Hong Hu Walmart & residential towers from szhome.com. My unit was over the blue Walmart sign.

View from across the lake. My tower inside left in this photo. Photo credit bottom right.

My apartment was on the 10th floor of the center tower, the name of which I can't remember. It started with Jing. It had a spectacular view across Hong Hu Lake (which is redundant because hu means lake in Chinese, but Hong Lake sounds funny. The name translates literally as “Vast Lake.”) The Walmart was on the ground floor and three towering residential buildings sat directly on top. My unit was owned by a guy who lived in Australia and so had wonderful Western amenities like urethaned parquet floors, window screens, and a hot tub. It had two balconies, one of which was off the master bedroom. You could see clear across the city since no buildings obstructed the view. In the distance some 15 miles away was Nanshan District which had a lot of greenery and was still being developed. In fact, the last three houses I’ve lived in since 2007 did not yet exist at this time.

Looking west towards Nanshan, Seiga tower in Futian is barely visible center.

I always liked this view with the bronzed cypress trees in winter and orange bridge arch.

Simon and his girlfriend Vivi lived nearby. Vivi had helped me find that place. All three of us lived separately but we spent a lot of time together either at Simon’s or my place. Simon’s building was up a small side street from me behind an office building that was almost completely empty. Vivi explained that it was because the building was rumored to be haunted and nobody wanted to rent there. We never investigated it further, but it was clear that most of the building was vacant. Offices remained dark, there was no furniture or drapery of any kind visible, people were not seen going in and out of the building even at rush hour or lunch time. Whether it was haunted or not I may never know, but the locals were certainly uncomfortable with it. This part of town was lively, crowded and noisy from about 7:00 am till 10:00 pm every day. None of the other buildings with higher rents suffered vacancy, just this one. It was directly across the street from Children's Park (儿童公园).

When I first moved in, I got a sense of something else being there. I often thought someone was walking along the hall towards the living room from the back office. I’d get up from the sofa, look, and ‘feel’ like I could see a figure, but there was nothing to it. I would stand at my end of the hallway peering down into the office trying to make out a shape or a wisp, but saw nothing. I'd switch to wide-angle vision, a method used by trackers to catch subtle movements and shifts in the environment, but could never make anything definite out. I made nothing of it. I wasn't afraid of ghosts. My family's always lived with ghosts, from the house on Barracks Street in Perth Amboy 100 years ago to the houses I grew up in and even my cousin's house. But I couldn't make anything of this.

A little while after that, my friend Erich moved in with me to take the small bedroom, and in the extra activity and banter of having a roommate, the phenomenon went unnoticed.

He moved out eventually into his own place nearby. After that, my girlfriend at the time, Heather, started spending more time over there. She also got the sense that someone else was around. When I made my first trip home after coming to China, I offered to let her stay there full time to keep an eye on the place. It was Christmas and I was going home for a month.

When I got back she was there waiting. The place looked really clean, as if it hadn’t been lived in the entire time. I asked her if she had stayed there. She said no.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I think there’s a ghost here,” she harrumphed.

“Really?” I pressed.

“Yes. I could hear it walking around. Sometimes I thought I saw it. I couldn’t stay here.”

Now it was just after this that one my best friends, Gravy, came to visit me in China and brought his friend Paul. Paul met a girl while he was here. We didn’t see him for about five days, and then he showed up again on the last day to get his stuff and go back to America. Ten days later he was back in China and he and his new girlfriend Lily moved in upstairs from me on the 15th floor.

Inside the ghost pad, a regular house of horrors. That's Gravy with Erich (seated).

Paul and Lily and Heather and I became fast friends. We got along really well and spent a lot of time together eating, watching movies, going to the movies, going to parks and going shopping. Paul started setting up a successful business while Gravy helped him continue his business back home. It wasn’t long until Paul and I had become rather like brothers and his future bride viewed me as family as well.

It was while he was on a trip home to tend to his business and his house in DC that things really unraveled.
I got a call from him late one night asking me to check on Lily the next day and make sure everything was OK.

“What the hell happened?”

“Well, it’s like this,” he began. “Lily went to bed tonight and for some reason had trouble falling asleep. She was lying in bed with her eyes closed trying to get to sleep when suddenly she felt this terror. She opened her eyes and saw this Japanese soldier from World War II walking towards the bedroom from the living room. She thought she might be dreaming so she closed her eyes and opened them again. When she opened them, he was even closer. He wasn't making any noise, just walking towards her with this evil look on his face. She closed her eyes again and when she opened them, he was right in her face. She screamed and jumped out of bed, then called me and told me what happened. She sounded pretty terrified.”

“Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed. “You know Heather and I thought there might be a ghost in my place too but we never had any thing like that!”

“Well I told her to go down to 7-11 (yes, there are 7-11s in China) and buy some salt and put it all around the room. You know, make a circle and make sure it’s unbroken and then the ghost can’t cross it.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard similar stuff. I saw that in a movie once too. The Devil's Bride with Christopher Lee. Seemed to have a good handle on esoteric and occult lore.”

“Oh yeah. I've seen that. Christopher Lee plays the good guy. They used to show that on Channel 20's Saturday Chiller like twice a year."

"That's the one."

"Anyway, I think she’s OK for the night, but tomorrow she may want some company.”

“Sure, we’ll invite her down or go upstairs.”

When Paul got back to China, he and Lily moved out and into a brand spanking new mixed residential office building that was top of the line for Shenzhen, the International Finance Center. It even had central air conditioning which was exceptionally rare at that time, especially for residential. Even the lobby and elevators had a/c, a welcome blessing in the 100 degree heat of Shenzhen. In most buildings, you worked up a sweat in the sauna-like elevators and couldn’t cool off till you got home or to your office space.

Shortly after Paul and Lily moved out, another couple moved into their unit. Within a few weeks the husband and wife were fighting. It began as arguments that later became violent shouting matches, according to the neighbors who were disturbed almost daily by it. One night, the husband finally stabbed his wife to death, then took his own life by jumping 15 floors off the balcony.

They say it was the evil spirits, the hungry ghosts as they say in China (e gui--饿鬼) on that floor that drove them to it. Everyone moved out of that floor and the units became virtually impossible to rent out. Nobody wanted to live there. Like Emily's clothes, the place was cursed. Rents in that building remain below market rates because of the stories that still circulate.

A little investigation on Lily’s part turned up some very interesting information. She uncovered that the building was built on the site if an old brothel from World War II where the Japanese kept comfort women to service their troops. Near the end of the war when the tide had turned in favor of the allies and the losing fate of Japan became clear, the locals burned the place to the ground with many of the soldiers and women still inside, burning them all to death.

Do the restless spirits of these tormented souls still haunt the residences above the Walmart? And why do they seem to like apartment 15H so much?

So terrifying was this experience to poor Lily that to this day she refuses to talk about it. When I contacted her for this book she said it was too scary and could not talk about it. I could talk to Paul if I wanted to know what happened, but she flat out refused. She said she wouldn’t be able to sleep if she ever brought it up again.