The ghost of a once-beautiful girl with braided hair haunts the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. On blustery nights in a wooded lane near where the old railway line used to run, she lurks in the shadows, waiting to turn her mutilated features towards male students who walk past the scene of her death. She died the day she eloped with her lover by train from the mainland to Hong Kong. Fearful of being stopped by immigration officers at Kowloon, they decided to leap from the carriage as the train hurtled past the university campus. After a final kiss, the girl leaped first. In that fatal moment, as her hair blew in the wind, one braid caught in the door of the train. She jumped, but it lodged tight, ripping off her hair and her face as she plunged to a bloody death.
Today, male students walking along the lane running behind the Chung Chi Canteen - known as Single Braid Road - say they sometimes see a girl with beautiful, braided hair with her back turned to them. When they draw close and look at her they are horrified to see she has no face.
Her ghost is the most famous in what is arguably Hong Kong's most haunted university campus. Researchers have found that 98 per cent of students know the story and many of them hear it before they start studying at the Chinese University, often from secondary-school teachers who studied there.
The Girl with Braided Hair is far from alone. Joseph Bosco, associate professor of anthropology at the university, has discovered she treads the twilight with a legion of other ghosts whose stories are highly distinctive in their cultural origin and the moral message they carry. In a study spanning nine years, the results of which are soon to be published in The Journal Of Popular Culture in the United States, Bosco has collected more than 100 ghost stories told around the campus. Most of the tales are told to freshmen and women during orientation week each August, when students spend four nights sleeping in the university dormitories - a tradition unique among Hong Kong universities. On those sultry summer evenings, students talk to their newfound friends in whispers as they spend what for some are their first nights away from home in the semi-rural surroundings of the hillside campus in Sha Tin. It is here the flames of a folklore tradition with roots in centuries-old Chinese ghost stories are fanned.
Bosco's fascination with supernatural stories developed soon after he arrived from the United States to teach in Hong Kong 10 years ago. While lecturing in religion and culture he found students became most animated when they discussed ghost stories, so Bosco used them to spice up what might otherwise be dull lectures. Students were asked to tell the stories they had heard, and he kept note of them. The Chinese students' interest in ghost stories didn't surprise Bosco, who had spent time Taiwan, but he says they revealed a lot about local culture.
'The whole problem with superstition is that it's different. My superstition may be someone's religion,' he says. Bosco doesn't believe in ghosts, but says that isn't the point. 'I believe in them at the cultural level, the same way I believe in Santa Claus. They are real as ideas, but not as a physical presence.'