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

Part I: The Author's Own True Tales

Chapter 1: The Haunted College

Recent pics of Shenzhen Youth College on Meilin Lu gleaned from Baidu.com. Teachers' dorm not visible.

One of my first jobs in Shenzhen was at Shenzhen Youth College (深圳青年学院 or Shenzhen Qing Nian Xueyuan in Chinese). My previous job at an elite private school nearby was utterly unbearable due to the stuffy administration who constantly added hours and responsibilities to my contract unilaterally, the spoiled nature of the students, and the generally poor staff morale.

I was complaining about this one day to one of the Chinese teachers. She was a steamy hot Hunan girl with a slight but cute trace of freckles and one of the most perfect asses I have ever seen. It was often visible due to the gossamer fabrics she wore in response to the stifling subtropical heat that plagued the city 10 months of the year. She spoke excellent English and flirted continuously. We became friends.

She asked why I don’t apply for the job at Shenzhen Youth College, which was literally right down the street. She knew the director of the English program, which was contracted out to the now defunct Delter Business Institute, and promised to give me a reference. The next day I called him and set up an interview, which I passed handily and got the job. I was hired on the spot and given a free apartment in the teachers’ dorm. The owner of Delter gave me the key and told me I could move in any time.

During the week I secretly biked over from the private school with a backpack full of belongings each day and dropped them off. That Friday, I hauled out a giant suitcase as if taking off on a weekend jaunt to some place in China and never showed up again. There's slightly more to this story than I'm telling you that involves what happens when you play God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols for a group of precocious, unruly 13-year-old Chinese students, but that's for another time.

The housing deal at the youth college was pretty sweet. We got free two-bedroom apartments all to ourselves in a decent neighborhood not far from Huang Gang Kou’an, the 24-hour border crossing with Hong Kong.
The teachers’ dorm was inside a courtyard that surrounded a parking lot with a large banyan tree in the center directly opposite our units. Across the courtyard was the student dorm and the young pioneers’ office, a kind of boy and girls scouts for Communists. Facing our building to the right were staff dorms where local staff stayed.

The teachers’ dorm was a six story building. On the ground floor in the stairwell stretching out the entrance hall along my exterior wall were laundry facilities. Each floor had two apartments. The doors to each apartment were on either side of the stairwell facing each other. The upper floors had three-bedroom units, but those were sometimes shared between two roommates. The two-bedroom apartments were always single-dweller units. The college was very liberal about allowing guests, even for extended stays.

I got lucky. I scored a ground floor unit. Yeah the door was right next to the washers and dryer, but it was never an issue. I was an avid biker, and this meant I didn’t have to schlep my bike up and down six flights of stairs every time I wanted to go for a ride. I also had a cool patio in the shade of the banyan tree that dominated the courtyard.

Teachers & students pose inside my apartment. Note Christmas lights and wall decorations.

All the apartments had steel cages around the patios or balconies to keep thieves out, but to be honest I don’t recall thieves ever being a problem. The only time I ever heard of thieves being a problem is when some drunk Canadian or British asshole was so drunk he couldn’t unlock his own door and therefore kicked it in. And before you go thinking I don’t like Brits or Canadians, this is just a specific reference (they know who they are). The next day they’d complain to the campus admin they were burglarized so they wouldn’t have to foot the bill for the new lock or the new door. It was the same two guys every time. Gee, what an incredible coincidence. The bars were painted silver and close enough together to keep, say, a Dalmatian in, but not a Chihuahua.

It wasn’t long before I settled into my new digs. They were comfortable enough for a wanderer such as myself. They had an ugly but cushy gold sofa; a dining table with chairs and a coffee table; a big TV with cable; a decent kitchen for China (no oven as is almost always the case); more flatware and silverware than any of the other units; a big bed with bedding in one bedroom; and free internet. Sliding glass doors opened onto the caged patio. The second bedroom I used for bike and bike crap storage and just laid the twin bed up against one wall. The bathroom was good enough for a guy who’d spent most of the last five years living outdoors or in the car. In other words there was nothing fancy about it, but everything worked. Actually, compared to most apartments in China in 2003, it was pretty nice.

There was just one small annoyance. Every night there were strange noises. It sounded like someone was moving furniture upstairs and dropping a whole lot of screws while doing so. That is exactly what it sounded like. Drag a heavy wooden table or some chairs across a ceramic tile floor, and that was the sound I heard. Drop a handful of screws on the same floor. That is also exactly the sound I heard. It clearly wasn’t ball bearings. They would bounce and roll. It clearly wasn’t something plastic or wooden because they wouldn’t rattle with a slight metallic ring. It had to be furniture and screws.

If these sounds went on late at night, I never noticed. If Ehab was into rearranging his apartment once or twice a week, what did I care as long as it wasn’t too late at night?

Then one night the noises did awaken me. Furniture moving noisily everywhere. Hundreds of screws dropping and rolling around. It was 3:00 am. I went upstairs to Ehab’s who lived directly above me on the second floor.

How to know you're at Ehab's

“Hey, Carl, what are you doing here? Come in. Come in. I was just rolling a joint.”

“You’re up? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“You know me. I like to keep these hours.”

I looked around his apartment and absolutely nothing had been moved since the last time I’d been there.

“Dude, I thought you were up here moving furniture, but I can see it wasn’t you.”

“Yeah!” He responded. “You heard it too? I thought it was Simon. And I heard screws dropping too, like someone was dumping out a box of little screws or something. Like it was directly upstairs and I could hear it through the ceiling.” He took a hit from his joint.

Ehab had been a builder back in his home country. He knew exactly what a box of screws dumped on the floor would sound like.

“That’s exactly what it sounds like to me, like it’s directly upstairs and I can hear it through the ceiling. That’s why I thought it was you.”

“No. No. I think it’s Simon upstairs.”

“Well let’s check. He must be up if he’s moving furniture around.”

It wasn’t unusual for any of us to be up at 3:00 am. I’m not sure why, but many of the teachers kept amazingly late hours. One guy, Stan, would just be coming home at 6:00 am when I was heading out for a ride. Then he’d go to work at 10:00 and teach his first class, no problem. There was never a shortage of parties or after parties in Shenzhen, or girls who went to them. The fun stopped only when you wanted it to.

A typical night in the teachers' dorm, in this case, Ehab's pad.

A rooftop party before shooting fireworks at various buildings and roads. We ran extension cords down to Sean's on the 6th floor to power a boombox.

We went up to Simon’s on the third floor. He was awake.

He opened the door and laughed in his jolly way. “Gentlemen! To what do I owe this pleasure?” He was in his pajamas.

“Are you moving furniture up here?”

“Nooo…” he trailed off thoughtfully. “But I heard it too. It woke me up. It sounded like it was coming from upstairs at Stan’s.”

Well, that made perfect sense. If anyone was awake, and moving furniture, at 3:00 am, it would be Stan and his crew.

Well, the three of us went upstairs together to Stan’s apartment. He was indeed wide awake having the usual party with friends. And the same thing happened again. Must be upstairs at Erich’s. So went upstairs to Erich’s and he was awake, said he heard the same thing but thought it must be upstairs at Sean’s. To our dismay, Sean was not home.

Of course the obvious question arose as soon as I realized it wasn’t Ehab. Why would the sound come through all the way from Simon’s as if it were happening on Ehab’s floor? The further up you go the less likely the explanation furniture moving on the floor becomes. There’s no way that box of spilled screws would come through five floors. Yet we all heard the sounds of furniture and screws as if they were coming from the floor directly above.
We all had another observation in common. We’d all heard the same sounds before, but never this late at night and never this loud. We decided to ask the staff about it the next day.

The front desk staff for the English program were always very friendly and very helpful. In fact we have lasting friendships with them to this very day. One of them even married a guy she met through us. Another of them wanted to marry one of us, but alas it didn’t work out. Needless to say this was a very chummy and intimate environment, a true blessing when roving so far from home, but the hijinks that went on are beyond the scope of the story at hand.

Ready to bring the hammer down at the front desk.

I don’t remember which one of us got there first in the morning or spoke up first to the front desk crew, but at some point three or four of us were standing there together asking Joey and Emily if they knew anything about what makes those noises or if maintenance could come have a look. We explained the phenomenon. There were no ventilation ducts. Each apartment had its own wall-mounted air conditioners, and there was no heating. The walls and floors were solid concrete. The walls were coated with a thin layer of plaster and the floors with ceramic tiling. Could it be the plumbing?

Joey lived in the staff dorm and said she had never heard such noises. Emily lived in the teacher’s dorm on the 4th floor across the staircase from all of us. She didn’t hear the noises on her side, but had heard them before, because, as we found out at that moment, she used to live in my apartment!

This was her story:
When she first started working for Delter, she was given the ground floor apartment. As soon as she moved in she noticed strange things happening. She heard the same strange noises we heard, like furniture moving and screws dropping. Then she noticed things getting moved in the house. She never saw them move, but when she went to retrieve them, they’d be misplaced. Keys, cooking utensils, hair brush; everyday items would not be where she left them.

But the kicker came on her day off. She finished her laundry in the morning and hung it out on the patio to dry. There was a bar suspended from the underside of the balcony above from which one could hang laundry with clothes hangers. A lot of Chinese people don’t like using dryers and think that clothes hung in the open air are better.

Now bear in mind that around the patio is a cage that no one can possibly fit through, not even a a small child or contortionist. Yet, when she came home at the end of the day, all of her clothes had been moved to the patio of the vacant unit next door! Her apartment was locked. Only she had the key. No one lived next door. How could the clothes have been moved?

She immediately began seeking a culprit, but nobody fessed up to it. They were as baffled as she was. It must have been a ghost!

Emily retrieved her clothes from the neighboring vacant apartment and burned them all that day and bought new ones. Chinese can be superstitious about that. The ghost that moved the clothes had cursed them. No good Chinese would wear them again. She immediately moved out and into a unit upstairs where she remained until the Delter program closed down a year or so later.

Now it’s obvious that someone with a carefully crafted pole could have removed the hangers one by one from her patio and transferred them to the one next door through the grating. She claims that this wasn’t so, because the hooks were facing the wrong way.

And let’s say that someone did pull that prank. Certainly me and my friends would have and could have done something like this if we put our minds to it. We’d pulled more elaborate pranks than this before. But after the initial scare and befuddlement, you laugh and fess up to it. You certainly don’t take it so far as to make someone burn all their clothes and buy new ones. In any case, this happened before most of us were hired. So I doubt this was a prank. Even so, it would not explain the strange noises of moving furniture and falling screws. Furthermore, Emily was the one who controlled the keys! In her absence no one would have been able to access them and enter the two apartments to accomplish the trick.

It wasn’t long after that that I noticed my belongings being displaced. Again it was everyday items. My keys or bike lock would go missing. The bike pump would be moved. Tableware would appear on the dining table. The table wouldn’t be set, but there’s be a plate or a couple of cups that weren’t there before. I’d find the toothpaste in the shower, and so on.

My family going back generations had lived in haunted houses. There are numerous family stories of the house on Barracks Street, the music shop, the house in Bound Brook, and the house in Fairlington at 3467B S. Stafford St. Both my parents had reported ghostly phenomena in the houses where they live today. But in no case was anyone ever harmed. You just learn to live with it.

And so I did. The noises continued from time to time, once in a while I had to hunt down some item I was looking for, but since I used the dryer, my laundry was never transferred off the balcony.

I haven’t encountered those noises in any other place I lived in China. It was only there, and there are more than a dozen witnesses who heard the same thing, though I never heard reports of their stuff being moved. Emily assured me it was because only my unit was actually haunted.