Chaonei No. 81

Chaonei No. 81 is a red-brick house built in French Baroque style in the early 1900s, standing in the Chaoyangmen area of Beijing's Dongcheng District and now protected as a historic building. It is widely called "Beijing's most celebrated haunted house." The most repeated legend claims a Kuomintang officer abandoned his wife or mistress there when he fled to Taiwan in 1949, and that she later hanged herself inside — though researchers have found no record to support it. What locals do report are unexplained noises, sudden disappearances, and sightings of a grieving woman's ghost drifting through the empty rooms. The 2014 film The House That Never Dies, set here, turned the derelict property into a magnet for young urban explorers, despite fencing meant to keep them out.