It was 1949, and the Communists had just defeated the Nationalists in the civil war. Legend has it that during the losing army's rushed retreat to Taiwan, a high-ranking Kuomintang official living in Beijing abandoned his wife, leaving her to fend for herself as the Communists marched into the city. Devastated, the wife (some say she was his concubine) hanged herself from the rafters of their three-story French Baroque-style home.
The spirit of the spurned woman, local residents say, has haunted the house ever since.
Today, with its floor-to-ceiling cobwebs and crumbling floorboards, the house, Chaonei No. 81, certainly seems like the ideal breeding ground for paranormal activity. However, unlike the famously ghost-ridden Forbidden City, which hosts droves of tourists every day, the Chaonei house has sat dilapidated and deserted for years, a quiet enclave amid Soviet-style apartment blocks and glittering modern buildings.
According to local legend, the mansion was built by the Qing imperial family as a church for British residents of Beijing. It could not be more of an anachronism, with its red brick facade, Mansard roof and stone quoining. Yet, there has been a surge of interest in the house in recent years, with videos circulating online and word of mouth building about a new film set at the house.
Inside, the intricate banisters and fragments of decorative tile flooring are the only remaining signs of the mansion's former elegance. Building materials, beer bottles and cigarette butts are strewn about, much of the debris left behind by the many ("too many" says a guard) young adventurers who sneak in at night. Graffiti cautions visitors to stay away.
"Even in the 1970s, people thought the house was haunted," said Li Yongjie, who grew up in a traditional alleyway behind Chaonei No. 81. "As children, we would play hide and seek in the house but we didn't dare come in by ourselves."
"Even the Red Guards who lived in the house during the Cultural Revolution got scared and left," Li, 50, added, referring to the militant activist youth loyal to Mao Zedong in the late 1960s.
Despite the buildings' location in the centre of Beijing, where a small courtyard home easily sells for several million dollars, there are "no officials plans" to do anything with the neglected buildings, said the Rev. Liu Zhentian of the Beijing Catholic Diocese, the property's current owner.
The buildings are now on a historic preservation list, so they can only be renovated, not torn down. And the church has so far been unable to find a tenant willing to undertake the cost of renovation, which church officials have estimated at more than $1.5 million.
But with millions of dollars being splashed out on building construction all around the city, the long-term abandonment of Chaonei No. 81 still remains rather mystifying.
It has led some to suspect that the derelict state of the home has more to do with ghosts, or at least the belief in ghosts, than with costs. Potential tenants might be shunning the home, some say, because of a tendency among many Chinese to avoid all things related to death. The superstition is so pervasive in Chinese culture that mobile numbers or apartments with addresses that contain the number 4 are often automatically devalued, since the word for "four" in Chinese sounds like the word for "death."
Even in the cities, the tradition of burning paper money (also known as "hell money") as offerings to placate ancestors and ghosts is still widely upheld, particularly during the annual tomb sweeping and hungry ghost festivals.
Both the district police and the Catholic diocese have rejected the Chaonei ghost tale.
"In terms of the history, there is no such thing as a Kuomintang official living there," Shi Hongxi, secretary general of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association in Beijing, which oversees the diocese, told a local newspaper in 2009. "The whole story about the house being haunted is complete nonsense."
Shi said the mansion and one other building on the property were built in 1910 as a language training center for foreign missionaries called the North China Union Language School. In 1930, the school was renamed the California College in China and broadened its teaching mandate to include diplomats, businessmen and scholars, one of whom was the prominent China historian and Harvard professor, John K. Fairbank.
However, some urban historians contest Shi's account, saying that the California College was located elsewhere in Beijing. They say the buildings at Chaonei No. 81 were built as a private residence for the French manager of the company that built the railway connecting Beijing to Hankou in Hubei province.
On the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, according to those historians, the house was occupied by the Irish Presbyterian Mission, hence the home's connection to the Beijing Catholic Diocese today.
Whatever the truth, the various narratives swirling around the house have only enhanced its allure.
"Death and religion - these are always good starting points for potential ghosts," said Daniel Newman, the founder of Newman Tours, which offers a ghost tour of supposedly haunted locales around Beijing.
Chaonei No. 81's history is more established after 1949, when it came under government control. For decades, the buildings shifted between various states of use and disuse, as the property rights were passed between a number of government ministries.
"There used to be a beautiful fountain in the front and all this wild grass," Li recalled, as he walked through the house one afternoon, his first visit in many years. "I didn't think it would be as rundown as it is now."
The rights to Chaonei No. 81 were handed off to the Beijing Catholic Diocese in the late 1990s. The buildings were close to being demolished when officials from the church stepped in, citing the distinctive architecture as well as the possibility of housing the Vatican Embassy there if relations between the mainland government and the Vatican were ever re-established, according to Liu Yang, an expert on religious architecture in Beijing.
Since then, the house has sat neglected and serene, apart from a few occasions during which it was rented out as a backdrop for film and television productions set in China's Republican era.
"There are so few of these traditional buildings left," said Fu Qian, an artist living in Beijing who came to explore the house one afternoon after reading about it online.
"They should do something with it, it's very sad," he said.
