In Cold Blood: The Qui Mansion Haunting

I can imagine the looks on their faces as they opened the warehouse door for the first time - a sea of coloured dyes danced before their eyes like a room full of harlequins. It was 1915, and the Great War was raging across the world - bringing Europe to its knees. China would have an important role to play in the conflict of World War One behind the scenes, but it would never send troops into battle - and so the Qiu brothers were safe from being hunted down for any sort of military service. Instead, they had just made it big. They were migrants, living as peasants under a German employer - but of course he fled the city due to the conflict, and the worth of dye had just skyrocketed thanks to the closure of the ports. The two worker siblings would become millionaires in the city of opportunity that was Shanghai - but their fortunes wouldn't last forever, and would come to a bizarre end. Despite their stories ending suddenly, their playthings weren't going to let go of this mortal plane so easily...

A House Haunted by Dragons

Qiu Xingshan and Qiu Weiqing built their mansion in the 1920s, and they lived like kings - their epic decadence surpassing that of the nouveau riche and legendary gangsters. The mansion complex consisted of two identical palace-like buildings (the East Block and the West Block) in which each of the brothers could live with his family and friends. The estate was surrounded with a beautiful garden, and all sorts of exotic animals were released into this Eden-like display of opulence. Tigers prowled through the magnolia trees, and crocodiles basked on the shores of a man-made lake. There are even stories of two thousand pigeons being released from the aviary every day at noon, darkening the sky over Wujiang Lu (then called Love Lane).

They were legendary - like kings of their own little neighbourhood - and so it was all the more baffling when they both suddenly vanished. No trace of either of them has ever been found, and their mansions started to fall into disrepair thanks to their lack of an heir. The garden grew over and became a tangled jungle, and the unfortunate animals were all either sold off or eaten by the people of Shanghai - who were now in the grip of a famine. Eventually, one of the Qiu mansions was razed to the ground, while the other was announced soon to be dug up, foundations and all, and moved to another location to make room for more high-rise buildings. Although various sources claim that it was this event which kicked off a violent haunting on the premises, the earliest reference I can find to traceable stories about paranormal activity there dates back to 2009.

It was the Summer of 2009, and something very weird was going on at the nearly-demolished Qiu Mansion. Construction workers were turning up at the local Yueyang Hospital with what night nurse Li Fei described as 'bite wounds'. However, no wild animals were found in a thorough search of the building, and the victims were left too frightened to return to their jobs. On the Meadin.com forum website, employees at the Four Seasons Hotel could be seen complaining about the terrifying ghostly animals that manifested to them on their night shifts. In August of 2009, local blogs started printing the story of a mason working at the site who had seemingly suddenly snapped and attempted to attack his manager with a hammer. When he was later questioned about his motive for the violent attack, he simply said that the 'lizards' made him do it. Some other versions of this same story describe them as having been 'lizard-like creatures'. One Mrs. Ye, who lived near the construction site in the alley off Wujiang Lu, even claimed to have seen a monstrous dragon crawling along the arm of a construction crane.

One final creepy twist comes to us courtesy of JHMoncrieff.com. The bloggers behind this award-winning website visited the Qiu Mansion in late 2016 or early 2017, and although it had been successfully moved and deposited down on some new foundations elsewhere in mid 2010 - thus obviously warranting the end of construction work there. So it would be a very good question to ask who the workmen who were 'clearly' seen by the bloggers moving around on the second floor were...

Sources

'Cha House' on Wikipedia

'The Qiu Mansion, Shanghai' on Paranormal Asylum

'Haunted Travel: The Ghosts of Shanghai' on JHMoncrieff.com

'Haunted Shanghai: The Phantoms of the Qiu Mansion' on travel.cnn.com

Honey, Aliens Shrunk the Kids

With a title like that, I really can't blame you for clicking on this article, and I really hope that you won't be disappointed. Today I have another case from the UFOs Northwest archives which involves the apparent abduction of an 18-year-old and his brother by otherworldly beings, which seemingly resulted in the two young victims becoming spontaneously shorter overnight...

The New Gloucester Abduction

It was 1973, the dreaded Year of the Humanoids, when an anonymous witness, his brother and two other friends - who were driving close to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine - suddenly became aware of a bright UFO following them, visible in the window of the driver's side of the car. They were on the road towards Middle Range Pond when they first saw it, and they promptly decided to make a 'sharp left' towards Oxford, Maine in what was presumably an attempt to evade the odd object. After they got to the Oxford Plains Speedway, they turned around and headed back the way they had come.

They had just reached the apple orchard by the intersection between Route #26, Outlet Road and Quarry Road (the latter of which was known as Shaker Village Road at the time) when they noticed that they had seemingly slipped into the Twilight Zone. There were no other cars on the busy and usually well-travelled road, and the Sun had gone down 'awfully fast'. The stars were apparently abnormally large in the night sky, with the witness saying that it felt as if he could 'reach out to them'. The world around them appeared to have gone completely silent - with the usual chirping of the crickets being totally absent. In this odd state, the witness could feel and hear his heart pounding in his ears, and he said that it was like they 'were inside a vacuumed bottle'.

The UFO suddenly made itself visible once again - hovering above what is still the only tree that is placed slightly ahead of its fellows in the orchard. It was a large, round object which 'lit up orange' and was totally silent. The four dumbstruck witnesses just sat and stared at the aerial enigma for what they thought at the time to be roughly one hour. However, when they finally decided to return home, the person who would later report the incident to UFOs Northwest noticed that 'it became daylight way too soon', and requested that his brother - who was driving the 1967 Tan Chevy Nova in which the group was travelling - redirect them to the Auburn, Maine police department so that they could report the bizarre happening. However, they were apparently about to witness further strange events.

This is sadly where the narrative gets a little cloudy. The witness said that he would write back to the organisation detailing his further experiences, but failed to do so if I am interpreting the records stored on the organisation's website correctly. However, he did describe (confusingly in an earlier letter) the bizarre physiological effects that this event had on him and his brother. Trying to report their abduction - it was an abduction, the witness clarifies, saying that they 'were taken onboard' and released one day later - was apparently a mistake. Instead, he elected to go to a local hospital for a checkup, seeing as his nose was bleeding, the whites of his eyes had gone a 'deep orange', and his lungs ached when he breathed. He was understandably 'very concerned' about this, but his shock would only get greater when the nurse read his height as 5ft 9 inches, seeing as he was supposed to be over 5ft 10 inches tall. Telling her that she was incorrect, he had the nurse re-check the measurements only to find that he had seemingly lost an inch of height overnight.

Map of the terrain around the abduction

When he and his brother returned home, their mother was apparently very vocal in her alarm at the state of her children. She demanded to know what had happened and remarked that they were both shorter and that she wanted to know what had happened to their eyes. Presumably panicking at this point, the witness ran to his bathroom mirror and was horrified to note that, indeed, he 'didn't look right'. In an effort to prove to the local authorities that this had happened, he implored them to check his high-school medical records and the photographs taken on his eighteenth birthday, roughly two weeks before the apparent abduction event. He asked them to compare how he looked now and how he was recorded as being back then. 'How many 18-year-olds lose an inch overnight?'

Analysis

I'm not sure what to make of this case. I know that at least one case in which the height of a UFO witness spontaneously changed after the event, and so this report is not unique. The language used by the witness in the letters transcribed on the UFOs Northwest website make me think that he is either possibly executing a rather-immature hoax, or is genuinely emotional and panicked to an extreme degree by the memories he now possesses. I think that I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, especially since he said that 'the emotional experience of my abduction never stops'.

Source

UFOs Northwest - Man Recalls Abduction Experience, He Sustained Injury from Experience