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
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