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

Forgotten: The Kundanbagh Horror House

He must've eventually gotten used to the bodies. There were three of them, lying prone on the dust-covered bed. The first time Mohammed Sajid broke through the window into the two storey house was some time in early Summer of 2002, and since then he had been routinely making his way into the abandoned home - after all, there was nobody alive in the house to watch him. He would often raid the empty rooms, opening all the almirahs (armoires) and rifling through the cheque books of the departed family. It was only when he was caught by the local Shahinayathgunj police during another crime that he finally told the story of what he had found in that accursed house. This confession would jump-start a media journey down a bizarre rabbit hole involving three unexplained deaths, witchcraft, and a house full of ghosts...

Something Terrible Happened Here...

One of the many photos of the house

The house in question was nestled in the city colony Kundanbagh within the city of Hyderabad, which is the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. Mohammed Sajid was arrested sometime in early September of 2002, and the police soon began their investigation of the abandoned house about which he seemingly had so many stories. This police investigation either took place on the 7th of September 2002, or one week later - the sources are unclear. A 56-year-old divorced woman from West Godavari named Jayaprada lived in the house with her two daughters, but this small family hadn't been seen by their neighbours for months. The last time anyone had said that they'd seen them was in June - and the stories the neighbours had to tell about this family were worrying to say the least. The community said that the people who lived in the house were 'a queer people' who apparently practiced witchcraft or something very much like it.

They would apparently light candles at midnight and walk around their house, and strange noises were often heard coming from the building. People reported that they had sometimes seen what appeared to be bottles of blood hung out on their verandah (open air porch). One of their daughters was said to have sometimes been observed sat outside on the porch playing with one of these blood bottles. Despite their garbage bins being just two minutes' walk away from the house, they would always use the car to travel this minuscule distance. Jayaprada would use an axe to chase away passersby - and it is said that her husband had left her because of how dangerous the family was. There was no money flowing into the house, no cable connection. Two to three years' worth of electrical bills had been paid in advance. A complaint had been filed about the odd family by some students from a nearby college roughly two years ago, according to the assistant commissioner of police for the area, P. Rama Rao.

The police soon learned that the family had mysteriously gone missing in June of that year - nobody saw them and presumably everyone was much too scared of them to go up to their door and enquire as to their wellbeing. Newspapers from June 21st had piled up on their porch, and the front door was locked from the inside. The police soon found the entrance which had perhaps been used by Sajid, however, as they discovered that there was a side door which wasn't padlocked. When the policemen got inside the house, they noted that the entire place had been ransacked - perhaps thanks to Sajid's handiwork - and that the family's clothes had been neatly stacked next to their bodies. Various documents were scattered all over the floor. The bodies were badly decomposed. The temperature had not been too high during that period, and so putrefication had been much slower than it might otherwise have been, meaning that the neighbours had not even noticed the stench of decaying bodies. A bottle of black liquid was discovered in the room where the bodies lay, and it was promptly sent off to a lab for analysis along with the bodies for autopsy.

Tall Tales

After such an upsetting incident (which was reported in local newspapers at the time and so is unlikely to have been a total hoax), it is hardly surprising that legends started to take root. Although details about what came of the autopsy examination are seemingly nonexistent - with a report from the time simply resorting to speculating that the cause of death was poisoning - stories about what this autopsy found have seemingly sprung up in the absence of any real information. Well, either this or there is real information that I have failed to find. What these stories say is that the autopsies revealed that the family had been dead for six months. This, of course, placed something of a spanner into the works of a purely materialistic explanation of this whole situation - the family had stopped being regularly seen three months after they had supposedly died. The residents of the surrounding city of Hyderabad were now questioning who they had been seeing performing those bizarre rituals and threatening passersby with axes.

Although the house lacks electricity after having been derelict for over a decade now, lights are apparently still turned on at night for no discernible reason. The gates are always locked, and there is a line of large rocks across the driveway for some nebulous symbolic purpose. There is a story about a cyclist whose headlight spontaneously went out as he entered the lane on which the haunted house is situated, resulting in him immediately getting into an accident with one of his friends who was driving along the lane from the opposite direction. The police are now apparently very present around the house to prevent any would-be ghost hunters from breaking and entering.

The Sowmith Testimony

A Quora forum user named Sowmith Raja claimed to have once been something of an afficionado for the stories surrounding the mysterious house. He lives in Hyderabad, and if his testimony is to be believed then he found something far stranger than any of the other stories while investigating the alleged haunted house. He discovered that the house which had been photographed and previously thought to have been the house in which the strange things had happened didn't quite fit the description of the property given in the story. There was no garbage disposal point two minutes away from it - and the nearest garbage disposal point was two minutes away from a different house. Beside the house which had been photographed was a lane which split into two. One of these lanes was fairly well-lit with streetlights while the other was completely dark. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dark lane was the one which had the garbage disposal point on it and thus also had the real haunted house.

A photo that might portray the castle

On this lane there are three doors which are painted dark green, and are higher off the ground than normal doors. The three doors all lead to the same stretch of grounds, and contained within these grounds are several structures - a bungalow (as is sometimes described in variations of the main story despite the supposedly legitimate haunted house being two storeys high) and a castle-looking building. This odd space is apparently what is known as the Kundanbagh Haunted Palace, and it is much less well-known than the fake house which was apparently highlighted as being the location of the crime by the CID to stop people breaking in - as they allegedly did one Ramadan in order to ransack the place and vandalise a Honda City car which had apparently been previously parked outside this haunted palace.

A photograph which might portray the gates

The story about the light on the upper floor always being on in the haunted house is said to instead refer to the castle building by Mr. Raja. He says there are nightly police patrols around the haunted palace area, and that there was once a sign on the gates which read 'CID RESTRICTED AREA'. However, I must admit to being somewhat skeptical of what Mr. Raja is saying here on the grounds that he seems to have been able to enter this highly guarded area and yet it seemingly never occurred to him to take any photographs which could be used as evidence for his claims. Then again, there are a few photographs floating around the Internet which show the so-called haunted house as being a very different looking structure to what is normally depicted in other mainstream photographs, and this odd structure has dark green doors...

Turning on the Light

A blogger by the name of Aditya Chintha claimed in 2013 that he had solved the mystery of the haunted house and that he had conclusively debunked the claims made about it. He did so in a blog post which was later taken down 'due to the concern of the people in the neighbourhood'. Luckily, I have been able to retrieve the original post thanks to the Wayback Machine - and the story he uncovered is intriguing not least because it flies directly in the face of much of the rest of the testimony given about what may or may not be going on in the Kundanbagh house. He too lives in Hyderabad, and so during the summer of that fateful year he went out with a group of his friends to try and find the house. While he initially had some difficulties locating it, thanks in no small part to the reluctance of the people in the neighbourhood to reveal where it was - he and his companions were eventually able to find it - and they were sorely disappointed. It looked like a normal house. The gates had been locked and there were indeed rocks out in front of of the driveway, but a conversation with a neighbour cleared this up quickly - the residents of the house (yes, there were apparently people now living in the house) had locked the gate to discourage potential ghost hunters from breaking in while they were out on summer vacation. The stones were apparently placed there to make sure that people couldn't use the driveway as a free space to park their cars or bikes. Aditya thus considers the story to have been conclusively debunked. I am not so sure...

A photograph taken by Aditya Chintha depicting the gates and the stones outside said gates.

Theories

The neighbours to which Aditya talked said that the story about the strange family and their unexplained deaths had been true - and I am also inclined to believe that this is the case. It was reported in the Times of India newspaper in 2002 as the story broke. The details about the family and their deaths can all be backed up with proper sources - but unfortunately the detail about the autopsy finding that the family had died three months before they went missing cannot be verified as of yet. I will of course continue searching for a source, but I have not currently found one which I am comfortable with trusting. Aditya's explanation makes some sense in this context - and if we are to assume that the story about the ghostlly manifestations is false then we are still faced with an odd story about a family of witches who died under mysterious circumstances.

The testimony given by Sowmith Raja is intriguing, especially in light of the seemingly distinct buildings shown in different photographs from across the Internet - but unfortunately the lack of photographs taken by Mr. Raja himself points towards his story having potentially been fictional. Overall, the whole situation with this literally ungodly house is a tangled web of conflicting accounts. I've presented the information - make up your own mind.

Subterranean Centaur Scare

It is early March of 1913 (probably the 7th, to be exact) - and hundreds of sweaty men are bustling about in the Chicksaw Mine under Kittanning, Pennsylvania. They are presumably quite desperate to see the sunlight outside, but the circumstances in which they would be forced out into the light in just a moment would haunt them for the rest of their days. Violent hoofbeats and a ghostly light seep their way through the subterranean gloom, signalling the fateful arrival of a bizarre spectre unlike any other...

The Kittanning Incident

The hoofbeats (which I have presumed must've been present) got louder and louder as the surreal form moved from room to room in the mine, ordering all the workmen to abandon their tools and leave the mine in a 'sepulchral voice'. Terrified and likely utterly dumbfounded at the sight, the workers promptly did as they were told by the incomprehensible creature - pouring from the entrance of the mine in droves, perhaps setting a new record for the speed at which a mine could be evacuated. 

The illustration that appeared in Fortean Times accompanying this story.

As my description of hooves might imply, this entity was not your average humanoid ghost. No, instead it was described as having a torso like that of 'an emaciated man' and the lower body of a horse. It was a centaur, to put it simply. In one hand, it carried an odd object which was compared to a dinner pail - from which issued 'lurid gleams' of phantasmal light. 

One John Martel was working as the driver of the mine motor, and was allegedly at his place atop the machine when the spectre came for him. It apparently manifested out of nowhere, before pointing its bony fingers at him and uttering a single word - GO. Martel found himself unable to move for a moment, being literally paralysed with sheer terror. As soon as he was once again capable of movement, he screamed in horror and dashed away from the creature. He sprinted along the tracks towards the light streaming in from the mine's entrance - only momentarily glancing back the way he came to see the motor in hot pursuit, now apparently being somehow driven by the centaur. By the time Martel finally emerged into the safety of daylight, he turned back once more to see that the motor (now driverless) was close behind him. He had only just made it. 

The miners refused to go to work the next day, and as of the time that the story was originally published (in the March 9th, 1913 edition of The Philadelphia Enquirer), it had yet to be decided how business should proceed in the Chickasaw Mine. The centaur was apparently seen as some kind of ill omen. One of my sources speculated that perhaps this was an incredibly bizarre excuse for the miners to escape work - but surely there would be less fantastical and more believable stories to be made up for this purpose? And presumably to be employed more effectively? 

Sources

I originally found this story in an issue of Fortean Times, which sadly only included a very much abbreviated version of the tale and didn't offer me any realistic way to track down the original source or even any more information. Eventually, fellow researcher Albert Rosales was able to find the full story in various newspaper clippings. I was also able to find another source online that repeated what the newspaper clippings said. Here is that source.

The most extensive (and sadly least clearly scanned) clipping on the topic.