The PolyU Red-Brick Legends and Campus Taboos: Jockey Club Innovation Tower, Hung Hom Geography, and Those Stories

In one line: The tales of the swimming-pool child, the library that never switches off its lights, the "Farewell Pavilion" tunnel, and others at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Hung Hom campus are all unverified campus folklore. This article, based on publicly available materials as of July 2026, places them alongside verifiable facts — such as the three funeral parlours on Cheong Wan Road, Hung Hom — and rates the credibility of each.

Module: 15 Campus Wild History (Wild‑History Zone) Reading discipline: This module belongs to Zones 13‑16, the Wild‑History Zone — claims backed by evidence are labelled with their source and credibility; hearsay is labelled “unverified folklore” and quarantined. Political symbols / sensitive content are assessed and routed according to the rules. This piece focuses on campus ghost stories and taboos, a folkloric topic. It touches no political narrative and names no living individual.

A university whose front gate faces three funeral parlours, with a silver alien-shaped building next door that people say “doesn’t have a single right angle” — a geography like that is practically fated to sprout stories. The Hung Hom campus of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is exactly that: threaded through its red-brick walkways you find the tale of the swimming-pool child, the library where the lights are never turned off, the tunnel you cannot walk out of, and a cluster of little superstitions students themselves have invented during exam season. This article does not adjudicate whether any of these stories are true. It does three things only: clearly flags which elements are verifiable geography and which are word‑of‑mouth; isolates each legend and rates its credibility; and, along the way, glances at why this patch of Hung Hom is so fertile a breeding ground for the uncanny.

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# Why is Hung Hom so persistently tied to “funerals”?

To make sense of PolyU’s campus ghost stories, you first have to look at the ground beneath it. PolyU’s main campus sits in Hung Hom, Kowloon, right beside Hung Hom Station and the entrance to the Cross‑Harbour Tunnel. Along Cheong Wan Road on the campus’s north‑eastern edge, three of Hong Kong’s major funeral parlours stand shoulder to shoulder — a real, verifiable “funeral street” that provides the geographic undertone for almost every piece of lore in this article.

According to each parlour’s own materials, Universal Funeral Parlour opened on 28 November 1975^※ at 10 Cheong Wan Road, Hung Hom, and is one of the largest funeral homes in Hong Kong. Next door, International Funeral Parlour, operated by Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, opened in March 1980^※ at 8 Cheong Wan Road; it is a four‑storey building. Global Funeral Parlour sits at 6 Cheong Wan Road, adjacent to the other two. All three share the same street, all lie within walking distance of Hung Hom MTR station and the PolyU campus.

Credibility: multiple corroboration (geographic fact). The locations and opening years of the three parlours can be verified item by item from the official materials of each parlour and of Tung Wah Group of Hospitals. They stand in the same Hung Hom district as PolyU, not far away, and form the real backdrop repeatedly invoked by campus folklore.

This “funeral street” is not itself the least bit spectral; it is simply a functional precinct where Hong Kong’s funeral‑service trade has concentrated. The cluster came about because of the area’s transport‑hub location (next to Hung Hom MTR station and the harbour‑crossing tunnel mouth), combined with the trade’s long‑standing habit of agglomeration — mourners and funeral‑procession traffic concentrate on a single strip, and supporting flower shops, coffin‑shops and funeral‑service providers gather in their wake, creating a service‑street. This is urban zoning at work, not anything supernatural.

But for successive cohorts of new students, the bare fact that “there are funeral parlours right next to the university” naturally provides an imaginative anchor for word‑of‑mouth. Psychologically, people are predisposed to project unease onto places associated with death and parting. When a university goes about its daily business beside a funeral street, the red‑brick walkways, the basement corridors, the library at midnight and the swimming pool all become a ready‑made set on which stories can be hung. Almost every tale retold below can be traced back to that layer of geographic impression.

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# The “Farewell Pavilion” and the haunted tunnel: how credible is the story circulating online?

On a handful of mainland‑China re‑posting platforms, a long‑form story about a PolyU “haunted tunnel” has been doing the rounds. It pushes the real geographic impression described above into a direction that is wholly unverifiable and decidedly grim.

According to a write‑up in a “city weird‑tales” column on NetEase^※ (a hearsay source; no independent source corroborating it has been found), the post claims that the PolyU site was a “mass grave” during the Second World War, that part of the campus later doubled as a public mortuary and funeral facility called the “Farewell Pavilion” (永别亭), and describes a student surnamed Yip encountering strange events in the tunnel linking the mortuary to the pier — a two‑minute walk that took twenty minutes, and a stevedore’s account of twenty or thirty people boarding a boat “as though a sheaf of paper figures had floated onto the deck.” The night in question was supposedly the night the mortuary was being relocated.

Almost every checkable link in this story lacks a source. This site has found no authoritative record that supports concrete claims such as “the campus site was once a mass grave” or “a Farewell Pavilion mortuary existed on campus.” The tale reads more like a web‑born yarn that starts with Hung Hom’s real funeral‑industry geography, layers on the common “relocation — farewell — ghostly boarding” motif, and then grafts it onto an unspecified “tunnel.” The only verifiable layer is the background: Hung Hom does indeed have a cluster of funeral parlours (see previous section). The time, place, and person in the story itself cannot be pinned down.

Credibility: unverified folklore (bordering on fabrication). Elements such as “mass grave,” “Farewell Pavilion,” and “paper‑figures‑boarding” lack any first‑hand or authoritative source. This site does not present them as statements of fact; it merely records their existence as an internet‑born urban legend. The sole genuinely verifiable element is the geographic backdrop of the Hung Hom funeral‑parlour cluster.

I place this item at the front to set a yardstick: from the same piece of land can grow both verifiable geographic facts and unverifiable tall tales. The two share the same Hung Hom but are entirely different things. Please read the campus legends that follow with that yardstick in hand.

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# The swimming‑pool child: why do people say the canteen windows were covered with reflective film?

PolyU’s most widely‑told ghost story, and the one with the most consistent versions across retellings, is tied to a real, existing swimming pool.

The verifiable part first. The on‑campus Michael Clinton Swimming Pool is an outdoor pool. According to the official PolyU Student Affairs Office page^※, it is a “50‑metre outdoor swimming pool” located between the Sir Run Run Shaw Sports Centre and Jockey Club Innovation Tower. It is open approximately from May to October each year and undergoes routine maintenance from November to April the following year. This is a day‑to‑day sports facility; its specifications and opening hours are all on the official page.

The legend grows from here. According to collections by Hong Kong lifestyle outlet The Honeycombers^※ and GOtrip’s university‑ghost‑story round‑up^※ (both are hearsay accounts):

The word‑of‑mouth version runs: one summer night, a young child — said to be the son of a professor — drowned in the pool. At the time, the neighbouring canteen’s floor‑to‑ceiling windows looked straight onto the pool. After the incident, students claimed to see “a child climb out from the poolside at night, walk slowly towards the canteen, and then vanish.” The university later applied reflective film to the windows to block the view, and the seats near the window were shunned for a time. Both GOtrip and Honeycombers note that some online posts claim the story has a prototype in the news, but no relevant archive can be found — take it or leave it.

The “verifiable anchor” of this legend extends only as far as the pool itself — the pool is real, it sits between the canteen and Innovation Tower (the geography holds up). As for the drowning incident, the causal link to the reflective film, and the sighting of a “child’s figure,” this site has found no first‑hand or news‑source support; even the media round‑ups explicitly state that no archive exists.

Credibility: unverified folklore. The existence and location of the Michael Clinton Swimming Pool can be verified from the PolyU official page. The drowning incident, the reason for the window film, and the ghost sighting are all unsourced; they belong to campus oral tradition and are not presented as statements of fact.

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# The library that never turns off its lights: is the story of the “short‑sighted girl” on the fourth floor true?

Another story that crops up repeatedly in Hong Kong local‑media round‑ups is “the library that never switches off its lights.” Its template, in truth, circulates at many Hong Kong universities; the PolyU version has attached itself to one particular floor of the library.

According to HK01’s Hungry Ghost Festival round‑up of Hong Kong university ghost stories^※ (hearsay / journalistic retelling): campus tradition has it that “a very short‑sighted girl student was cramming late into the night in the library and accidentally fell asleep at her desk. The janitor, when switching off the lights and locking up, did not notice her. When the girl woke, she found herself in pitch darkness, blundered into a bookcase, and was crushed to death on the spot.” Since then, the lights on that floor are said to remain on permanently — the university “dared not switch them off again.”

This is a highly templated urban legend: the same plot — “girl crams late — locked in unnoticed — crushed by a bookcase in the dark — lights henceforth left on” — appears in ghost‑story round‑ups from multiple universities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with nothing changed but the floor and the institution’s name. PolyU’s verifiable fact is that the campus does have a library (the Pao Yue‑kong Library), but the “short‑sighted girl crushed to death” and the “permanently lit floor” have no death record, no news archive, and no statement from the university whatsoever. Even within the legend itself, versions do not agree on which floor.

Credibility: unverified folklore (template legend). This “locked‑in‑crushing — permanent lights” plot belongs to a cross‑campus urban‑legend motif. This site has found no first‑hand source pointing to a real event at PolyU. The library’s existence is verifiable; the legendary details are not presented as statements of fact.

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# “Ghostly figures” on the red‑brick walls: reflections, or something else?

PolyU’s most striking visual symbol is the red‑brick cladding that covers much of the campus (for the architectural backstory see the companion article Red Brick, Lettered Cores and the Labyrinth Campus). Besides the red brick, the campus also features large expanses of glass curtain wall and translucent canopies, and around these reflective surfaces a “ghostly figure” story has also taken root in folklore.

According to GOtrip’s ghost‑story round‑up^※ (hearsay): the story goes that a worker doing a job at height lost his footing, fell, and died on the spot. Afterwards, many students passing beneath a certain translucent canopy / synthetic‑fibre roof claimed to see a “ghostly figure” pacing back and forth on top of it, then disappearing in an instant. The university’s explanation, according to the retelling, is that what students saw was very likely just reflections on the glass or semi‑transparent surface, not a real human figure.

This item is rare in preserving both the “folklore sighting” and the “university‑style explanation” sides of the story — it is worth laying them side by side as they are: on one hand, a ghostly figure passed on by word‑of‑mouth among students; on the other, the everyday explanation that “it was merely a reflection.” This site has found neither any concrete source record of a worker’s fatal fall, nor any way of verifying whether the university ever truly gave such a response — both are hearsay. The story reads more like a case of the natural tendency of the human eye to conjure shapes out of blurry reflections on highly reflective building surfaces, which then got spun into a tale.

Credibility: unverified folklore (two accounts placed side‑by‑side). No first‑hand source exists for the worker’s fatal fall or the ghostly‑figure sighting; the “reflection” explanation is also a hearsay account of a university response, which this site cannot verify. It is recorded here for the form in which it circulates — “legend plus explanation” as a pair — without endorsing either side.

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# Innovation Tower: a “right‑angle‑shunning” silver ship — what folk chatter has it stirred up?

Jutting out incongruously amid a campus of red brick stands a silver‑white alien‑form building — the Jockey Club Innovation Tower. Designed by the late architect Zaha Hadid, it houses the School of Design and is the building on PolyU’s campus that attracts the most folk‑talk.

First, the verifiable data. According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, construction began in 2009 and the building was completed in mid‑2013. It stands about 76 metres tall, with 15 storeys above ground and one basement level, a gross floor area of roughly 15,000 m², and a capacity of about 1,800 staff and students. Construction was supported by approximately HK$249 million in sponsorship from The Hong Kong Jockey Club. Wikipedia describes its “streamlined shape” as “overturning the conventional appearance of a high‑rise.” According to English Wikipedia^※, the building officially opened on 18 March 2014 and was Hadid’s first permanent building in Hong Kong. These are the uncontested factual layers of the building.

The folk chatter revolves around its “irregularity.” Because the building yields hardly any neat right‑angles or horizontal planes, a long‑standing joke among design‑school staff and students is that during construction or exhibition set‑up you “can’t find a horizontal surface, can’t find a right angle.” Some also half‑jokingly call its silver streamlined form “a ship beached on a pile of red bricks.” This sort of spoken riff about Innovation Tower is more a ribbing of Hadid’s parametric sculpting than a ghost story. The “no right angles” staff‑and‑student anecdote is already recorded in the companion article Red Brick, Lettered Cores and the Labyrinth Campus; it is not unfolded further here.

Credibility: unverified folklore (oral accounts from design‑school staff and students). The building’s architectural data, designer, and opening date are all verifiable (see table above and Wikipedia). “Can’t find a right angle / horizontal surface” and “like a ship” belong to offhand banter among staff and students; it is difficult to match them one‑to‑one with any official source, and they are recorded here as campus wisecracks, not presented as fact. As for the occasional folk attempt to retrofit the unusual form with “feng shui” explanations, this site has found no reliable source and does not include them.

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# Exam‑season micro‑superstitions: touching red brick, hogging the lucky seat, paying a quick prayer — anything uniquely “PolyU”?

Much closer to everyday life than the eerie ghost stories is a cluster of small exam‑season superstitions that students themselves have invented. None of them qualifies as a “legend,” yet they form the most active layer of campus folklore.

A necessary disclaimer upfront: almost every one of these behaviours is a practice common across Hong Kong and even Chinese‑speaking universities generally. None is unique to PolyU, and virtually none has any formal source. Commonly seen examples include: not cutting one’s hair before exams (a pun‑based taboo on the word for “lose” in Cantonese); not sharing a pear with someone (homophone with “separation”); avoiding giving clocks (“attending a funeral” pun) or books (“lose” pun) as gifts. During exam season, seats in the library are impossibly scarce; students “reserve” seats with books and water bottles, which has spawned all sorts of private lore about “lucky seats.” Before big exams, some will visit a nearby temple (such as Wong Tai Sin) to pay a quick prayer for peace of mind. The psychological mechanism behind all this is clear: in conditions of high stress and uncertainty, small ritualised actions can lower anxiety and give a sliver of felt control.

The most distinctively “campus‑like” of these behaviours is the exam‑season seat‑hogging (占座) culture. Every end‑of‑semester period, the Pao Yue‑kong Library has seats as rare as hen’s teeth; students get there at dawn and “plant their flag” on a seat with books, pencil cases and water bottles, laying claim to it for the whole day. From this have sprouted many private rituals — some swear by a particular spot by the window where they “absorb the material better,” others insist on sitting at the exact same desk they used when they aced a subject last time. “Lucky seats” of this sort hardly count as superstition‑as‑legend; they are more like personal rituals under high pressure, yet they are the truest and most pervasive layer of “lore” in daily campus life. There is no single canonical version — every student has their own set — and for that very reason they neither need nor admit verification.

What this site stresses is: for none of the above is there any reliable source pointing to “uniquely PolyU” origins. They are included here only to faithfully record exam‑season folklore shared by Hong Kong university students, not to claim that PolyU is home to some exclusive taboo of its own. Should you ever encounter a concrete claim such as “every PolyU student touches a particular red brick and their exams go smoothly,” treat it as an unsourced campus joke — this site has found zero evidence for it and does not endorse it.

Credibility: unverified folklore (common folklore, not PolyU‑specific). Exam taboos, seat‑hogging, and temple‑visiting are practices widespread among Chinese‑speaking university communities; they have no systematic provenance and still less any evidence of being unique to PolyU. This site records them only as folkloric background; it does not present any specific “lucky object” or “lucky spot” as a PolyU tradition.

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# How to read these stories: a table that shows the boundaries of the evidence

Lined up side by side, the stories in this article reveal a very clear layering. The same Hung Hom campus holds solid geographic and architectural facts, tall tales that are wholly unverifiable, and a further layer of common folklore. The key to reading them is not to muddle the three.

One look at this table and the logic becomes clear: the reason ghost stories take root at PolyU is often not that “it really happened,” but that a genuine, verifiable anchor — a funeral street, a swimming pool, an alien‑form building — gets fitted with an imaginative superstructure through word‑of‑mouth. The anchor is real; the story grows on top of it. This is campus wild history’s most typical mode of generation: the geography and the architecture supply the premise; successive cohorts of students supply the plot.

Why are universities especially fertile ground for stories of this kind? A researcher of Hong Kong urban legends has offered an explanation that is not at all spectral. Mr Man, a HKU alumnus and urban‑legend buff, remarked in an interview with MPWeekly Culture^※ that “urban legends are a generation’s collective memory; they can be the starting‑point for getting to know a place’s history.” Campus ghost stories are often not really about ghosts, but about how successive year‑groups of students share the same space, and about the way a strange environment is “talked into familiarity” — new students arrive, senior‑year classmates tell tales, everyone gives each other a fright during late‑night revision sessions; in this way the stories are handed down from one cohort to the next. Their truth or falsehood is not really the point; the shared memory is.

This site records these stories not to frighten readers, nor to endorse them, but to lay out clearly “which parts can be checked, which parts cannot,” so that readers may judge for themselves. The companion article From midnight‑blue robes to red‑brick photo‑ops deals with another layer of that same red‑brick campus — “traditions walked out by students themselves,” the graduation photo‑taking rituals. Read side‑by‑side, the two pieces capture, roughly, the well‑evidenced and the evidence‑free faces of PolyU’s campus folklore. For how “red brick” has sedimented from an architectural signifier into an identity marker in orientation and festival rituals, see 《PolyU Orientation, O‑Camp and Campus Festivals (Part I)》.

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