The Red Brick Legends of PolyU: Jockey Club Innovation Tower, Hung Hom's Geography, and the Stories That Grew Around Them

The one-line take: The tales that cling to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) campus in Hung Hom — the child by the pool, the library that never turns its lights off, the tunnel of no return — are all unverified campus folklore. This piece sets them against the verifiable facts of Hung Hom, including the three funeral parlours on Cheong Wan Road, and grades each story by credibility, drawing on material published as of July 2026.

Module: 15 Campus Wild History (Wild History zone) Reading discipline: This module belongs to the 13–16 wild-history zone — anything with evidence gets a source and a credibility rating; hearsay is marked "unverified folklore" and quarantined; politically symbolic or sensitive content is assessed and routed according to the site's rules. This piece focuses on campus ghost stories and taboos as a folkloric subject. It touches no political narratives and names no living individuals.

A university whose main gate faces three funeral parlours, with a misshapen silver tower next door that people say "has no right angles" — a piece of geography like that was almost guaranteed to grow stories. That is the campus of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hung Hom: among its red-brick colonnades circulate tales of a child by the swimming pool, a library that never switches off its lights, a tunnel you cannot walk out of, and a small private superstitions that students invent for themselves every exam season. This piece does not try to judge which of these stories are true. It does three things only: it marks out which elements are verifiable geography and which are word of mouth; it isolates each legend and rates its credibility; and it looks at why Hung Hom in particular is such fertile ground for ghost stories.

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# Why does Hung Hom keep being tied up with funerals?

To understand the campus ghost stories, you first have to look at the ground beneath them. The main campus of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University sits in Hung Hom, Kowloon, right next to the Hung Hom station and the entrance to the Cross-Harbour Tunnel. And on the campus's north-eastern flank, along Cheong Wan Road, stand three of Hong Kong's major funeral parlours, side by side. This is a real, checkable "funeral row" — and it is the geographic undertone beneath almost every ghost story on this page.

According to each parlour's own records, the Universal Funeral Parlour opened on 28 November 1975^※, at 10 Cheong Wan Road, and is one of the largest funeral parlours in Hong Kong. Right next door, the International Funeral Parlour, run by Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, opened in March 1980^※, at 8 Cheong Wan Road, four storeys tall. The Universal Funeral Parlour sits at 6 Cheong Wan Road, alongside the other two. All three share one street, all within walking distance of both the Hung Hom MTR station and the PolyU campus.

Credibility: corroborated by multiple sources (geographic fact) — the locations and opening years of the three funeral parlours are set out in the official records of the parlours themselves and of Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, and can be verified item by item. They sit in the same Hung Hom neighbourhood as PolyU, a short distance away, and form the real-world backdrop that campus folklore keeps reaching for.

"Funeral row" itself carries nothing supernatural. It is simply a functional district where Hong Kong's funeral industry happens to concentrate. The reason the parlours cluster in Hung Hom has to do with the area's position as a transport hub (next to the Hung Hom MTR station and the tunnel mouth) and the industry's long-standing habit of clustering its operations: when funeral processions and overnight vigils draw crowds to one street, the flower shops, funeral-supply stores and undertakers' services follow, and a functional street takes shape. This is the outcome of urban zoning, nothing more.

But for every incoming cohort of students, the bare fact that "the school sits next to funeral parlours" is a natural anchor for the stories passed around by word of mouth. Psychologically, people are readier to project unease onto places connected with death and parting; and when a university lives cheek by jowl with funeral row, its red-brick colonnades, basement corridors, the late-night library and the swimming pool all become ready-made backdrops for narrative. Nearly all of the most-repeated tales below can be traced back to this layer of geographic impression.

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# The "Pavilion of Last Goodbyes" and the haunted tunnel: is the story doing the rounds online credible?

On several mainland reposting platforms, a long tale circulates about a "haunted tunnel" at PolyU. It takes the real geographic impression above and pushes it in a direction that is impossible to verify and rather grim.

According to a NetEase account's collation of urban legends^※ (word-of-mouth source; no other independent source corroborates it): the post claims 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 named the "Pavilion of Last Goodbyes" (永别亭), and describes a student surnamed Ye who encounters something strange in the tunnel connecting the mortuary to the pier — a two-minute walk that takes twenty minutes, with pier workers claiming that twenty or thirty people "floated onto the boat like so many slips of paper" and departed, on the very night the mortuary was being relocated.

Almost every checkable link in this story lacks a source. This site can find no authoritative record supporting specific claims such as "the campus site was a mass grave" or "there was a mortuary called the Pavilion of Last Goodbyes on campus." It reads far more like a piece of internet folklore that takes Hung Hom's real funeral geography, layers on the familiar "relocation — farewell — ghostly boarding" motif, and grafts it onto an unnamed "tunnel." Only the background layer is verifiable: Hung Hom does indeed have its cluster of funeral parlours (see the section above). The story's own time, place and people cannot be pinned down at all.

Credibility: unverified folklore (close to fiction). The story's "mass grave," "Pavilion of Last Goodbyes" and "paper-cutout boarding" episodes have no primary or authoritative source. This site does not present them as fact; it merely records that such an internet legend exists. The only verifiable element is the geographic backdrop of Hung Hom's funeral parlours.

Placing this one first is meant to set a yardstick: the same patch of ground can produce verifiable geographic facts and it can produce legends that cannot be checked at all; the two share one Hung Hom, but they are entirely different things. Read the campus tales below with this same ruler.

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

The most widely circulated ghost story at PolyU — and the one with the most consistent versions — involves a real swimming pool.

First, the verifiable part. The campus's Michael Clinton Swimming Pool is an outdoor pool. According to the PolyU Student Affairs Office's rules for campus sports facilities^※, it is an "8-lane 50 M" pool — a 19 m × 50 m body of water, 1.3 to 4 metres deep, unheated, with a maximum capacity of 150 people. The JUPAS page on PolyU's student services and facilities^※ lists it as the campus's "50-meter outdoor" pool (the other campus pool, in Block X, is a 25-metre indoor one). According to the Student Affairs Office's sports facilities and opening hours page^※, the pool is open every year from May to October and closed for routine maintenance from November to April. It is an everyday sports facility; its dimensions and season are written in official documents.

This is where the legend grows out of it. According to the Hong Kong lifestyle magazine The Honeycombers' collation^※ and the GOtrip round-up of university ghost stories^※ (both word-of-mouth retellings):

The story in circulation is this: one summer night, a small child — said to be the son of a professor — drowned in the pool. At the time, the floor-to-ceiling glass of the adjacent canteen looked straight out onto the pool; after the incident, students claimed that at night, from the canteen, they saw "a child climb up from the poolside, walk slowly towards the canteen, and then disappear." Later, it is said, the university pasted reflective film over the glass to block the view, and the seats near the window went begging for a while. Both GOtrip and The Honeycombers note that some online posts claim the incident had a real news story behind it, but no such archive can be found — take it or leave it.

The "verifiable anchor" of this legend stops at the pool itself: the pool really exists, and it really is outdoors. As for the drowning, the causal chain behind the reflective film, and the sighting of the "child's figure," this site has found no primary or press source to support any of it — even the media retellings explicitly say no record can be found.

Credibility: unverified folklore. The specifications and opening season of the Michael Clinton Swimming Pool can be verified against the official rules and pages of the PolyU Student Affairs Office. The drowning, the reason for the glass film and the ghostly sighting all lack sources, belong to word-of-mouth campus lore, and are not presented as fact.

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# The library that never turns off its lights: the light on the fourth floor and the "short-sighted girl" — is any of it real?

Another tale that turns up repeatedly in Hong Kong local media round-ups is the "library that never turns its lights off." Its template actually circulates at several Hong Kong universities; the PolyU version is set on a particular floor of the library.

According to HK01's Hungry Ghost Festival round-up of Hong Kong university ghost legends^※ (word of mouth / press retelling): the tale goes that "a very short-sighted girl student was studying hard in the library late into the night, and accidentally fell asleep at her desk. The librarian, turning off the lights at closing time, did not notice her. When the girl woke up, she found herself in total darkness, and accidentally knocked over a bookshelf, which fell on her and crushed her to death." Ever since, it is said, the lights on that floor have stayed on permanently — the university "dares not turn them off again."

This is a heavily templated urban legend: the same sequence — "girl studying late — no one notices at closing — crushed by a bookshelf in the dark — the lights are never switched off again" — appears in ghost-story round-ups for many universities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with only the floor number and the school name changed. The verifiable fact at PolyU is that the campus does have a library (the Pao Yue-kong Library), but the "short-sighted girl crushed to death" and the "floor with the ever-burning light" have neither a death record, nor a press archive, nor any statement from the university — the legend itself cannot even agree on which floor it happened on.

Credibility: unverified folklore (template legend). The "crushed at closing — permanent light" plot is an urban-legend motif that circulates across universities. This site has found no primary source tying it to any real event at PolyU. The library itself is verifiable; the details of the legend are not presented as fact.

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# The "ghostly figure" on the red-brick walls: a reflection, or something else?

PolyU's most striking visual signature is the red-brick facade that covers the campus (the architectural story behind it is in the companion piece Red Brick, Lettered Cores and a Maze of a Campus). But alongside the brick there are also large stretches of glass curtain wall and translucent canopies, and around these reflective surfaces there is a "ghostly figure" story in circulation.

According to the GOtrip ghost-story round-up^※ (word-of-mouth retelling): the story goes that a worker working on a rooftop fell to his death on the spot, and that 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 before vanishing. The university's explanation, it is said, was that what students saw was most likely just a reflection on the glass or the translucent surface — not an actual person.

This one is unusual in preserving both sides — the "sighting" as told by students and the "university's explanation" — and the two deserve to be set side by side as they are: on one hand the ghostly figure passed along by word of mouth, on the other the mundane "it was only a reflection." This site can find no specific record of any worker falling to his death, and cannot verify that the university ever actually gave such a response — both accounts are retellings. It reads far more like the natural tendency of the human eye to turn a blurry reflection on a highly reflective building surface into a story.

Credibility: unverified folklore (two accounts set side by side). Neither the worker's death nor the sighting has a primary source, and the "reflection" explanation is itself a university response relayed by word of mouth; this site cannot verify it. It is recorded here as a pairing of "legend + explanation" that circulates as a unit, with no endorsement of either side.

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# The Innovation Tower: a silver ship that "ignores right angles" — what do people say about it?

In the middle of a campus of red brick stands an abrupt silver-white anamorphic building — the Jockey Club Innovation Tower. Designed by the late architect Zaha Hadid, it houses the School of Design and is the building around which the most campus chatter at PolyU accumulates.

First, the verifiable data. According to the Chinese Wikipedia^※, the Innovation Tower broke ground in 2009 and was completed in mid-2013; it stands roughly 76 metres tall, with 15 storeys above ground plus one basement level, a floor area of about 15,000 square metres, capacity for about 1,800 staff and students, and construction support of about HK$249 million from the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Wikipedia describes its "streamlined exterior" as overturning the conventional appearance of a high-rise. According to the English Wikipedia^※, the building officially opened on 18 March 2014, and is Hadid's first permanent building in Hong Kong. This is the uncontroversial, factual layer of the tower.

The campus chatter, meanwhile, grows out of its irregularity. Because the building has almost no regular right angles or level surfaces anywhere, staff and students in the design school have long passed around the joke that during construction and exhibitions "you can't find a level surface or a right angle," and some half-jokingly call its silver-white streamlined form "a ship beached in a pile of red brick." These oral jokes about the Innovation Tower are more a good-natured tease at Hadid's parametric forms than ghost stories; the "no right angles" anecdote among staff and students is already recorded in the companion piece Red Brick, Lettered Cores and a Maze of a Campus and is not repeated here.

Credibility: unverified folklore (oral anecdotes among design-school staff and students). The Innovation Tower's building data, architect and opening date are all verifiable (see the table above and Wikipedia). "Can't find a right angle or a level surface" and "looks like a ship" are oral jokes among staff and students, hard to match one-to-one against official sources; they are recorded as campus humour, not facts. As for the occasional folk attempt to dress the anamorphic form up as a matter of feng shui, this site has found no reliable source and does not include it.

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# Exam-season superstitions: touching red brick, fighting for seats, praying — is there anything "PolyU-exclusive"?

Compared with the grim ghost stories, what is closer to daily life is the tangle of small superstitions that students invent for themselves every exam season. Not one of them qualifies as a "legend," but they are the liveliest layer of campus folklore.

First, this needs saying plainly: this whole category is common to universities across Hong Kong and the Chinese-speaking world at large, is by no means PolyU's own, and almost none of it has a formal source. The usual items include — not getting a haircut before exams (a taboo built on the homophone of "lose"), not sharing a pear with anyone (homophone of "parting"), avoiding clocks (homophone of "seeing someone off at a funeral") and books (homophone of "lose") as gifts; during exam season the library is so short of seats that students "hold" them with books and water bottles, which spawns all sorts of private rituals around "lucky seats"; and before exams some students will go to a nearby temple (such as Wong Tai Sin) to pray for peace of mind. The psychology behind these behaviours is clear: under stress and uncertainty, ritualised little gestures lower anxiety and give a person a small sense of control.

Among all of them, the most "campus-flavoured" is the exam-season seat-saving (佔位) culture. Every finals period, seats in the Pao Yue-kong Library are so scarce that students "plant their flags" first thing in the morning with books, pencil cases and water bottles, holding a seat all day — and from this spring all sorts of personal rules: one student swears a window-side seat is where they "can actually study," another insists on sitting at the same desk where they did well in a subject last time. "Lucky seats" of this kind are less superstition than private ritual under pressure, but they are the most real and most widespread layer of "sayings" in everyday campus life. There is no single canonical version; every student has their own set, which is exactly why they cannot — and need not — be verified.

This site's emphasis is this: none of the above has any reliable source pointing to it as "PolyU-specific." They are written into this piece only to record faithfully the exam folklore that Hong Kong university students share in general, not to claim that PolyU maintains some exclusive taboo of its own. If you ever see a specific claim like "PolyU students rub a certain red brick to make their exams go well," treat it as an unsourced campus joke — this site has found no corroboration and gives it no endorsement.

Credibility: unverified folklore (general folk custom, not PolyU-specific). Exam taboos, seat-saving and temple visits are common behaviours across Chinese-speaking universities, with no systematic source and even less evidence of being unique to PolyU. This site records them only as folkloric background and does not present any specific "lucky object / lucky spot" as a PolyU tradition.

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# How to read all of these: a table showing where the evidentiary lines fall

Laid out together, the stories on this page fall into a clear hierarchy: the same Hung Hom campus yields geographic and architectural facts that stand up, legends that cannot be verified at all, and a layer of general folklore. The key to reading them is not to blur the three together.

The table makes it clear: ghost stories take root at PolyU not because they are "true" but because of a real, verifiable anchor — a funeral row, a swimming pool, a strange-shaped tower — which word of mouth then attaches imagination to. The anchor is real; the story grows out of it. This is the most typical way campus wild history is generated: geography and architecture supply the opening, and generation after generation of students supply the plot.

Why are universities such fertile ground for this kind of story? People who study Hong Kong's urban legends have offered an explanation that has nothing supernatural about it. Mr. Man, a Hong Kong University alumnus and urban-legend enthusiast, said in an interview with MP Weekly's culture section^※: 「都市传说是一代人的集体回忆，认识一个地方的历史，可以由此开始」 ("Urban legends are a generation's collective memory; getting to know the history of a place can begin there"). Campus ghost stories are often not really about ghosts. They are about the way successive cohorts of students share the same space and "talk it into familiarity" — freshmen arrive, seniors tell old tales, and late-night study sessions end with people trying to scare each other. Stories pass down the generations that way. Whether they are true or not is hardly the point; the shared memory is.

This site collects these stories neither to frighten anyone nor to vouch for them, but to set out plainly which parts can be checked and which cannot, and let readers judge for themselves. The companion piece From Midnight Blue Gowns to Red-Brick Graduation Photos tells the story of another layer of "traditions students walked into being" in the same red-brick campus — the graduation photo rituals; read together, the two pieces show the two faces of PolyU campus folklore, the documented and the undocumented. How "red brick" settled from an architectural motif into an identity marker in orientation and festive rituals is covered in PolyU Orientation, O-Camp and Campus Festivals (Part 1).

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