Causeway Bay wall hides face in banyan roots

12th September 2026 – (Hong Kong) A closed-eye face peeping from banyan roots on a stone wall behind Causeway Bay’s (Moreton Terrace) Bus Terminus has gone viral after a local woman posted photographs and traced the oddity through years of Google Street View images.

The woman shared several shots on Threads, calling the carving a curious human head set into the wall where a Chinese banyan spreads tangled roots. Look closely at the upper right of the root mass and a sculpted face with shut eyes appears. She wrote that the spot felt so uncanny it “would be quite frightening to see at night,” and later noted the face had once been white before “merging into one” with the tree.

Supernatural chatter followed: why leave only a face there, was a demon sealed behind it, would the features change and open a left eye after dark, or had the deep-rooted banyan become a tree spirit with age. A cooler thread of replies insisted there must be a scientific explanation and that the object was an artificial wall ornament — originally a white stone face that later looked “grown in” once roots climbed over it. In daylight, some added, it is plainly a statue rather than a living horror.

Street View supplies the timeline. Images from December 2016 show no face on the wall. By June 2019 a white human-face sculpture is visible. Later captures from 2020 and 2022 track the same feature as weather and growth take hold. The woman concluded the piece has stood for about seven years. The working theory is that around 2019 someone fixed a white artificial face among the banyan’s roots; sun, rain and oxidation browned the surface while aerial roots wrapped it until the sculpture and tree now read as a single brown mass.