Six haunted Hong Kong hikes for Ghost Month

17th August 2026 – (Hong Kong) As the seventh lunar month brings the colloquial “Ghost Festival” season – hikers are being reminded of six Hong Kong trails long wrapped in ghost lore, with the spirit gates said to have opened from 11.00pm on 12th August and the main festival day falling on 27th August (the fifteenth of the month).

Bride’s Pool heads many lists as the most feared of Hong Kong’s “big four” haunted countryside spots, ranked above So Lo Pun, Lai Chi Chong and Tai Po Kau. Folklore offers several versions of a bride’s death: sedan-bearers slipping so she drowned in the waterfall and her feet are still glimpsed in the water; a tearful bride leaping to her death; or a woman faking an accident to flee an unwanted marriage for a sedan bearer she loved. Nearby Mirror Pool is said to be where her spirit combs her hair and checks her reflection.

In Chai Wan, the “haunted bridge” is officially the Tai Tam Gap Stone Bridge, an arch structure built in 1934 that rises dozens of metres above the valley like a viaduct from a fantasy novel. Night walkers tell of Japanese soldiers, bullet-scarred stonework, waving white figures or uniformed ghosts, while Tai Tam Au’s tree-shaded quiet adds to the unease. Mount Davis, Hong Kong Island’s westernmost hill and named for the second governor Sir John Francis Davis, carries stories of mass Japanese suicides after the Second World War and a “big-headed baby” said to have been buried on the slope — amid dense greenery where rustling undergrowth can unsettle even sceptics.

So Lo Pun, originally So Nou Pun, is a former Wong-clan hamlet near Lai Chi Wo in the northeastern New Territories. Tales speak of a village wiped out overnight, coffins at an old school and compasses failing — though the name itself may mean “locked compass”. A real tragedy sharpened the myth: in May 1998 a 47-year-old man hiking with a Hiu Fung tour group in the northeast failed to return home and was found badly hurt and unconscious at So Lo Pun by the Civil Aid Service, dying of his injuries. The leader had not counted heads until a participant was found missing. The underlying disaster was a 1965 boat sinking from Sha Tau Kok to Ngau Shi Wu, killing four of 12 people and leading to that village’s abandonment — often wrongly pinned on So Lo Pun.

Lai Chi Chong’s geological trail shares the “big four” reputation; legend says lychee fruit turned into human heads on the trees until villagers cut them down, yet hikers still report strange sounds and shadows. The Little Hawaii path near Tiu Keng Leng recalls Canadian merchant Alfred Herbert Rennie, whose flour mill beside a reservoir failed around 1907 and who died by suicide — popularly misremembered as hanging, which helped coin the old name “Neck Hanging Ridge” before it became Tiu Keng Leng. The pool later served as a swimming spot named after Hawaii after Pearl Harbor, with pavilions and boats drawing crowds until drownings closed it; broken dam walls remain. Walkers in Ghost Month are best advised to stay on marked paths, hike in daylight and keep groups together.