Provenance: The Story of a Taipei Hotel and Its Grounds

Never mind things that go bump in the night and, as I say, set this question aside for a moment. And consider this one: Is there cause for ghosts to haunt the Grand Hyatt Taipei?

Starting seven or eight years ago, just about the time we all started to consume media in lists of the Most This and Top Five That, travel editors began to include the Grand Hyatt Taipei in editorial about ‘The World's Most Haunted Hotels' and the ‘10 Scariest Haunted Hotels Around the World.'

Let Halloween roll around, and news holes start screaming for something spooky. I've stayed at the hotel on several occasions, cognizant of the rumors from the start. I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm intrigued by the possibility and relished the opportunity to report on an actual sighting as such a sighting would pretty much put the lie to everything Newton and Einstein have discovered. I wasn't a ghostbuster by any means, but the possibility of ghosts in a hotel was a selling point for me. Indeed, a reason to stay! But, and here's the thing, a hotel should not enjoy such a reputation unless it deserves it.

The reputation, to read from online accounts, hinges on three alleged facts: That the hotel was built on the site of a political prison; that inmates were executed there and that people were buried there. If these things are true, and if it's also true that ghosts may exist, then the hotel should merit inclusion on such lists.



And so recently, I checked into the hotel for a few nights to investigate the possibility that there had been a political prison on that earth and that executions had taken place there.

I checked in not long after the hotel put the finishing touches on a top-to-renovation that stripped the place to its concrete fundamentals. The redesigned and rebuilt property is cool and sleek, with baths clad in half-square-meters of marble, sophisticated lighting, muted colors, goose down duvets, deep-soaking tubs, ample windows and textured walls. Habitat, I wondered, for ghosts?

The morning after my first drama-free night on property, I met a local historian in the hotel's lobby. His name is Liu Yi-chun. He is a Taipei native with a penchant for all things historical.

“Old buildings, primary source documents, ruins,” Yi-chun told me shortly after we met, “all of these things fascinate me to no end.”

Likewise, he was fascinated by the hotel's reputation. Yi-chun doesn't believe in ghosts, but he did want to believe in the possibility of ghosts.

“I'm a skeptic in general, but I am open-minded enough to believe that if there are ghosts, there would have to be cause for them to haunt some place,” he said. “Show me a political prison. Tell me executions took place on this ground, and then maybe we'll talk about ghosts in these halls.”

At the nearby 44th South Village Museum, Yi-Chun and I met Chang Yi-wen, a pleasant middle-aged tour guide who showed us a city map dating to 1897 when the Xinyi District, where the hotel stands today, was far beyond the pale of the developed city center. By 1905, Taipei was the island's largest city with 74,000 people, but the vast majority still clustered on the east bank of the Tamsui River.

At the start of the 1920s, Xinyi was predominantly farms and fields, but structures started dotting the area in the 1930s: a tobacco factory, a railway workshop, a hospital, and in the late 1930s a military warehouse on what is today's hotel grounds. After the war ended in 1945, the ROC government seized the one-time Japanese warehouse and converted the building into the 44th Munitions Factory.



Because so many of the rumors seem to spring from that sprawling warehouse / factory area, which include grounds occupied today by W Taipei, Le Meridien, the Taipei City Government and other major commercial buildings, Yi-chun and I contacted another local historian named Chen Ching-yang, whose father used to work in the factory. We asked whether he'd heard of any executions in this area.

“Not in this area, and not in that factory,” said Ching-yang. “My father said that factory was for munitions and supplies, not prisoners. Civilians worked in the factory, not military, and they didn't only produce munitions. They made fireworks for New Year and Double Ten Day celebrations.”

Ching-yang and Yi-chun discussed what they did know about prison camps on the island. There had been 16 of them during World War II. At Taihoku Prison, which is near the center of the city, and very far from the hotel grounds, 14 American pilots were executed at the tail end of the war as war criminals.

“If the hotel sat on one of the 16 prison camps instead of grounds once occupied by a munitions warehouse, the hotel would have a more legitimate claim to ghosts on its grounds,” said Ching-yang.

None of my research thus far turned up prisoners or executions on the hotel grounds, so I began to explore other possible incubators for ghosts.

The firing range scared local residents, to be sure, as did a nearby asylum for the mentally ill. There may have been tombs on the hotel grounds, as there were tombs all over Taipei in the old days, but if there were, those tombs would have been removed from the grounds in 1939 when construction began on the warehouse.

The time of the White Terror, when the ROC occupied the old Japanese garrison is also sometimes cited as a source of ghosts, but mostly, the stories circulating on the Internet claim the ghosts were born out of the Second World War executions.

In my three nights at the hotel, I dined at Yun Jin, which taps culinary traditions from all over China, and at Café, which may rank as Asia's most ambitious buffet. I worked out in the gym late at night when I was the only guest. I walked through the back of house at dusk, and took in views of Taipei from the hotel roof. And I read in my room at night, with only a floor lamp.

These days, we're a much more vigilant people, no matter where in the world we live. ‘See something, say something,' we're told again and again. After three nights in the hotel, all I can say is I have nothing to say.

Visit website: taipei.grand.hyatt.com/