GHOST !

 Ghost !!

The Daughter 
        of 
Hui Bi Hua

One of Saigon’s most famous ghost stories, The Daughter of Hui Bi Hua is the legend of the ghost of a young girl who roams the corridors of what is now the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Art at Pho Duc Chinh Street in District 1.

Back in 1934, when the trio of buildings was first built, it was a home to the family and business of Hui Bi Hua, an extremely wealthy real estate magnate who was reputed to own about 20,000 properties in the city. The main building used to be the family mansion and it is apparently haunted by the ghost of Hui’s daughter.

The story goes that she contracted leprosy during a city-wide epidemic and was confined to a bedroom on the upper floor. During that time, leprosy was thought of as more of a curse than what it really is: a disease. Ever superstitious and conscious of their public image, the family decided to cover up the fact that their daughter was ill with leprosy and announced that she had died from a “mysterious illness” which they then followed with a public funeral to put the matter to rest.

However, the truth is Hua’s daughter was locked away in her room, with her meals slid through a slot at the bottom of the door. They kept her locked in her room for years until the loneliness and misery of being locked away eventually drove her insane and she took her own life. Multiple versions of this story have claimed that she hanged herself, while an alternate story claims that she burned herself alive. Since then, many people have reported seeing the ghostly figure of a woman roaming the halls of the building and heard the plaintive sound of someone crying in the dead of the night.