A sealed dormitory room, a bathroom none dare use, a building riddled with maze-like, seemingly ever-shifting corridors…This book plunges readers face-first into one hundred iconic ghost stories set in high schools and universities across Taiwan, analyzing their possible origins and evolution over time.

After spending four years collecting, researching and analyzing widely shared ghost stories set on Taiwan’s high school and university campuses, Hsieh Yi-An discovered that, in both sociological and literary terms, such tales share something important in common with popular urban legends – while many have heard them, few can speak to their veracity.

Dormitory hauntings comprise the largest category of ghost stories in this book, with spine-tingling tales of sealed dorm rooms, architectural oddities, and worrisome roomies drenched in the angst of children not long separated from home. The second category, campus building hauntings, center on bathrooms and classrooms and are sometimes tied to features unique to one school or another. The third category, outdoor hauntings, take place in and around campus ponds, sports fields, and shuttle buses and are almost always tied up with something unique to that school. The 2020 film adaptation of The Bridge Curse is a prime example of this story type.

Each of the ten chapters and forty subchapters that form the three story categories begins with a traditional retelling of an iconic ghost story. Afterward, subsequent variants are introduced, the potential real-world origins and reasons for adaptation over time are explored, the plausible threads in the narrative considered, and tales are analyzed from a socio-psychological perspective to answer the question: Which real-world insecurities, fears and prejudices may have inspired such frightful tales of campus life?

Hsieh Yi-An’s approach to the narrative gives readers the tools to rationally reexamine these and other chilling stories of the preternatural. While they will always give us goosebumps, this book sheds light on the truth hidden just beneath the surface of our favorite scary stories.