HKU Campus Legends and Superstitions: The Lily Pond, the Main Building Clock Tower, and Hall Ghost Stories

The bottom line: What circulates most widely at HKU is not the ghost stories themselves, but a set of taboos that have grown up around them — "don't answer if spoken to at the Lily Pond at night," the "U" on the main gate that "won't stay put," the University Hall four-not-alike statues that "bring misfortune if touched, reversed by touching the lions." All of these are unverified oral traditions. This article isolates each in turn and cross-references them against the documented history of the pond's construction and the 1912/1930 history of the clock tower's donation.

Wild-History Zone · 15 modules · one of the deep files. This article focuses on HKU campus taboos and superstitions (what one "must not do" and the alleged consequences of doing it), rather than the full narratives of the ghost stories. The legends themselves (the Lily Pond ghost, the University Hall statue curse, the mortuary, the "Vniversity" spelling) have been physically quarantined in Campus Legends and Hall Traditions; this article does not retell their plots, only the behavioural taboos derived from them and their credibility. All folk claims are isolated in red lore cards marked "Unverified folk claim"; individuals are referred to as "Mr./Ms. [Surname]" only; proper nouns (halls, buildings, hall emblems) retain their original names. This article does not touch upon politically sensitive events.

Cross-references: for a walking-tour guide, see Walking HKU — Two Heritage Trails and the "Campus with the Most Ghost Stories" Reputation; for architectural facts, see 05 · Campus; for hall fact-files, see 10 · Colleges & Accommodation.

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# Taboos, Not Ghost Stories: How to Read This Article

Everyone can tell a campus ghost story, but what actually gets remembered by successive cohorts of freshers — and genuinely obeyed — is often not the plot itself, but the sentence tacked onto the end: "So whatever you do, don't…" HKU's urban legends are a case in point: the Lily Pond ghost story has been told for decades in multiple variants, yet nearly every version ends with the same taboo — if someone asks you the time late at night, don't answer. This class of "what you must not do" taboos is where the real staying power of campus legends lies, and it is the subject this article sets out to isolate and examine.

This article is complementary to the existing Campus Legends and Hall Traditions: that article is responsible for quarantining the legends themselves (who, where, what happened) and rating their credibility; this article extracts only the taboos and superstitions derived from the legends, methodically asking three questions of each — what specific action does this taboo forbid or require, does it have any verifiable source, and does it hold up when set against documented facts from the University or archival records. Where no empirical evidence is found, the claim is isolated in a lore card marked "Unverified folk claim," with no gory details retold or amplified.

One thing must be made clear upfront: none of the taboos listed below has any supporting official record, incident report, or archival evidence. They qualify for inclusion here solely because they have a traceable public record in media outlets (such as a Hong Kong 01 round-up of campus weird tales^※) or television dramas (such as TVB's Our Unwinding Ethos (十二傳說)), not because they are credible. Readers should treat them throughout as a phenomenon of campus oral folklore, not as statements of fact.

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# The Lily Pond: Why Does the "Old Ghost" Warn You Not to Answer at Night?

The HKU Lily Pond is the most photogenic spot on campus — and the most legend-laden. Let's put the documented facts first, then address the taboo.

The documented Lily Pond, first. According to HKU's own introduction on its official Facebook page^※, today's Lily Pond "Nestled behind the stately Knowles Building lies a serene oasis – the beloved Lily Pond." According to building records from the HKU Estates Office^※, the site was originally a large lawn in the 1950s, later converted into a large lily pond using fill material from Deep Water Bay, and it quickly became a gathering spot for staff and students; the original pond was lost during campus expansion in the 1980s, after which a smaller version was preserved; the present pond features a bronze statue of Dr Sun Yat-sen, installed in 2003. In this entire history — lawn, landfill-pond, downsizing, re-establishment — there is no record of any drowning, death, or closure of the pond.

The folk taboo, next. According to Hong Kong 01's compilation of HKU campus weird tales^※, the most widely circulated Lily Pond legend is the "ask the time" taboo: it is said that those lingering by the pond late at night will encounter a girl who repeatedly asks, "What time is it?", and the taboo passed down is — do not answer. As for the ghost's origin, multiple mutually contradictory versions exist in folklore; this article does not retell them (see the quarantined Legends article for details) and records only the behavioural taboo itself.

It is worth noting, by way of cross-reference, that the "ask the time" taboo is not unique to HKU. Late at night, by water, alone, a stranger who shouldn't be there strikes up a conversation — this motif recurs across Chinese-language campus and urban legends, with "if you answer, you'll be dragged away / taken" as the stock denouement. This suggests that rather than recording a specific incident, it is a narrative template that can be applied to any secluded body of water; the HKU Lily Pond merely happened to provide the stage — "late at night, secluded, with water." This is also why this article insists on marking it "unverified folk claim" and cross-referencing it with the documented history of the pond's construction: the same stretch of water carries one verifiable history of landscape design, and one unverifiable oral taboo. The two should not be conflated.

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# The Main Building and Clock Tower: Why Won't That "U" Stay Put?

The HKU Main Building is the oldest structure on campus and the one most frequently dragged into legend. Again, the documented facts first.

The documented Main Building and clock tower. According to the Wikipedia entry for the HKU Main Building^※, the Main Building was donated by Sir Hormusjee Naorojee Mody; construction began in 1910 and it was completed and opened in March 1912, serving as the University's sole building in its earliest years; its exterior has been a declared monument of Hong Kong since 1985. The building was designed by the firm Leigh & Orange in the Edwardian style — three storeys of red brick with granite Ionic columns, arranged symmetrically around a central clock tower, with turrets at the four corners. The same entry notes^※ that the clock tower was donated by Sir Paul Chater in 1930 — meaning the tower that people look up at today is a physical object with a specific donor and year, and has nothing to do with any ghost story.

The folk "U" taboo. The most "taboo-flavoured" claim directly tied to the Main Building is the one about the main gate's "U" not staying put. According to a folk compilation by "HKU Night Talk" published on Sohu^※, folklore has it that the letter "U" in the "UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG" inscription on the gate, because its shape so closely resembles the arched gateway, "gathers the resentment of the dead," and that no matter how it is affixed, it will always fall off by the next day. This claim points to the same stone inscription as the better-known "Vniversity spelling" legend, but takes the opposite direction — the latter has long been officially clarified by HKU as a deliberate imitation of Roman monumental inscriptions (see the official refutation already documented in the Legends article), whereas the "U falling off" is pure folk embroidery with no maintenance records or University statement to support it.

As for "the clock tower ghost story" — many assume a century-old clock tower must have a frightening legend attached, but a trawl of available folk compilations and media round-ups reveals no fully formed ghost story centred specifically on the Main Building clock tower in circulation; the tower tends to be mentioned in passing as atmospheric backdrop — "a gloomy old building" — rather than as the protagonist of an independent legend. This article accordingly records, straightforwardly, that no specific clock tower legend exists; the only documented fact is Sir Paul Chater's 1930 donation of the tower. Writing down the "absence of a legend" is itself a deliberate choice — to avoid inventing a spooky tale on the reader's behalf where none exists.

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# Hall Ghost Stories and Taboos: Sealed Corridors, the Back Hill, and the Mortuary Orientation Prank

Halls of residence are the other epicentre of campus legends. The taboos circulating among HKU hall residents mostly revolve around sealed spaces in old buildings, new-wing construction, and orientation rituals. Each is isolated below.

# May Hall and Eliot Hall: The Sealed Corridor

# St. John's College and "The Call from the Back Hill": The Empty Coffin

# The Medical Faculty Mortuary Orientation: A Recycled Anecdote

# University Hall's Four-Not-Alike: Touch Brings Doom, Touch the Lions to Break It?

The four-not-alike (sei bat jeung) stone statues at University Hall represent one of the rare "solvable" taboos in HKU superstition — it doesn't just say "don't touch," it comes with a prescribed ritual for "what to do if you did." The documented facts first.

According to the Wikipedia entry for the University of Hong Kong's University Hall^※, University Hall began life as Douglas Castle, built in 1861, and was formally converted into an HKU hall of residence in 1956. Its exterior is a declared monument of Hong Kong, and the architecture blends Tudor and Neo-Gothic styles. Flanking the stone staircase at the main entrance are three four-not-alike stone carvings (two large, one small), whose defining feature is that they possess "the head and nose of an elephant, the body and tail of a qilin, and the claws of a lion," yet resemble none of the three. The same entry also documents two other verifiable heritage items: a bronze spiral staircase (fifty-two steps) shipped from Paris by sea, confiscated by the Japanese army during the Second World War and taken to Japan, and returned after the war; and Auntie Three (Mrs. Yuen So-Mui, 1927–2017), the beloved cook who served from 1956 until her retirement in 1998 (for her Honorary Fellowship and other documented parts of her story, see the Legends article).

The "touch brings doom, touch the lions to break it" structure is a classic piece of folklore construction: it imposes a taboo, yet leaves a back door open, giving believers both a sense of dread and a way out of despair. Stone lions have a traditional feng shui function in Chinese culture as guardians that suppress evil, so co-opting the nearest pair as the "antidote" is a perfectly logical move. This is also why the four-not-alike taboo has enjoyed such stable transmission among hall residents — it doesn't merely frighten; it offers an actionable ritual to restore peace of mind.

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# Credibility Summary

The table below lists the taboos and superstitions covered in this article alongside their corresponding verifiable facts, making it easy to tell at a glance "which ones have no evidence, and which ones are real."

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# Where Do These Superstitions Come From? A Folkloristic Side-Note

Viewed side by side, the seven items above reveal a fairly clear "production mechanism" for HKU campus superstitions, driven by roughly four forces.

First, old buildings are natural narrative containers. The HKU Main Campus has one of the densest concentrations of heritage higher-education buildings in Hong Kong — the Main Building (1912), University Hall (1861), May Hall, and Eliot Hall are all centenarians. Add in the historically attested weight of memory, such as University Hall's ground floor being "said to have been used as a place of torture, execution, and the storage of bodies" during the Japanese occupation, and you have a recipe where the older the building and the more real its wartime trauma, the more readily oral tradition latches onto it with supernatural embellishments. Legends are rarely fabricated from whole cloth; they are parasites that attach themselves to a patch of real but fuzzy history.

Second, taboos are pressure valves. Campus superstitions cluster most densely around two scenarios: exam season and residential life. The four-not-alike claim — "touch it and you won't graduate/will fail your exams" — transforms abstract academic anxiety into a simple concrete action: "don't touch that statue." The Lily Pond's "don't answer at night" condenses the diffuse unease of walking alone after dark into a single, executable rule of self-preservation. The function of a taboo is never purely to frighten; it is also to give anxiety a ritual outlet — do this one thing, and you can feel a little easier.

Third, the closed structure of halls naturally breeds oral tradition. A hall of residence is a space where freshers first leave home, sleep communally, and pass lore from one generation to the next. Legends like "the empty coffin on the back hill" or "sealed corridor, hear the lovers whisper" almost always sprout at moments of spatial change — the construction of a new wing, the closure of an old block. As each committee hands down to the next, and old ghosts scare the new, the legends are solidified through night after night of orientation retellings, becoming part of hall identity.

Fourth, secondary media transmission "fixes" oral tradition. According to Wikipedia^※, TVB aired the drama Our Unwinding Ethos (十二傳說) in 2019, one unit of which, "University Campus Unbelievable Incidents," used a "lotus pond" as its setting, weaving classic campus urban-legend elements into a fictional crime narrative. The same entry notes^※ that the drama did not adapt any real campus homicide, but borrowed longstanding legendary motifs. Through this broadcast, the Lily Pond story — previously a fluid, variant-rich oral tradition — was cinematically "fixed" and massively amplified. This explains why the Lily Pond remains HKU's single most "famous" legendary location: it has a real-life stage of still water, and it has been repeatedly endorsed by mass media.

It bears repeating that the four points above are folkloristic observations on why legends spread, and do not amount to an admission that any of the taboos are true. On the contrary, understanding how they are generated makes it easier to put each in its proper place: the documented history of pond construction, clock-tower donation, and declared-monument status belongs to the official record; "don't answer at night," "the U won't stay put," and "touch the lions to break the spell" belong to folklore. A single campus can hold both systems of meaning at once, but this archive's position remains consistent — the factual is recorded as fact; the oral is isolated and labelled. The two are never muddled.

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# A Crude Method for Fact-Checking: Three Questions to Ask When You Encounter a Campus Taboo

The process of compiling this article turned out to be a replicable fact-checking workflow. When faced with any claim that "you must not do X at Y location in HKU," this archive always asks three questions, and readers are welcome to do the same.

Question one: What specific action does this taboo forbid or require? A superstition capable of spreading can almost always be compressed into a single executable action — don't answer; don't touch the statue; don't press your ear to the wall. Conversely, if a "legend" offers only atmosphere and no specific prohibition, it has probably not yet "matured" into a taboo; it is merely a scary description. Extracting the action is the first step in identification.

Question two: Aside from oral tradition, is there any third-party source? The threshold for inclusion in this article is not "is this story credible," but "does this claim have a traceable public record." The Lily Pond "ask the time" and the University Hall four-not-alike taboo qualified because they had prior media documentation such as the Hong Kong 01 round-up^※; whereas the "student died after damaging the statue" anecdote, for which no news report or archival record can be found, can only be labelled as hearsay and is not treated as credible. A record does not make something true, but it at least proves that "the story is genuinely in circulation" rather than being improvised by a single person.

Question three: Does it hold up when cross-referenced against documented facts? This is the most critical step. The Lily Pond is cross-referenced against its construction history; the "U" is cross-referenced against the official spelling explanation and the clock tower donation record; the four-not-alike is cross-referenced against the heritage records of the statues and the bronze staircase. When placed side by side, most taboos reveal their cracks — either they directly contradict an official explanation (as the "U" claim does against the "Vniversity" clarification), or they are elaborate parasites on a real but exaggerated history (as the Japanese occupation memory is for University Hall). Fact-checking here is not about trying to prove "there are no ghosts"; it is about cleanly separating the verifiable from the unverifiable.

These three questions amount, in the end, to the universal stance this site takes towards all low-credibility subject matter: do not credulously accept, but do not dismiss wholesale either. Treat oral tradition as a folkloric phenomenon worth documenting, not as something that must be "debunked" or "confirmed." That these HKU taboos have survived for a century has its own cultural and psychological logic — documenting them, labelling them, and juxtaposing them with documented facts is sufficient. Whether to believe them or not is left to the reader.

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# Not Found / Pending Verification

• The earliest source and date for each taboo: None can be reliably ascertained. This article can only trace back to media round-ups and online compilations from recent years; earlier oral sources have no archival trail.
• "Student died after damaging four-not-alike" and similar specific case claims: No verifiable news or archival record exists; this article records them only as isolated folklore and does not treat them as credible.
• The exact "legendary location" of the Lily Pond: Folk versions contradict each other (behind Knowles Building / between Hung Hing Ying Building and Pao Siu Loong Building); the documented Lily Pond location follows the HKU official version (behind Knowles Building).
• The Main Building clock tower: No specific legend found; documented history (donation by Sir Paul Chater in 1930) can be found in the Main Building dedicated file (05 · Campus).

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