3 The ghostly takeaway
On a normal afternoon in December of 1989, the Chiu Yong Kee cha chaan teng (茶餐廳; Hong Kong-style café) in Tai Po Tin received a phone order for four people’s worth of food to be delivered. Upon his arrival to the flat, the delivery boy rang the doorbell, and the door opened just a crack. Money was slipped through this gap and the person in the flat asked for the food to be placed outside. The staff didn’t think much of it and headed back to the restaurant.
When the owner cashed out the register that night, he discovered a stack of “hell money” (burned by locals for the dead to use in the afterlife). All of the staff claimed to have nothing to do with it, but a couple of days later, there was “hell money” in the cash register again. Making the connection that a delivery had been made to the same apartment again that day and thinking it a tasteless prank, the furious owner demanded that he will deliver the food if another order from the same address should come through.
Sure enough, they received a call the next day, so the owner made the trip himself and tried to peek in through the gap when the door opened. He couldn’t make anything out and left after making sure the money he received was indeed Hong Kong dollars, tucking the cash away separate from the rest of the day’s earnings. That evening, the money had once again transformed into a wad of ghostly notes. By now thoroughly spooked, the owner immediately reported it to the police.
When the authorities forced their way into the unresponsive apartment, they discovered the grisly scene of four dead bodies prone on the floor. By the state of their decomposing bodies, they had been dead for some time, but their neighbours claimed to have heard the sound of mahjong (麻將; Chinese tile-based game) playing coming from the flat recently and so didn’t even think anything was amiss. The coroner also reported in disbelief that there was food in the corpses’ digestive systems that had only been digested for a day or so—something that shouldn’t have been possible given their deduced date of death. This case also made the national papers and was widely discussed back then. What do you make of it?