The Ghost of the Hello Kitty Murder

The Hello Kitty Murder Case shocked Hong Kong and the world to the core when the skull of a woman was found sewn inside of a Hello Kitty Doll. One of the participant in the torture of the victim claimed that she was haunted by her and for years after the murder, the place itself was said to be haunted.

In 1999, a young girl walks into a Hong Kong police station alone, riddled with nightmares and guilt. The 14 year old teenager claims to be haunted by this dead woman for the last couple of weeks, and she truly believes she won’t be at peace until the girl confesses to what happened to the ghost that is haunting her.

At first the police disregards her statements, thinking she is delusional and making stuff up, but when she tells them about the horrible torture and murder she witness and even took part in, the police couldn’t ignore it.

Read More: Check out all our collection of ghost stories from China

When the police started investigating the address the girl gave, they came to find something truly shocking and horrible. The apartment had been the sight of a crime were a woman had been held imprisoned, tortured and raped for over a month before she died. The body had been mostly disposed of, but stuffed inside of a huge Hello Kitty plush doll, they found the woman’s head. Therefore the murder case was called The Hello Kitty Murder Case.

The Hello Kitty Murder Case shocked Hong Kong and the world to the core when the skull of a woman was found sewn inside of a Hello Kitty Doll. One of the participant in the torture of the victim claimed that she was haunted by her and for years after the murder, the place itself was said to be haunted. — *Granville Road in 2016 in the Tsim Sha Tsui area were the gruesome Hello Kitty Murder took place.*

The Harsh Life of the Kidnapped Hostess

The place of the Hello Kitty Murder was in a third-floor flat in the downtown area on No. 31 Granville Road (加連威老道) in Tsim Sha Tsui area in the Kowloon district. The inside of the apartment was filled with Hello Kitty memorabilia, including the big Hello Kitty Mermaid Plush Doll.

The victim was the 23 year old nightclub hostess and young mother, Fan Man-yee (樊敏儀)who had been missing for a month.

Her life had never been easy, and it ended in the most gruesome way imaginable. She had been abandoned as a child and grew up in an all girls orphanage in Hong Kong. When she got kicked out at 15 because she was too old to be there, she supported herself through sex work.

Over the years she turned into a drug addict and barely got by. She ended up marrying one of her clients who also were a drug addict, and lived with him despite their abusive relationship.

Then she got pregnant and had a child and decided to turn her life around. She got clean, left her husband and quit being a prostitute. Instead she started working as a nightclub hostess at the Romance Villa and hoped for a better future together with her son.

The Murderous Pimp and Drug Dealer

Her hopes got crushed fairly quickly however as bills were piling up and her nightclub was frequented by criminals, drug dealers and addicts as well as the Chinese crime syndicate, The Triads.

One of these seedy types she met was the 34-year old Chan Man-lok. He was both a drug dealer and a pimp and had a sexual relationship with Fan-Man. She once stole his wallet that had around $HK4,000 (roughly $500 USD) inside of it, but even if she gave it back at once Chan Man-lok realized she was the thief, he demanded more money from her that she was unable to pay. And because of this, he decided to kidnap her, thinking he would make money out of her by pimping her out.

A Month of Sadistic Torture

Instead he ended up rounding up his other accomplices, and ended up just torturing her in what seemed to be for no other reason than perverse and sadistic enjoyment.

The teenage girl given the cover name Ah Fong because of her young age testified that three men Chan Man-lok, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun, all in their 30s and 20s abducted Fan Man-yee and tortured her until she died over the course of a month. She was the quote on quote: “girlfriend” of Chan Man-lok who also worked as a sex worker for him and she admitted that she even joined in on the beating on occasion.

Over the course of that month the men got high on drugs while they beating her with iron bars, raped her, burning her by dripping melting plastic on her, pouring chili oil on her wounds, stringing her up hanging from the ceiling for hours and other sadistic acts they came up with. She was even forced to smile and say she enjoyed the torture. If she didn’t it would only get worse.

The Horror of the Hello Kitty Murder

After she died they dismembered her body, boiled them and disposed of it as household trash or feeding it to stray dogs. Some of her internal organs were found in the refrigerator. The head they sew in the head of the Hello Kitty doll, although their motive for this is still unclear.

The exact cause of death is not known because of how little of her remains they found, and therefore there was also too little evidence to sentence the men for murder with intent, although it was clear she had died because of their abuse.

“Never in Hong Kong in recent years has a court heard of such cruelty, depravity, callousness, brutality, violence and viciousness,” said Hong Kong Justice Peter Nguyen after the trial, who sentenced the defendants to life imprisonment Wednesday after they were convicted of manslaughter. “The public is entitled to protection from people such as you.”

The three men were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole for 20 years. Hong Kong does not have the death penalty, but if it had happened on mainland China, they would have likely been executed.

The Ghost of Fan Man-yee at Court

Who really knew what would have happened to the case if the teenage girl known as Ah Fong hadn’t been convinced she was haunted by Fan Man-yee, and because of her torment and remorse, she ended up walking into the police station and at least helping to find the victim. Because of her young age and corporation she never received any punishment for her involvement in the Hello Kitty Murder case.

Many unusual events have occurred that are regarded as supernatural by the public. And rumors about something paranormal and strange going on started already during trial.

The forensic doctor in charge of the case revealed that when the evidence including the skull of the deceased, the Hello Kitty doll, and the clay pot used to cook the body were presented to the court, the entire court was filled with the smell of the corpse. No matter where the Hello Kitty doll was presented, nearby lights would flicker. The same light disturbance happened when the defense lawyer argued that the only illegal thing happened when they were disposing of the body. An observer of the trial refused this rumor though and said it only happened when the police played the defendant’s confession.

The Haunted Building

The building where the murder happened had strange things going on. A woman rented a unit on the fourth floor without knowing about the murder. Her friend often heard women crying at night, and at that time, there were no people living downstairs. It’s worth noting that this woman had suffered from sleep paralysis while sleeping.

The hair salons on the first and second floors of the building had discovered Hello Kitty dolls of unknown origin when they came to work in the morning. When looking at the CCTV footage, they even saw that after the salon closed at night, there were figures walking around in the salon. The manager of the hair salon denied that unusual incidents had occurred in the store.

The wife of Hong Kong metaphysician Chen Dingbang said that in 2013, when she was relaxing in a bar on Granville Road, she saw a woman’s head staring at her from the opposite building. Later she learned that the unit was where the case took place.

The apartment building where Fan was tortured has since been demolished as no one wanted to buy or rent the infamous apartment that everyone in Hong Kong knew the backstory behind. It was empty for years and eventually, no one wanted to live in the other apartments in the building either.

Some claimed that after the Hello Kitty Murder the building itself was haunted by Fan and there were many who claimed to have seen her haunting the area.

In the end someone bought the empty building and demolished it in 2012. Instead they built a hotel there in 2016 named Soravit. As a memorial to what happened there, they placed three Buddha portraits in the hotel.