The most haunted places in Asia

From Rajasthan's cursed abandoned fort to a Bangkok skyscraper frozen mid-construction, Asia's most haunted places ranked

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Asia’s haunted places draw on a cultural relationship with the supernatural that differs in texture and specificity from the ghost traditions of Europe and the Americas. The continent’s horror cinema reflects this: Thailand’s Shutter and Japan’s Ringu produced scares rooted in local spiritual beliefs, mythology, and history, which the Western remakes attempted to replicate with variable results. The same specificity applies to the haunted sites themselves. Many of the places on this list are not haunted in the generic sense of being old, crumbling, or abandoned. They carry specific stories tied to specific tragedies, specific war crimes, specific curses attributed to specific individuals, and specific apparitions that enough independent witnesses have reported over enough decades to accumulate into something resembling a documented phenomenon.

The region’s history of colonialism and wartime occupation also runs through several entries on this list. Dutch and Japanese military presence in Indonesia, the Japanese occupation of Singapore, and the American and Japanese military presence in the Philippines all left behind sites where the violence of those periods has, according to local belief and folklore, produced supernatural residue. That historical layer gives several of these places a political and moral dimension alongside the purely frightening one.

These 10 locations come from Travel Leisure’s selection of the most haunted places in Asia, spanning nine countries across the continent, from the Rajasthan desert to the Malaysian highlands, and from a centuries-old Rajasthan fort to an unfinished 1990s Bangkok high-rise, and from one of the world’s most famous palaces to a remote Silk Road ruin buried in the Gobi Desert’s sand, the list reflects Asia’s geographic and historical diversity across the continent from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asian island nations and the deserts of Inner Mongolia and the Malaysian highlands beyond.

1. Bhangarh Fort stands cursed and empty in Rajasthan

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Bhangarh Fort in Rajasthan, India, was once a functioning royal residence in a settled town. In the 18th century, both the fort and its surrounding settlement stood abandoned, apparently abruptly, leaving behind empty temples and desolate market areas. The Rajasthan Tourism Office identifies it as one of the most haunted places in India. The question of why everyone left has generated two competing legends: one holds that someone placed a curse on the fort because its height was casting a shadow over their home, and the other attributes the abandonment to a love potion gone catastrophically wrong.

The details of these legends — the injured party, the nature of the offense, the mechanism of the curse — vary across retellings, as is typical of orally transmitted folklore over centuries. What does not vary is the outcome: a once-thriving settlement emptied completely and uninhabited ever since. The physical reality of Bhangarh today, with its roofless temples and vacant market stalls preserved in a kind of suspended emptiness, supports the legend’s premise that something caused everyone to leave at once.

The fort draws visitors who come specifically for the supernatural associations, and the site’s atmosphere during the day already carries the weight of its history. At night, the site is off-limits to the public, a restriction that the local authorities enforce in part because of the fort’s reputation. Documented historical abandonment, no clear mundane explanation for the departure, and a site uninhabited despite its architectural quality together make Bhangarh Fort one of the more genuinely mysterious locations on this list. The Archaeological Survey of India manages the site today, and entry is free. The gates lock before sunset and open after sunrise, an official acknowledgment of the site’s nocturnal reputation. Visitors should note that the Archaeological Survey’s management of the site has improved access and signage, making daytime visits more informative than the unguided exploration earlier visitors reported.

2. Lawang Sewu moved from a Dutch railway hub to a war prison

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Builders erected Lawang Sewu in Semarang, Indonesia, in the early 1900s as an administrative hub for the Dutch East Indies Railway Company. The building’s name means “a thousand doors” in Javanese, a reference to the profusion of doors and similarly proportioned windows lining the facade, which create a distinctive and somewhat unsettling visual rhythm. After the Dutch colonial period ended, Japanese forces took over the building during World War II and used it as a prison. It subsequently became the site of a violent conflict between Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian forces as the war ended and Indonesian independence approached.

One figure concentrates the building’s supernatural reputation: a young Dutch woman who died by suicide on the premises and is said to still roam the property. The specific identity of this ghost — a colonial-era European woman in a building that has undergone colonialism, occupation, and war — gives the haunting a historical charge that generic, frightening abandoned buildings do not. She appears in the context of a building that has witnessed multiple rounds of historical violence, which layers the supernatural claims over documented atrocities.

Lawang Sewu underwent restoration and now opens as a tourist attraction and historical site. The Indonesian tourism authority acknowledges its haunted reputation while also presenting the building’s architectural and historical significance. The fact that a building this famous for paranormal activity is also officially promoted as a........

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