The Chair No One Should Sit In: Inside Fengmen Village, China's Most Famous Ghost Town
Deep in the Taihang Mountains of Henan, above the city of Jiaozuo, there is a stone village that no one lives in anymore. Its houses stand roofless in the fog, its terraced fields have gone back to weeds, and in one abandoned room, explorers say, there sits an old wooden armchair that you must never sit in. They call it Fengmen — the sealed-door village. Its residents left decades ago for reasons that were entirely ordinary: no water, no road, no future. But the legends that grew after them were not ordinary at all. Spinning compasses, dead cameras, explorers who came home sick, and a story about the year 1963 that no one can verify. This is the tale of how a poor, thirsty mountain hamlet became the most haunted address in China — and why a rapidly urbanizing country cannot stop telling ghost stories about the places it left behind.
