In the mist-shrouded northern outskirts of the city, a crumbling century-old mansion stood quietly. Three stories tall, built of wood with upturned eaves and peeling red paint, it remained cold and damp all year round. Once the residence of a wealthy merchant in the late Qing dynasty, it had long been deserted and now survived by being rented out to short-term tenants. Over the years, countless ghost stories surrounded the place—some claimed to hear a woman weeping at midnight, others swore they saw unfamiliar faces in the mirrors. Locals had grown used to it, while newcomers were occasionally frightened away. But no one ever seriously investigated the truth.
Until a woman's body was found hanging from a beam in the living room, dragging the mansion back into public attention.
The deceased was Han Lu, 26 years old, single, and a freelance illustrator. She had chosen this remote old house because of the cheap rent. Her roommate discovered the body early Saturday morning upon returning home: Han Lu, in pajamas, barefoot, suspended in midair, tongue protruding and face contorted, with an overturned stool beneath her.
The preliminary police report read: Suspected suicide by hanging—awaiting forensic verification.
Standing beneath the corpse, Su Wanqing looked up, examining the distance between the victim's toes and the ground, then glanced at the stool's position.
"Something's wrong," she frowned. "If she stood on the stool and hanged herself, it should've been kicked away during the fall. But the stool is only tipped over, without any clear signs of force or motion."
Standing behind her, Lu Chenzhou looked up at the dim chandelier. He nodded slightly. "So—this scene was staged to look like a suicide."
As Su Wanqing examined the body, she noticed scratches and subcutaneous bruises around the victim's ankles, along with traces of gray-white particles under her fingernails.
"These are typical drag marks," she said softly. "She struggled before she died."
More importantly, during the autopsy, she found that the hyoid bone was completely intact. In true hanging cases, the weight of the body typically causes the hyoid to fracture or leads to severe tearing of the throat's soft tissues. But Han Lu's strangulation marks were low and irregular, suggesting she hadn't been suspended vertically—rather, someone had strangled her with a rope and then hung her body afterward to fake a suicide.
Lu Chenzhou immediately led a full search of the house. In a dusty corner of the second-floor attic, they found an old notebook.
"She kept a journal," he said, flipping to the first page.
"Every night at 3 AM, I hear footsteps in the attic.""A woman I've never seen before appears in the mirror.""I dream of drowning, someone pulling on the necklace around my neck…"
The entries were surreal, revealing a deep sense of fear. But one passage stood out:
"The landlord said if I signed that 'early termination transfer agreement,' he'd waive two months of rent... I refused. I don't want to be kicked out. But he's been acting stranger lately."
This detail caught Lu Chenzhou's attention. He immediately reviewed the rental documents and found Han Lu had indeed signed an "early transfer agreement" before moving in—giving the landlord the right to demand she vacate the premises and return part of her deposit. Similar clauses appeared in three previous "haunted house" incidents. Over the past two years, five tenants had moved out due to "mental disturbances"—three claimed to suffer hallucinations, and two mysteriously vanished.
"This is no coincidence," Lu Chenzhou said. "The landlord has a motive to clear the tenants and sell the property."
Further investigation identified the landlord as Liang Weizhong, a middle-aged man listed as the heir to the property. In truth, he made a living by scaring off tenants and flipping haunted houses. He was outwardly polite but emotionally detached, repeatedly insisting, "She had mental issues. How was I supposed to know she'd commit suicide?"
"Really?" Su Wanqing tossed a small evidence bag onto the table. "The residue on your cuff matches the lime dust found under the victim's nails. It's from the crumbling attic walls—which means she struggled there before she died."
Faced with the evidence, Liang Weizhong's expression finally changed.
It turned out Han Lu had repeatedly rejected his pressure to terminate the lease, and she began to suspect the haunting stories were fabricated. That night, while she was drawing alone, Liang Weizhong slipped into the attic and descended through a ceiling vent. He strangled her with a rope, dragged her upstairs, and staged the scene to look like a hanging.
"She noticed the footprints in the attic," he muttered through clenched teeth. "She was going to report me... Do you know how long I've waited to sell this house? As long as it's empty, I can hand it off to a developer—three million, clean profit…"
He called it a "desperate choice," but showed no remorse. Lu Chenzhou said nothing. He simply stared coldly, then personally cuffed him.
When the case was handed over to the prosecutor's office, media reports again spotlighted the "Haunted Mansion of Hanging Souls." But this time, it wasn't about supernatural tales—it was about human cruelty.
That night, Su Wanqing sat in her office, flipping through excerpts from Han Lu's journal.
"Why didn't she just move out when she was scared?" Lu Chenzhou asked.
She replied softly, "Maybe she was more afraid of reality than ghosts."
They both knew—behind every seemingly "supernatural" case, there often hid a far more terrifying truth.