CityU urban legends and campus ghost stories: the Festival Walk corridor, academic buildings and the exam curse

The City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) comprehensive information database · Campus folklore module

Reading note (folklore zone): This article collects urban legends and superstitions passed around campus by word of mouth. The overwhelming majority have no reliable first-hand sources; they are campus anecdotes and should not be taken as fact. All unverified claims are presented in warning containers and with attribution statements, set side by side without conclusions; anything involving "someone taking their own life" is never named, narrated or given a timeline — the existence of the legend alone is recorded. For the verification of the University's emblem and architectural landmarks, see the companion piece 《校徽存废争议、校训源流与标志建筑》; for campus animals and the veterinary school story, see 《城大校园猫与动物轶事》.

One-line conclusion: The most widely circulated campus superstition at CityU is "过中门，不过三" ("walk through the middle door, and your GPA will never pass 3") — the rumour holds that anyone who steps through the middle door of the red entrance of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly Academic Building No. 1, named in 2017) will never see their GPA climb above 3. This article grades the reliability of each legend item by item, and traces the "curse" back to the American-style honours degree system CityU adopted in 2020.

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This is a university attached to a shopping mall. Step out of Kowloon Tong MTR station, cross the atrium of Festival Walk, follow a pedestrian walkway that is noticeably dimly lit, and you are straight inside the teaching blocks of City University of Hong Kong — no need to go outdoors, no need to brave the rain. Because of this rare symbiotic relationship between campus and mall, CityU has bred an entire folklore that only works inside this vertical campus: the "time tunnel" in the walkway, the middle door of the red entrance that must not be used, the sculpture at the Tat Chee Avenue end that must not be touched, and the unspeakable tales about a toilet. This article works through the legends one by one, marking the strength of the source for every item that is mere hearsay, and making no factual claims.

# Why do CityU legends all revolve around Festival Walk?

The main campus of City University of Hong Kong sits on Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong, immediately next to the large shopping mall Festival Walk, to which it is connected directly by footbridges and walkways. This spatial arrangement — "a campus that lives attached to a mall" — is the prerequisite for understanding CityU campus-culture jokes: many of the nicknames and legends are, at bottom, students teasing the fact that "the university and the mall are inseparable".

According to an HK01 report^※, when CityU consulted on a possible renaming in 2021, netizens pushed "又一城市大学" (mockingly rendered in English as "Festival Walk University") as one of the most popular creative name suggestions. There are also punning nicknames in circulation such as "Shitty U" and "Kitty U", all of which play on the sound of the English short form "City U" without carrying praise or blame. These nicknames are not negative incidents in themselves; they are simply part of the campus humour tradition, and this archive records them faithfully without judging.

This spatial layout also dictates where CityU legends "set their scenes". In most universities, urban legends take place in remote corners — hill slopes, ponds, old dormitories. CityU is the opposite: its most famous legends all happen in the most crowded spots — the walkway connecting to the mall, the main entrance of the core teaching block, the junction on the route to the library. A vertical urban campus sharing its human traffic with a mall leaves little in the way of desolate corners for the imagination to work on; so the legends grow along everyday commuter routes, turning the doors and corridors that everyone passes every day into repeatedly retold "places with rules".

A distinction should be drawn: the verifiable, institutional content — the property relationship between Festival Walk and CityU, the vertical-campus identity and so on — belongs to the research domain covered in the companion piece 《校徽存废争议、校训源流与标志建筑》. This article deals only with the legends and superstitions that spring from that spatial relationship.

# The "Time Tunnel": corridor ghost story or plain architectural feature?

The pedestrian walkway leading from Festival Walk into the CityU teaching area is nicknamed the "Time Tunnel" by CityU students. According to a freshman guide compilation^※, the origin of the nickname is quite prosaic: both sides of the walkway are lined with panels on CityU developments, and because sunlight is blocked and visibility dims, walking through feels like passing along a dark tunnel — hence the name.

The name invites supernatural associations, but on the available evidence the "Time Tunnel" is a nickname for an architectural feature, not the site of some ghost story. There is the occasional stray claim linking the dim corridor to eerie feelings, but these are personal impressions; this archive has found no source for any concrete incident.

One verifiable point of comparison: the corridor is actually famous for a functional reason — students who want a longer stretch of air-conditioning in summer, or less rain in wet weather, will deliberately walk through Festival Walk to get to CityU, and the walls also serve as a display strip for university announcements. Dim, narrow, plastered with posters — those three together are enough to give a purely functional commuter corridor a mildly mysterious name, without there being any supernatural core at all. The substrate of a legend is often nothing more than an utterly ordinary commuting habit.

# "Walk Through the Middle Door, Never Pass 3": Where does the red-door GPA curse come from?

The most widespread CityU campus superstition centres on the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly "Academic Building No. 1", AC1). According to an official CityU announcement^※, Academic Building No. 1 was officially named the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building on 28 April 2017, in recognition of the donation of Dr. Yeung Kin Man, co-chairman of the CityU Foundation Board of Governors. This is the academic core of the University, housing the Run Run Shaw Library and a large number of classrooms; students navigate the building by colour-coded zones (Blue / Yellow / Green / Purple Zone).

The legend runs as follows: the building has a "red door", and anyone who walks through the middle door will never achieve a GPA of 3 — they may even fail courses. Hence the mantra "过中门，不过三". According to a freshman guide compilation^※, "the rumour that walking through the middle of the red door means your GPA can never pass 3" is one of the most widely circulated taboos among incoming CityU students.

One version of the origin story circulates: CityU is said to have two "never pass 3" taboos, the first being the middle door of the red entrance; the legend is traced to a foreign staff member — after colliding with a student while walking through the middle door, he supposedly spread the saying in order to clear the middle door as a staff-only route, giving rise to "过中门，不过三" around campus.

Reliability summary: the mantra itself — "过中门，不过三" — is widely current in CityU freshman culture (found across several independent hearsay compilations) and can be taken as a genuinely existing campus superstition; but its efficacy is pure nonsense, and its origin story rests on a single hearsay source. This archive's position: the circulation of a legend is a fact; the content of a legend is not.

# The real body of "Never Pass 3": how CityU's GPA system actually works

The best way to explain the "curse" is to look at CityU's actual grading system — when students talk about "passing 3" or "never passing 3", they are referring to a set of degree regulations that are written down in black and white, with nothing to do with any door or sculpture.

According to an official CityU 2020 announcement^※, starting with undergraduates admitted in the 2020/21 academic year, CityU adopted a US-aligned degree honours system: the minimum cumulative GPA (CGPA) for a bachelor's degree was raised to 2.0; honours classifications no longer follow the British "first-class / second-class" divisions but are instead ranked by graduating GPA, with honours awarded only to the top 15% of each department's graduating cohort — the best 2% receiving summa cum laude, the next 5% magna cum laude and the following 8% cum laude.

The provision closest to a "curse" concerns the threshold for losing your place at the University. CityU states in official regulations: 「任何三个学期的平均积点（GPA）均低于 1.7 分的学生，将失去城大学籍」^※ (any student whose GPA falls below 1.7 for three consecutive semesters will lose their CityU registration). According to an Hong Kong Economic Times TOPick report^※ (June 2020), the new system was summarised as "only the top 15% of graduates receive honours classifications; a GPA below 1.7 over three semesters means loss of registration", with the University saying the aim was to adopt the American system, reward academically outstanding students and raise academic standards.

Put the two side by side and it becomes clear: the "never pass 3" that students fear is a set of real institutional designs around CGPA thresholds and honours quotas (the 2.0 graduation line, the 1.7 three-semester dismissal line, the 15% honours quota); the claim that "walking through the middle door means you can never pass 3" is a psychological metonymy that projects this anxiety-inducing system onto a specific door. The source of the curse is not the door — it is the quota.

# The "Four-Unlikes" at the Tat Chee Avenue junction: a sculpture not to be touched

Another CityU taboo, on a par with "never pass 3", centres on a sculpture. According to a study-abroad compilation^※, CityU has a pair of statues facing Festival Walk that students nickname the "四不像" ("Four-Unlikes"), and "it is said that CityU students must not touch or climb them, or they will fail to graduate".

The problem is: what exactly is this sculpture? This archive has found no authoritative statement from CityU on the sculpture's name, artist or symbolism. "Four-Unlikes" is a student nickname based on its appearance (the form defies easy classification), not an official name. In the absence of primary material, this archive records only the folklore phenomenon — "there exists a sculpture referred to by students as the Four-Unlikes, to which a graduation taboo is attached" — and does not speculate on its true identity.

What is distinctive about this CityU taboo is that its object does not hide in the depths of the campus: it stands at the junction facing Festival Walk — like the "Time Tunnel", the legend attaches to a spot that students pass every day, not to an out-of-the-way corner.

# The 3M toilet tale: a legend best observed from a distance

The most "hardcore" item in CityU's urban legend collection concerns a toilet. According to The Honeycombers' compilation of Hong Kong university ghost stories^※, CityU's most famous tale revolves around the "3M toilet" in the Yellow Zone; the English-language outlet records two mutually contradictory versions — one involving a female student, the other pointing to an accident involving a worker during the building's construction — and adds that the women's toilet in question was later converted into a men's toilet, with campus lore attributing this to "adding yang energy to ward off misfortune", after which the tale faded. A study-abroad compilation^※ carries a similar version.

This archive treats this legend with particular restraint, for three reasons. First, the two origin versions contradict each other (a female student versus a male worker), which is itself evidence of the tale's unreliability. Second, anything involving "someone taking their own life" is never named, narrated, reconstructed in detail or placed on a timeline — we record only that "such a tale exists". Third, the claim about converting the toilet to a men's room "to add yang energy" is folk feng shui speculation; this archive has found no official or first-hand source showing any connection between the facility conversion and any event.

In the broader Hong Kong campus context, this genre of "toilet / swimming pool / dormitory suicide tale" is a fixed item in the oral tradition of every Hong Kong university's orientation period. According to The Honeycombers compilation^※, versions exist everywhere from CUHK to HKU, PolyU and HKUST. CityU's 3M toilet tale is less a secret unique to CityU than a local variant of the Hong Kong campus ghost story as a folk genre — its research value lies in folklore studies, not in the factual record.

# Placing CityU back in the genealogy of Hong Kong campus ghost stories

CityU's legends are not isolated. The most effective way to judge the credibility of a campus tale is to ask whether near-identical "twin versions" exist at other Hong Kong universities — if the same motif recurs across many institutions with only the place names changed, then it is most likely a circulating narrative template, not a real event unique to one school. Several of CityU's legends happen to find counterparts elsewhere.

According to The Honeycombers' compilation of ghost stories at Hong Kong universities^※, the Chinese University of Hong Kong has the "oxtail soup" legend (attached to the tragedy of a heartbroken student) and the story of the "Braid Girl" beside the railway tracks; HKU circulates the tale of a female student in the lotus pond (Ho Kwok Pinging Garden) who took her own life and returned as a ghost; PolyU has the tale of a child who drowned in the swimming pool crawling toward the canteen at night; and HKUST has the "red-eye" tale of a peeping incident driving someone to suicide. Line these up and CityU's "3M toilet" tale immediately shows its generic character — "someone took their own life somewhere on campus and now lingers there" is a stock item at nearly every Hong Kong university, with highly similar plot skeletons and only the setting swapped to each campus's darkest corner.

Likewise, "walking through a certain door / touching a certain sculpture means you cannot graduate" looks like a cross-institutional template: it is said that many Hong Kong universities each have their own "door that must not be passed through" or "sculpture that must not be touched", and CityU's "middle door of the red entrance" and "Four-Unlikes" are simply local instances of this template. Recognising the template does not make the legends less interesting — quite the opposite: it reveals that what these stories actually record is not a haunting but a collective act, in which each generation of freshmen tells the next the same set of anxieties on orientation night. This is precisely the angle folklorists take on campus ghost stories: the function of the story is to translate an unfamiliar new environment and looming academic pressure into a narrative that can be shared, and laughed off, together.

# Why do legends grow on a campus like CityU?

Put the items above side by side and a shared generative logic emerges in CityU's urban legends: the more unusual the space, the more specific the legend. The gloominess of the Festival Walk corridor grew the "Time Tunnel"; a red door in the core teaching block plus a stringent GPA system grew "过中门，不过三"; a strangely shaped sculpture at the busiest junction on Tat Chee Avenue grew the "Four-Unlikes that must not be touched". Legends do not arise from nothing; they attach to a concrete, slightly odd location that countless people pass every day.

This also explains why CityU legends are almost all bound up with "graduation / grades", with few purely horror motifs. For a university known for its strict GPA system, with honours quotas reserved for only the top 15%, students' deepest collective anxiety is not ghosts but grade points — and so even doors and sculptures acquire the power to decide one's GPA. A curse is a vessel for anxiety — that point is closer to the truth than the veracity of any single legend. Once this is understood, it is easy to see why CityU superstitions consistently aim at "graduation" and "passing 3" rather than anything else: at bottom, they are a way for freshmen to project an intangible, invisible grade-point pressure onto a door and a sculpture that can be seen and touched.

# Items with no record found (honestly marked, not filled in by speculation)

• Any concrete, verifiable source for a paranormal incident in the "Time Tunnel" corridor — none found; only the nickname and personal impressions exist;
• The official name, artist and reason for installation of the "Four-Unlikes" sculpture — no authoritative record found; "Four-Unlikes" is a student nickname;
• The original source of the "过中门，不过三" origin theory (the foreign staff member collision) — the hearsay compilation of school superstitions on which this article's retelling relies was hosted on a platform that has since shut down; the original text is unreachable and no archive copy has been found, so the claim survives only as a single source;
• Any specific person, event or date involved in the "3M toilet" tale — no first-hand source found; the two origin versions contradict each other;
• Any official CityU response or debunking of any of the above legends — none found.

# Summary

The CityU urban legends surveyed in this article fall into two categories: architectural nicknames and taboos (the Time Tunnel, the middle door of the red entrance, the Four-Unlikes sculpture) and campus ghost stories (the 3M toilet tale). The former can mostly be traced to specific locations and folk mantras, but their efficacy is pure nonsense and their origin explanations mostly rest on single hearsay sources; the latter are CityU's variant of the Hong Kong campus ghost story as a folk genre, and no story involving individuals is elaborated here.

What is genuinely confirmed is only the layer of institutional fact wrapped at the core of these legends: since the 2020/21 academic year CityU has operated an American-style honours degree, with a minimum graduating CGPA of 2.0, honours classifications awarded only to the top 15% of each department, and loss of registration for anyone whose GPA falls below 1.7 across three consecutive semesters. The reason "过中门，不过三" has survived generation after generation of freshmen has never been whether that door works — it is that the 1.7 red line is real enough, and tense enough, to carry it.

For verification of the emblem and landmark buildings, see the companion piece 《校徽存废争议、校训源流与标志建筑》; for campus animals and the veterinary school story, see 《城大校园猫与动物轶事》.

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