Lawang Sewu Ghosts: The History Beneath the Haunting

Content note

This piece deals with the detention, torture and execution of prisoners during the Japanese occupation of Java, with the killing of several hundred Japanese civilians by Indonesian forces at Bulu prison in October 1945, and with a ghost legend in which a woman takes her own life. If any of this is difficult for you, please look after yourself first — the history will still be here.

If you need to talk to someone: in the UK, Samaritans on 116 123, free, day or night. In Indonesia, Kemenkes Healing119.id on 119 extension 8. In the US, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on 988.

The tour of the most frightening room in Indonesia begins with a safety briefing. You are issued a hard hat and a high-visibility vest, the same equipment a contractor would hand you on any building site in Semarang, and you are counted into a group, because nobody goes down alone. Fifty thousand rupiah at the standard rate, after a half-price introductory period in December 2024. The site opens at eight in the morning and stays open until eight most days, later on Saturday, and no more than seven hundred and fifty people are admitted to the basement in a day.

Then you go under Building B, into low brick vaults where the ceiling forces the taller visitors into a stoop and the air changes temperature against your face, and you stand in the place that made the Lawang Sewu ghosts the best-known dead in the country. Water has been in here. You can read it on the brick. There are chambers off the main passage barely wider than a man’s shoulders, and shallow tanks in the floor about knee-deep, and the guide will tell you what the Japanese did with both of them, and you will believe it, because you are standing in a hole under a colonial office block in the dark with a helmet on.

Everything above you is immaculate. The building came out of a restoration that cost a fortune it had no business attracting, and it shows: repainted arcades, restored stained glass, floors you could see your face in, room after room of open doors receding into good daylight. Upstairs there is a museum about the history of the railways in Java. It is thorough. It runs to signalling equipment and locomotive plates and the growth of the network across the island, and it manages, in a building erected as the headquarters of the Dutch East Indies Railway Company, to say remarkably little about the Dutch.

That is the first thing to understand about this place, and the reason it is worth an argument rather than a listicle. Three histories are contending for Lawang Sewu. One of them is a monument to empire, and the people who own it now cannot quite bring themselves to name it. One of them is a labour movement that came out of these rail yards and founded a political party in this city in 1920, and it is not commemorated anywhere on the site, because in Indonesia it cannot be.

And one of them is a woman in white in an upstairs corridor.

Only one of the three is spoken aloud. It is not the true one — and it is not the false one either.

The Place: Semarang’s Thousand Doors

Semarang sits on the north coast of Java, a working port of a million and a half people, hot in a way that does not lift after dark and wet in a way the city has never solved. The old lower town floods. It has been sinking for a century, some of it by centimetres a year, and the sea is not helping. This matters to the building, because almost everything clever about Lawang Sewu is an answer to water and heat.

It stands on a traffic circle where Jalan Pemuda meets Jalan Pandanaran, and the traffic circle is the first surprise. This is not a ruin on a hill. It is civic furniture in the middle of a busy city, and it spends its days surrounded by mopeds. In the centre of the roundabout is the Tugu Muda, a stone obelisk on a base of relief carvings. Behind it is a military museum. A cathedral is a short walk away, and so is Kampung Pelangi, the hillside kampung whose houses were repainted in blocks of pink and turquoise and yellow to draw visitors. A kilometre north, the colonial warehouses and offices of Kota Lama include both carefully restored facades and buildings still waiting for them.

The complex is four separate structures on a large fenced plot of some eighteen thousand square metres, named without ceremony as A, B, C and D. Building A is the one on every postcard. It is L-shaped, and if you did not know better you would take it for a church: two four-storey towers flanking a broad corner facade, a third tower anchoring the rear, a heavy arch guarding the second-floor veranda, and red Dutch roof tiles carrying the eye along a very long roofline. The towers are not decorative. Each was built to hold a water tank of seven thousand litres.

Inside, the light does the work. Tall stained-glass panels fill the main stair hall with colour, and the instinct is to read them as scripture. They are not. They are pictures of commerce, industry and Dutch technical achievement, installed to be contemplated in a stairwell like saints’ lives.

Then the arcades. Both street frontages run away from the facade in long shaded corridors lined with doors, and the doors keep coming, and this is where the name lives. Lawang sewu is Javanese for a thousand doors. There are not a thousand. There are around six hundred large window openings and enough doorways between them that nobody has ever felt the need to correct the arithmetic. Walk one of these arcades in the middle of the morning and the effect is not fear. It is arithmetic anxiety, the mild vertigo of a repeating pattern that will not resolve.

Building B is behind A and gets fewer photographs. Three storeys: offices below, a ballroom on the top floor, high windows all the way up. Beneath it is the basement, which was built to be partly full of water so that evaporation would pull the heat out of the floors above. Seventeen short passages connect its chambers to one another and to the building overhead. It was drainage and it was air conditioning, in a coastal city that offered a lot of the first problem and no solution at all to the second.

Somewhere near the exit of the tour there is a small, squat monument to railway employees killed here in 1945. Sources say five. Vann counted six. Almost nobody stops.

The History of Lawang Sewu

The first railway in the Indies ran out of Semarang in 1867, and the company that built it was the Nederlandsch-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij. By the turn of the century the NIS wanted a headquarters, and what it commissioned was not an office.

Ground was broken on 27 February 1904. Building A was finished in July 1907; the rest of the complex followed between 1916 and 1919. The design came from Cosman Citroen, working for the Amsterdam firm of J.F. Klinkhamer and B.J. Ouendag, in what is called New Indies Style, which is Dutch architectural rationalism transplanted to the tropics and carrying Berlage’s fingerprints. The result is a building that solves genuine engineering problems with real intelligence and is, at the same time, a piece of propaganda.

The Dutch justified their presence in the archipelago through what was called the Ethical Policy: the claim that occupation delivered modernity, law and infrastructure to people who lacked them. Railways were the proof. Nothing in 1907 said the future like a train, and so the office that administered the trains was given towers, a veranda, a cathedral’s worth of stained glass, and the best corner in Semarang.

There was a second effect nobody in the boardroom intended. Building and running a rail network requires an industrial working class, and the Indies now had one. Railway and tram workers organised early and organised hard, through the VSTP union, and they were among the most politically dangerous employees in the colony. On 23 May 1920, in this city, the Perserikatan Komunis di Hindia was founded, later the PKI, with the railwaymen’s organiser Semaoen as its first chairman. The headquarters of Dutch rail and the birthplace of Asia’s first communist party outside the Soviet Union were the same square mile of Semarang. This is not a coincidence anybody has to strain for. It is what industrial infrastructure does.

In 1942 the Japanese took Java, and the NIS building became a transport bureau for the occupation. The Kempeitai used the basement of Building B as a detention centre. Rumours moved through the city about what happened down there, and one of them said that the severed heads of prisoners had been thrown into a corner. Whatever the truth of the specifics, Semarang learned to look at the building differently, and that is when the dread starts.

What happened next is the part almost every English-language source gets wrong.

Japan surrendered in August 1945 and Indonesia declared independence on the seventeenth of that month. Mountbatten, with no Allied troops yet in Java, instructed Japanese forces across Southeast Asia to hold order until relief arrived, which left armed Japanese garrisons sitting in cities that had just declared themselves part of a new republic. By early October, Semarang was substantially under Indonesian control. Negotiations between the pemuda, the Central Java governor Wongsonegoro, Major General Nakamura Junji and Major Kido Shinichiro produced a transfer of somewhere between six hundred and sixty and seven hundred rifles between 5 and 7 October. On the twelfth, the Indonesians asked for more and Kido refused.

On 14 October, Kido’s men disarmed the Indonesian guards on a city water reservoir. A doctor named Kariadi set out to test the water for poison and was shot dead on the way. That night, more than three hundred Japanese civilians who had been moved in from Kendal were being held at Bulu prison; an attempt to move them ended in a fight and then a massacre, with only a handful getting out. At around two in the morning on the fifteenth, before he knew about the prison, Kido launched his offensive, splitting his men into detachments of 383 and 94. On the afternoon of the sixteenth his troops took Bulu prison and found what was inside it, after which, by the accounts collected afterwards, they stopped taking prisoners.

Five days of street fighting. Estimates of the Indonesian dead run from under three hundred, in Dutch historiography, to around two thousand in Japanese. Kido logged forty-two of his own soldiers killed, forty-three wounded and 213 missing, with a further hundred and eight dead at Bulu. Eyewitnesses described streets with bodies in them and a ditch that had stopped draining.

On 19 October the British 10th Gurkha Rifles came ashore. The Japanese, mistaking them for Indonesian reinforcements, opened fire and killed two Gurkhas before losing four of their own; then they handed over the city.

There were no Dutch troops. The Dutch had no combat force in Central Java in October 1945, which is precisely why the pemuda were so desperate to get hold of Japanese rifles before one arrived. Wikipedia’s article on this building nonetheless states that the Dutch retook Semarang and used the tunnels beneath Building A to infiltrate the city, and Michael Vann’s otherwise excellent 2013 essay repeats it. The claim has been copied outward from there across the whole tourism internet. It is wrong in its combatants, wrong in its chronology, and wrong about the tunnels, which are the next problem.

Sukarno inaugurated the Tugu Muda in 1953. The building went to the Indonesian state railway, was occupied for years by the army, was listed as Cultural Property of Indonesia in 1992, and then was allowed to fall apart. By 2009 a Jakarta Post writer found it blackened by pollution, with plaster cracked, mould and weeds through the fabric, and rats as the principal tenants. Two rooms still carried the painted lines of long-abandoned badminton courts. There were places in the attic where you could see the sky.

Then, very suddenly, there was money. The restoration ran from 2009, and on 5 July 2011 the First Lady, Ani Yudhoyono, opened the rebuilt Building A. In late 2013 the city government announced a programme to eliminate the building’s frightening image and attract more visitors; it was already drawing around a thousand people a day. The basement was closed to the public in 2014. It reopened, ticketed and guided, on 3 December 2024.

The Legend of the Lawang Sewu Ghosts

Ask in Semarang about the Lawang Sewu ghosts and you will get a roster, and the roster is more culturally precise than the English-language ghost blogs allow.

The most famous resident is the noni Belanda, the Dutch girl. She is seen upstairs and in the corridors, usually at night, usually alone. In some tellings she is missing her head. In others she took her own life in the building, and in others still she was executed by the Japanese, which are three incompatible stories about one figure that circulate happily side by side.

Then there is the kuntilanak, and here the distinctions matter. A kuntilanak is not a person who happens to be dead. She is a category: a woman who died in or around childbirth, returning as a beautiful figure in white with long unbound hair, announced by the cry of an infant that sounds distant when she is close and close when she is distant, carried on the scent of frangipani. She is not the sundel bolong, the one with the hole in her back, though foreign accounts merge them constantly. She does not require a name, a date or a grave, because her identity is her manner of death and the rules that follow from it. In kejawen, Javanese spiritual practice, a violent death binds itself to a specific place, which is why a building with this history acquires occupants rather than memories.

There is a Japanese soldier, sometimes headless, in uniform. There is a story about the lower passages that says if you crouch in the dark long enough you will see something crawling with green eyes. There is a persistent belief that the tunnels run to the Kota Lama, four or five kilometres away, or to the harbour, or all the way out under the Java Sea. There was even a period when the city’s underground channels were blamed for a plague of pythons.

The stories multiplied in the derelict decades, and they multiplied for a reason: the building had started to look the part. Young men dared each other to go in after dark, and the braver ones tried to stay all night. That was a local practice, on a local scale, until 2007.

Lawang Sewu: Dendam Kuntilanak put it on every screen in Indonesia. The plot is thin: a group of young people out drinking end up inside the building, one of them urinates on the place, and the spirits take that badly. Among the avengers are a kuntilanak and a Dutchwoman who died by her own hand. The reviews were poor, one critic accusing the director of violating a culturally significant site, and the box office did not care. What the film did was fix a particular set of images to a real address: the endless doors, the stair hall, and above all the basement.

The television crews followed. A run of low-grade paranormal investigation shows went in with cameras and dared their presenters to spend the night, and the figure they returned to most often was the headless Dutchwoman. Then the smartphone arrived, and now there is an inexhaustible supply of blurred photographs.

By the time the state railway got its restoration money, the building was already, in the national imagination, a haunted house that happened to have been an office.

The Skeptics

Start with the room, because the room is where the Lawang Sewu ghosts live.

The basement of Building B was designed to be partly flooded. Water sat in it, evaporated, and pulled heat out of the floors above, which is a competent answer to the problem of putting several hundred clerks in a masonry building on the north coast of Java in 1907. It also took drainage off a site in a city that floods. Every serious account of the building’s construction says so, including the ones written by the company that owns it. The most feared room in Indonesia is climate control.

That does not, by itself, tell you nothing happened in it. Buildings get repurposed, and a windowless vault under an occupied administrative headquarters is exactly the kind of space an occupying military police force would find a use for. The Kempeitai detention centre is not seriously in dispute.

What is in dispute is everything below that level of detail. Go on the tour and you will be told about two kinds of cell. The penjara jongkok, the squatting prison: shallow tanks about fifty centimetres deep, prisoners forced to crouch in water up to the neck with an iron grille dropped over the top. The penjara berdiri, the standing prison: cells around a metre square holding seven or eight men who could not sit. You will be told these were not places of detention but places of killing, and that the bodies went into the river behind the building. The account is delivered identically by guides, tourism sites, national newspapers and the building’s own signage.

Nobody cites anything. There is no archival reference attached to it, no war crimes testimony quoted, no prisoner’s account named. That does not make it false: the Kempeitai’s conduct across occupied Southeast Asia is among the best-documented atrocities of the war, and none of what is described here is out of character. But a claim this specific, repeated this uniformly, with this little provenance, has the texture of something that consolidated in the retelling rather than something that was recorded. The honest position is that the detention is documented and the furniture of it is not.

The tunnels are cleaner. Semarang heritage observers have said flatly that there is no physical evidence for a passage to the harbour or the Java Sea, and the claim survives anyway. What exists is seventeen short connecting passages within the complex. Tjahjono Raharjo, an architect at Unika Soegijapranata in Semarang, has gone further and questioned the drainage account itself, suggesting the underground space reads more like storage, which is a useful correction to make, because it shows that even the sensible explanation of this basement is a reconstruction rather than a certainty. Two competing readings of a hole in the ground, neither of them documented to the standard anyone would want, and the version with the water torture is the one that travels.

Then the sightings themselves. This is a building with roughly six hundred large openings, long parallel arcades, and interior sightlines that run the full length of two street frontages. Move anywhere in it and something moves at the edge of vision, several rooms away, framed by a doorway. Restored, the arcades are also full of hard reflective surfaces and pale walls. Derelict, for four decades, they were full of rats, bats, standing water, and a roof that let the weather in. A pale shape at distance in a repeating colonnade is not a demanding perceptual problem.

The dates are the strongest sceptical argument, and they are not really contestable. The Lawang Sewu ghost stories did not accumulate steadily from 1945. They accumulated during the decades of neglect, went national in 2007 with a horror film, and was industrialised by television immediately afterwards. The specific ghost that the television shows kept producing, the headless Dutchwoman, is the specific ghost the film had put in front of the audience. What visitors report seeing is what they were shown before they arrived.

But the door does not close all the way, and it is worth being precise about why. The sceptical account explains the distribution of the sightings beautifully: where, when, and in what form. It explains why this building and not the other colonial landmarks of Kota Lama a kilometre north. What it does not explain is why the vocabulary held. A film gave the country a Dutchwoman. The country already had a kuntilanak, and she is still there, in the older stories and the newer ones, obeying rules that no screenwriter invented and no camera crew could film. Something in this place was being described in Javanese terms long before it was described in cinematic ones, and that older description has not been displaced. It has simply agreed to share the room.

My Thoughts

I think the Lawang Sewu ghosts are doing a job.

Not a supernatural one. Ghost stories are what a place produces when it is dark, empty, structurally repetitive and known to have been the site of violence, and Lawang Sewu was all four for forty years. I do not think a woman in white walks the second floor. I think the perceptual and commercial machinery that makes people see her is well understood, and that a horror film in 2007 did more to populate this building than the Kempeitai ever did.

What holds me is the second thing the Lawang Sewu ghosts are doing, which is carrying a history that is otherwise not permitted to move.

Look at what the official account of this building is permitted to say, and then at what it reaches for instead. The restoration was opened by a First Lady and the press wrote it up as an exorcism. Two years later the city announced a plan to remove the building’s frightening image, which is an extraordinary thing for a government to say out loud about a building whose meaning it does not own. The architectural style is handled in careful international terms. Every evasion in the place is pulling in the same direction, and the two histories underneath them cannot be told: one because it is humiliating, the other because after 1965 that lineage is not something an Indonesian state institution can put on a wall.

The third one requires no ministry’s approval whatsoever. It costs nothing to repeat, nobody has to sign it off, nobody has ever lost a job over it. So it is the one that gets repeated, until it is the only version of this place that more than two hundred and eighty million people can name.

Here is what makes me uncomfortable rather than merely interested. The ghost story is not, functionally, a lie told over the top of the history. It is a container. Everything true about this building, that people were held and hurt under it, that it was built to glorify an occupation, that men died in the streets outside it in October 1945, is inside the ghost story in some deformed shape. The Dutchwoman is colonialism, unnamed and unresolved and still upstairs. The prisoners in the flooded cells are the occupation, remembered with a precision the archive cannot supply. The dread is accurate even where the detail is not. When people say the building is angry, they are not wrong about the building. They are only wrong about the mechanism.

And the state railway understood this perfectly well, whatever its press releases said. It took a rotting colonial office block that might not have attracted the same public urgency on architectural merit alone, and it saved it after the haunting had made it nationally famous. Then it spent a decade trying to make the haunting go away. Then it reopened the basement, put a guide in front of every group, and started charging for the dark.

I do not read that as cynicism, exactly. I read it as an institution losing an argument with its own public and deciding, sensibly, to charge admission to the loss.

Which leaves the question I cannot get past. If the only version of this building’s history that can circulate freely is the one that isn’t true, and if that version is nonetheless carrying the emotional content of the two that are, then when the guide takes the group down into the water tanks and tells them about the squatting prison, is that a failure of history, or is it the closest thing to remembrance this building is currently allowed?

Visitor Information

Lawang Sewu is at Jalan Pemuda 160, Sekayu, Semarang Tengah, in the centre of Semarang, facing the Tugu Muda roundabout. It is one of the easiest heritage sites in Java to reach: the BRT Trans Semarang stops at Tugu Muda, taxis and ride-hailing know it by name alone, and it is about twenty minutes from Semarang Tawang station or forty from Ahmad Yani airport, depending entirely on the traffic, which is considerable.

The March 2026 KAI visitor listing gives opening hours of 08:00–20:00 from Sunday to Friday and 08:00–22:00 on Saturday. General admission is Rp20,000 for Indonesian adults and university students, Rp10,000 for children and school students, and Rp30,000 for international visitors. The guided Kelderverkenning basement tour is a separate Rp50,000 ticket. Hours, tour access and prices can change, so check KAI or @wisata.lawangsewu before travelling.

Staying overnight in Semarang? Compare places to stay in Semarang. If you book through this link, Shin Stories may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The basement tour is worth doing, and it is not a casual walk. It is guided, groups only, with a hard hat and hi-vis vest issued at the entrance. Ceilings are low, floors are uneven, and the air is close. If you are claustrophobic or unsteady, this is a genuine consideration rather than a formality. Daily numbers into the site are capped, so arrive earlier in the day at weekends and during Indonesian school holidays.

Give the ground floor of Building B a proper hour before you go under it. The railway history displays are better than they need to be, and reading them first makes the argument of this piece visible in a way that no amount of description will. Then walk out to the small monument to the railway employees killed here in 1945, near the exit, and give it a minute. Almost nobody does.

One request. This is not a set. People were held and hurt beneath this building within living memory, and a paying visitor with a phone standing in that room has an obligation that the film crews mostly did not honour. Photograph the architecture, by all means. Take the guide seriously even where the history is shakier than the delivery. And if you are tempted to test whether anything down there responds to being provoked, consider that the people who would be listening are not the ones you came for.

Before You Go

The Dark Atlas is a journey through twenty of the world’s most compelling haunted places, and Lawang Sewu is number eleven. The episode that goes with this article takes a route the piece above does not: it follows the money rather than the building, and it ends somewhere I did not expect when I started researching.

If you want the rest of it, everything is here. The full documented history of the NIS building and the Five Day Battle, the sourced correction to the version of October 1945 that most of the internet is still repeating, the sceptical case on the basement, the complete ghost roster as Semarang actually tells it, and the practical visitor guide above. All of it, and every source, at shinstories.co.uk.

Continue through the archive with the Castle of Good Hope ghosts and the Mackenzie Poltergeist at Greyfriars, or explore every mapped location in The Dark Atlas. Location twelve is closer to home, and considerably stranger than its reputation.

Follow The Dark Atlas on Spotify as each new location is mapped.

Sources

Books and Academic Works

Han Bing Siong, “The Secret of Major Kido: The Battle of Semarang, 15–19 October 1945,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 152:3 (1996), 382–428.

Kenʼichi Gotō, Tensions of Empire: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Colonial and Postcolonial World (Singapore, 2003).

Stephen B. Connor, Mountbatten’s Samurai: Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Forces under British Control in Southeast Asia, 1945–1948 (NUS Press, 2015).

Moehkardi, Revolusi Nasional 1945 di Semarang (Gadjah Mada University Press, 2021).

Panitia Penyusunan Sejarah Pertempuran Lima Hari Semarang, Sejarah Pertempuran Lima Hari Semarang (Semarang: Suara Merdeka, 1977).

Jongkie Tio, Semarang City: A Glance into the Past (2011).

Gunawan Tjahjono (ed.), Architecture, Indonesian Heritage vol. 6 (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1998).

Het Indische bouwen: architectuur en stedebouw in Indonesië, 1800–1950 (Gemeentemuseum Helmond, 1990).

Journalism and Long-form Reporting

Michael G. Vann, “Haunted house, haunted history,” Inside Indonesia 112 (April–June 2013).

Simon Marcus Gower, “Lawang Sewu: A haunted, sad place,” The Jakarta Post, 9 February 2009.

Ainur Rohmah, “Lawang Sewu’s spooky image eliminated to lure more visitors,” The Jakarta Post, 28 December 2013.

AA Ariwibowo, “First Lady Inaugurates Renovated Lawang Sewu Building,” Antara, 5 July 2011.

“Banyak Warga Kecewa Lawang Sewu Direnovasi,” Okezone, 13 October 2011.

“Ruang Bawah Tanah Lawang Sewu Dibuka Lagi setelah 10 Tahun,” Tempo, 8 December 2024.

“Wisata Sejarah Lawang Sewu 2025: Harga Tiket, Wahana, Aktivitas Wisata,” Kompas, 19 August 2025.

M.F. Mukhti, “Orang Semarang Melawan Jepang,” Historia, 19 October 2017.

“6 Fakta Ruang Bawah Tanah Lawang Sewu,” Merdeka, 18 June 2020, carrying the comments of Tjahjono Raharjo of Unika Soegijapranata on the underground space.

Official and Institutional Sources

KAI Wisata / PT Kereta Api Indonesia: site management, current opening hours, ticketing and the Kelderverkenning basement tour.

Semarang City Government, Lawang Sewu heritage listing (Cultural Property of Indonesia, 1992).

Central Java Provincial Tourism Office, Lawang Sewu.

Ministry of Tourism of the Republic of Indonesia, indonesia.travel.

Further Reading

Lawang Sewu: Dendam Kuntilanak (dir. Arie Azis, 2007): the film that made the building nationally famous, and the origin point for much of what visitors now report seeing.

The English Wikipedia entry on Lawang Sewu, cited here specifically because it is the most-read English account of the building and it states that Dutch forces retook Semarang in October 1945 using the tunnels beneath Building A. It is the clearest single example of how the error discussed in this article propagated.