It is a brick structure in the French Baroque architectural style built in the early 20th century, with a larger outbuilding.

During the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1960s, it was briefly occupied by the Red Guards; their hasty departure from the property has been cited as further evidence of the haunting.

It is currently owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing, which in the late 1990s raised the possibility that it might one day serve as the Vatican embassy as a reason for not demolishing it.

[4] The house is located along the north side of the street, about 250 metres (820 ft) west of the Second Ring Road intersection, the former site of the Chaoyangmen gate for which the neighborhood is named.

Scattered around the intersection with the Ring Road are exits and entrances to the Chaoyangmen station on Lines 2 and 6 of the Beijing Subway.

At the intersection with the ring road is the distinctively shaped headquarters of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation; other high-rises are on the neighboring corners.

Short driveways and narrow alleys lead to two-story residential buildings in the interior of the block, separated by occasional rows of trees.

a third along the top of the windows on the latter marks the middle of the plain stone frieze below the damaged modillioned cornice from which some trees sprout.

Metal drainpipes fed by older pipes run down the facade on both sides of the pavilion and just south of the north corner.

The side quoining continues up to the mid-facade water table, enclosing a slightly raised stone panel with a carved foliate design.

They are brick with stone trim at the corners, plain rectangular forms that echo the more ornate front entrance balcony below.

It is flanked by two casement windows with elongate middle panes topped by a two-pan transom of almost the same height as the door.

On its first level it has a tripartite French door (mostly gone with only shards of glass remaining) with the same treatment as the one on the west corner of the south side, save for the stone panel being plain.

The exposed brick facade is covered with discoloring brownish dust that makes it appear the same color as the stone, and most of the windows are completely gone, leaving only openings.

With the main house it shares the water tables, course and modillioned cornice at the same positions on its facades, and the quoined window surrounds.

[7] "The history is very difficult to get straight," Xu Wen, one of the property's groundskeepers, told The New York Times in 2014, as building records predating the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic of China are inconsistent or missing.

Most commonly, it is believed to have been built around 1910 as the North China Union Language School, to teach Mandarin Chinese to missionaries from the West.

An Irish-born priest may have attempted to use it in 1937, after which, the diocese claims, it was used by a group of Belgian Augustinian nuns as a clinic during World War II and until at least 1946.

[10] At the time of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War three years later, it was being run by the Irish Presbyterian Mission.

Shi Hongxi, secretary general of the Beijing chapter of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), which oversees the property's current owner, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing, says there is no record of a Kuomintang officer living there, the basis for the most common story of the house's alleged haunting, at that time in history.

By that time Beijing's real estate market was booming as reforms by Deng Xiaoping liberalized the Chinese economy, and the buildings had reached the point where they were close to being demolished.

The archdiocese suggested that the complex would be ideal for use as the Vatican embassy should relations between it and China improve to the point that ambassadors were exchanged.

Between 2003 and 2005 it listed the project as one of its top priorities, but then Fu Tieshan, the CPCA secretary who had been instrumental in saving the property, died and it was put on hold.

[12] While the heritage listing prevented the buildings from being torn down, it also made it difficult to renovate since strict historic preservation rules have to be followed.

[13] During the preceding years legends about the old deteriorated, overgrown house in the middle of an otherwise modern, developing neighborhood being haunted spread, and local teenagers flocked to it out of curiosity.

[2] In 2011, Hong Kong filmmakers Raymond Yip and Manfred Wong began what would ultimately be three years of preproduction for The House That Never Dies, a horror film set at Chaonei No.

The Red Guards who moved into the house during the previous decade's Cultural Revolution supposedly left after a few days because they were frightened, he said.

She has been described as either the wife or lover of an officer in the National Revolutionary Army, the military arm of the Kuomintang (KMT), during the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s.

[1] The rumors and legends may have practical effects, making the property impossible to sell or lease despite the otherwise liquid real-estate market in the area.

Although the diocese estimates that repairs to the house would cost at least US$1.5 million, that would be unlikely to deter buyers since similar properties nearby have been sold for several times that amount.