The Ghost Tower, Bangkok.

The Ghost Tower, Bangkok.

April 2015.

I was having breakfast in the hostel one morning when I overheard a curious conversation between an American expat and an Australian backpacker.

“Dude, you haven’t climbed The Ghost Tower?!?!”

The American’s coffee cup hung suspended in mid-air. Crime of all crimes, Mr Australia had never set foot in The Ghost Tower. I hadn’t so much as heard of the place, which is how I came to be shamelessly eavesdropping. The details were patchy, but as Uncle Sam told it there was an abandoned skyscraper over in Sathon District. One you could walk into and explore for a small fee.

In truth, I was more than a little naive when I headed off that afternoon with the Australian to find the tower. All I knew was that it stood just off Charoen Krung Road. At forty-nine storeys high we had no trouble spotting it, but what surprised me was how easy it proved to get inside. We walked in through an open gate, past nothing I can recall in the way of trespassing notices or safety warnings.

On the ground floor, an empty open-air shell, I noticed a metal door leading to a stairwell. Beside it sat a middle-aged Thai man at a desk, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“Ghost Tower?” he asked, barely looking up.

The fee, he insisted, was 200 Baht, around $7. We paid our dues and headed on through, adrenaline pulsing.

The Ghost Tower, Bangkok.

Though I didn’t know it on the day of my climb, The Ghost Tower’s real name is Sathorn Unique Tower. Planned as a luxury high-rise condominium complex, construction began in 1990 under the supervision of Rangsan Torsuwan, a renowned Thai architect and real estate mogul.

Three years in, the project ran into trouble of a kind nobody could have forecast. Rangsan was arrested and charged with masterminding a plot to murder Praman Chansue, the President of Thailand’s Supreme Court. The trial dragged on for fifteen years. He was eventually convicted in 2008 and sentenced to twenty-five years, then acquitted on appeal in 2010.

Building work carried on for a while, but the scandal did its damage. Investors drifted away and the money grew harder to raise. When the Asian financial crisis arrived in 1997 it drove the final nail into the tower’s coffin, bankrupting the finance companies behind the scheme and leaving the building around 80% complete.

The building has stood empty ever since as Bangkok’s tallest derelict tower. I remember what a workout the climb was, floor after floor of it. The first five to ten storeys offered little to look at, only gutted stone hallways and rooms carrying the odd patch of charmless graffiti.

Sathorn Unique Tower.

It was a creepy experience all the same. Ghostly, you might say, with nobody else about and our footsteps echoing down the dark, dank corridors.

The tower’s ghostly moniker comes from a widely held local belief that the structure is haunted. And, some would say, not without cause. In December 2014 it returned to the headlines when a Thai photographer working his way up the floors found the body of a Swedish man in his thirties on the forty-third. Police concluded that the death was a suicide. He had been there for the best part of a week. I was glad, afterwards, to have known nothing of it on the day of my climb.

Just over a year after my climb the tower got a new set of visitors when a Thai film crew arrived to shoot a horror movie called The Promise, released in 2017. Its story begins in 1997 with two teenage girls, whose families are ruined by the Asian financial crisis. They make a pact to end their lives together in the half-built tower. But only one of them goes through with it, and twenty years later the broken promise comes back for the survivor.

Up on one of the thirty-something floors, I came upon a local photographer setting up his tripod. As with most of the balconies I saw, there were no railings or barriers of any kind. Just a narrow stone ledge and a sharp drop down to oblivion.

The Ghost Tower, Bangkok.

He was shooting a nearby skyscraper, the Lebua State Tower. As well as being one of Bangkok’s fanciest five-star hotels, film fans may recognise it from the Hollywood comedy The Hangover Part II. Most memorably in the rooftop scene with Paul Giamatti, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Ken Jeong, filmed at the golden-domed Sky Bar and Sirocco on the 63rd and 64th floors.

Photo courtesy of Na derdingseben.

The two towers are more closely related than they look from a distance. Lebua State Tower came off the same drawing board as the one I was standing in, both of them Rangsan Torsuwan’s work. Which is why they share Neo-Grecian columns and balconies. One got finished, the other got the likes of me mooching around its desolate corridors.

Long before the film crew turned up, the family had been trying to offload the place. In 2004 Rangsan’s son Pansit joined the firm and set about finding a buyer, without success. The sticking point was the price. They held out for a figure that would repay the original purchasers in full rather than declare bankruptcy, and nobody was willing to meet it.

By the time we neared the rooftop we were hot, breathless and running on fumes. But the views over Bangkok made every floor of the climb worthwhile.

The Ghost Tower, Bangkok.

Had I stopped to do any research beforehand I might have thought twice. I knew nothing of the Swedish man. Nor did I know about a South American visitor who, clambering over a pile of rubble on the twenty-second storey, fell straight through the floor and broke a leg and a hip.

The Aussie and I cracked open the beers we’d carried up from a 7-Eleven on the way. The whole thing had been so spontaneous, and had unfolded so fast, that this was the first moment I’d had to stop and consider what I’d done.

As it turned out, I was among the last people to get in so easily. Later in 2015 Pansit Torsuwan tightened security with extra guards and no-trespassing signs. He also filed criminal charges against five people who had posted footage of themselves inside, including a pair of backpackers who filmed themselves free running on the roof.

Access has grown harder ever since. The guards who once waved people through for a fee appear to have gone, and the tower now sits behind several layers of locked barriers. Atlas Obscura lists it as permanently closed and warns that anyone trying their luck risks a spell in a Bangkok prison cell. Every recent traveller account that I’ve come across says some version of the same thing. Don’t even try.

Sunset Over the Thai capital.

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