The Death of a Factory Girl: An Anthropological Narrative of Haunting and Spatial Memory in the Post-Industrial Era

An Anthropological Study on Hauntings
It is precisely those silenced or disappeared ghosts that offer us a new beginning to understanding history.

On the morning of September 3, 1973, at Cijin Zhongzhou Pier, a group of men and women eager to get to work at the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone crowded onto the "Gaoshang No. 6" ferry heading to Qianzhen, Kaohsiung. These private ferries usually could only carry a maximum of about 10 people, but this particular ferry was packed with over 70 people. It capsized and sank during the journey. Twenty-five women, aged between 13 and 30, tragically drowned. The victims' families and the Kaohsiung City Government decided to bury the women who died in the accident together. The place where they were collectively buried was called the "Twenty-Five Maidens' Tomb." Folk legends state that unmarried women who die become homeless female ghosts. Rumors began to circulate that ghosts haunted the Twenty-Five Maidens' Tomb, seeking husbands, and people started to avoid passing through the area. The young female workers who lost their lives that year also bore the stigma of being specters.

In 2008, at the behest of local women's rights groups, the Kaohsiung City Government rectified the name for these unfortunate women, renovating the "Twenty-Five Maidens' Tomb" and officially renaming it the "Memorial Park for Working Women." The 25 young women who tragically drowned on their way to work were redefined as "heroic young female workers who fought for Taiwan's economic development in the 1960s," thereby promoting gender equality and labor safety issues.

Why were the victims of the ferry incident initially buried together? After so many years, why exhume their remains and go to such great lengths to renovate their resting place? How did their lives and deaths affect those around them? How did the surrounding community form a collective memory of the deceased? How do these memories connect with the past, present, and future?