Everyone loves a good ghost story… until it happens to you.

For TVB actress Joyce Tang, she never expected that her first drama, A Kindred Spirit, which ran from 1995 to 1999, would end up giving her plenty of encounters with the supernatural.

She was 19 and a showbiz rookie when she was cast in the drama. Most of the scenes were filmed on a studio set, and the bright eyed starlet didn’t think much of the spooky tales she had been told.

“I remember we were filming overnight one day and I had to go to the restroom,” Joyce recalled. “You could see the washbasins in the male toilet when you were entering the female restrooms. I noticed that the mirrors in the male toilets were always dry, but the ones in the female restrooms were always dripping with water.”

According to Joyce, opposite the restrooms was the changing room, where a huge portrait of the Goddess of Mercy faced the doorway. The door of the changing room was usually left open as the staff felt that it would ward off any evil.

One time, the door of changing room was closed, and Joyce went into the bathroom on her own. As she was washing her hands, she got the shock of her life when she saw another person in the toilet from the reflection in the mirror.

“I looked around and I was sure that I was the only person in the bathroom,” she said. “The toilet is known to be haunted, and there would always be someone who would burn offerings in front of that mirror on the first and 15th day of every Lunar month.”

And it wasn’t only the toilet that had bad juju.

Once, Joyce and her cast mates were in the studio at 2am when the audio engineer commented that he could hear someone whistling. Even after the crew checked to make sure all doors were closed and that nobody was whistling, he could still hear it through the mic.

The crew then told the cast to say their lines louder to drown out the sound, and quickly wrapped up filming for the day. “Even though we tried that, I still heard someone whistling just beside my ear, said Joyce.

Joyce's ghostly encounters didn't end after filming for A Kindred Spirit wrapped, like that time she was in Beijing for work.

“I was there for half a year, but I knew that I had a ‘friend’ staying in the same room as me from the very first day I arrived,” she said. “It refused to let me open the door and enter until I said ‘Hello, I’m back!’ It would turn off the lights when I turned it on, and adjusted the TV’s volume when it felt like it. It even turned on the heater or air conditioning if the weather was too cold or hot. It never hurt me, so I felt like it was only right to treat it with respect.”

Photos: PBE Media