Hong Kong’s Ocean Park has said it made “immediate adjustments” to a haunted house display following reports that it appeared to allude to the gruesome murder of model Abby Choi.
Local media reported over the weekend that during a preview event on Friday, journalists noticed one of the theme park’s haunted houses, part of the Halloween festival, featured a fake decapitated head in a soup pot.
Actors in the haunted house also reportedly asked visitors if they wanted “green radish soup” and whether they were “fighting over inheritance” – apparently referring to details of the 2023 murder that surfaced from police investigations and court proceedings.
The haunted houses have yet to open to the public. They will run on select dates from October 10 to November 2.
Paulo Pong, chairman of the Ocean Park Corporation’s board, told Commercial Radio on Monday that the park took the public views “very seriously” and had made immediate alterations to the display.
“For the past 25 years, Ocean Park’s Halloween Fest has been a place to play, have fun, and have a scare, and if it causes any concern to people, we take it very seriously and have immediately changed the design and made adjustments,” he said on the radio programme.
Pong also said that an internal preview, originally scheduled on Wednesday, was called off due to Super Typhoon Ragasa, and that the theme park was unable to make adjustments in time.
“After this incident, we’ve all learnt a lesson,” he said.
“I hope that we can give our young… creatives a chance to learn and understand that there are other factors to be considered when creating,” he added.
In a media statement on Saturday, Ocean Park said that all displays, characters, storylines, and dialogues were “entirely fictional,” and that concerns about individual scenes had been taken seriously, with immediate adjustments made.
In February 2023, Choi, 28, was allegedly murdered and dismembered by her ex-husband and members of his family, following a financial dispute, according to authorities. Legal proceedings over the murder case are still ongoing.
Scholars said that the murder revealed misogynistic undercurrents in the local media industry and Hong Kong society at large.
