The Little Girl in Red: where the Taiwan footage came from

What the legend says

Ask in Taiwan what the little girl in red is, and the answer is short and remarkably stable. A group of relatives went walking in the hills. Someone filmed it. Watching the tape afterwards, they noticed a small figure in red trailing the line of walkers — child-sized, but with a face that looked old. Not long afterwards one of the walkers died.

That is the whole of the legend as it is usually told. It is also why people ask whether the little girl in red is real rather than filing her with invented ghost stories: the story comes with a piece of tape attached.

Where it started

The outing took place in 1998, in the Dakeng hills of Taichung's Beitun district, and it was recorded on a domestic V8 camcorder. The Taiwanese writer He Jing-yao, in a 2021 Liberty Times column on the island's folk monsters, sets out the sequence: more than a dozen relatives went walking; a man who appears in the footage died of illness soon afterwards; a family member then sent the tape to a television paranormal programme and asked whether the two things were connected.

The programme screened it and gave the figure the name it still carries. Sources do not agree on when. English-language reviews of the later film, in the South China Morning Post and the Taipei Times, both trace the legend to a video from 1998; a United Daily News retrospective on 1990s ghost television places the broadcast in 1998 on the cable channel GTV; He Jing-yao's column says the programme aired the tape in 2000 and named the figure then. The Taipei Times review gives the year of the video itself as 1988. No archived broadcast record has been published that would settle it.

How it grew

The tape arrived at the right moment. Taiwanese television in the 1990s ran one paranormal series after another: TTV's Tonight (1990), with the storyteller Sima Zhongyuan; TTV's Rose Night (1991) and its Ghost Talk segment hosted by Peng Chia-chia; then Contact the Sixth Sense, Sunday Scares and others. Viewers posting their own tapes to a television station was ordinary behaviour, and stations competed for them.

After the broadcast the figure left television and became something walkers said to each other. In 2015 the story was made into a feature film, The Tag-Along, directed by the first-time director Cheng Wei-hao, followed by sequels. Most people outside Taiwan first heard the name from the films rather than from the tape.

What the folklore says she is

Both English-language reviews explained the film through mosinna (魔神仔). The Taipei Times called it "a kind of mountain demon known to steal humans — usually children and the elderly". The South China Morning Post described such spirits as ghosts that appear in the shape of children or monkeys.

Lin Mei-jung, an anthropologist at Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology who spent a decade on fieldwork about the tradition, argues that the little girl in red is a modern version of it. In a 2017 interview she listed the shared features — appearing in the mountains, a child's build, an aged blue-black complexion, red clothing — while noting that the backpack is modern student dress rather than a traditional element. In a 2025 university lecture she placed the figure between two traditions: the red clothing and childlike shape fit the mountain spirit, while the sense of grievance around the story belongs to the female-ghost tradition. She also set mosinna alongside Fujian's mihunzai, the Japanese kappa and European fairies, as versions of the same idea about wild places.

Which details hold up

Verifiable: the footage exists, it was broadcast, and it produced a nationwide reaction. Also verifiable, and more interesting: the programme sent a team to Dakeng, interviewed residents and school staff, and never found any lead as to who the figure was. He Jing-yao's column states this plainly. A programme admitting it found nothing is the sturdiest part of the whole account.

Not verifiable from anything published: the family's identity, the identity of the man who died, any independent examination of the original tape, and the exact date of the first broadcast. No contemporaneous record has been found that confirms the chain from the outing to the death to the posting of the tape. That chain rests entirely on what the family told the programme.

A calmer reading has circulated in Taiwan since the broadcast: that the figure was a walker separated from another party, and that low resolution and hillside light made the face look aged. It is plausible, and it is also untested — on the published record, nobody with access to the original tape has ever examined it frame by frame and shown their work.

Verdict

The tape is real. What is on it is not settled. Real or Legend has filed the little girl in red as disputed: a genuine piece of 1998 home video, a broadcast whose date the sources contradict each other on, and a figure nobody has been able to name in more than a quarter of a century. The true story, as far as it can be traced, is a story about a tape and a television programme — and about a much older idea of what shares the hills with you.