The Halloween season is an excellent time to explore the spooky side of Beijing, and few places in the capital are as soaked in blood and steeped in the supernatural as the now rather banal neighborhood outside the Caishikou Subway Station. For centuries, this area was famous for two things: being one of Beijing’s largest vegetable markets; as well as the place where thousands of prisoners met a grisly end at the hands of imperial executioners. Every autumn, prisoners were taken to Caishikou via the Xuanwumen (which earned the gate the happy moniker of “The Gate of Death”) at dawn. The condemned were lined up east to west, had their necks stretched with a rope, and awaited the chop.