The Little Girl in Red: Taiwan’s 1998 Hiking Tape

Somewhere in Taiwan, a family still has a home movie they wish they'd never watched twice. The first viewing was ordinary: a weekend hike, a tired toddler, a grandfather cracking jokes at the trailhead. The second viewing, weeks later and for a very different reason, is the one that turned into national news, then into folklore, then into a horror franchise that's still adding sequels a quarter-century on.

The story is known across Taiwan simply as Hong Yi Xiao Nu Hai — the Little Girl in Red.

The 1998 Video

On March 1, 1998, a family climbed the Dakeng trails in Beitun District, Taichung, and recorded the outing on a Sony V8 camcorder — the bulky consumer format that briefly replaced VHS-C for home video before digital tape and, later, phones took over. Nothing about the footage stood out at the time. The tape got shelved with every other undramatic home video a family accumulates.

What brought it back out, according to accounts that circulated for years afterward, was a death. One of the men on the hike reportedly died within weeks of the trip, and relatives went looking through old tapes for footage of him. That's when someone noticed the figure walking a few steps behind the group: a small child in a red outfit, moving with the same gait as everyone else, except that her face — when the tape was paused and studied — looked wrong. Sunken eyes. Skin like an old woman's rather than a child's. No one in the family recognized her, and no one remembered a child following them on the trail that day.

The family handed the tape to Shen Chu Gui Mo (“Ghosts and Spirits Appear and Disappear”), a paranormal program that aired on Taiwan's GTV Channel 27. Once it broadcast, the clip did what viral videos would later do on the internet, except it did it through a single television airing and the word-of-mouth that followed. Newspapers picked up the story. Viewers who'd been on similar trails came forward with their own sightings. The broadcast itself, and the public reaction it triggered, are documented — TV listings and contemporary press coverage confirm the program aired and that it caused a stir. What actually happened on that hillside in March 1998 is not something anyone has ever been able to verify. The tape itself, filtered through decades of retelling, is the only physical evidence, and its authenticity has never been independently confirmed.

A Legend Taiwan Already Believed

Part of why the tape landed so hard is that it slotted neatly into an existing fear. Taiwanese hiking communities have long warned each other about disappearances in the mountains, and the entity blamed is usually the same one: a mo-sin-a (魔神仔), a small, child-like spirit said to lure hikers off marked trails, sometimes for hours, sometimes permanently. Victims who are eventually found often describe losing time, or being led by what looked like a familiar face. Older newspaper archives from the Japanese colonial period already record cases attributed to mo-sin-a activity, so the belief predates the 1998 tape by decades. It's one of several homegrown Taiwanese entities blamed for things going wrong outdoors — hikers who wander off invoke the mo-sin-a, while rural families who lose a bamboo stalk fight to Tek-ko-kui, the bamboo ghost of Taiwan’s forests, for a very different kind of bad luck.

The Little Girl in Red gave that older fear a face and a format. Where mo-sin-a stories had circulated as oral warnings passed between hikers, the 1998 footage offered something that felt closer to proof: a timestamp, a location, a family who said they'd lived it. Whether the girl in the video was a mo-sin-a, a wandering spirit looking for a substitute to take her place, or — as skeptics have argued from the start — a straggler from another hiking group whose face was simply distorted by low-grade video compression and camcorder lighting, is a question the legend never resolves. All three explanations still get argued in Taiwanese forums and news comment sections today.

From Campfire Story to Box Office Franchise

The tape stayed in circulation as a staple of Taiwanese ghost-story television and, later, early internet forwards, but it took until 2015 for it to become a proper cultural franchise. Director Cheng Wei-hao's The Tag-Along, built around the legend, became a genuine domestic hit rather than a niche horror release. The sequel, The Tag-Along 2 (2017), reportedly outperformed the original at Taiwan's box office, pulling in more than NT$100 million. A prequel, The Tag-Along: The Devil Fish, followed in 2018, and the character has continued to appear in spin-off material since. Outside Taiwan, English-language horror communities and folklore blogs picked up the story mostly through the films, which is one reason the legend itself — as opposed to the movie franchise — has had thin coverage in English until now.

The Little Girl in Red belongs to a small, recognizable category of urban legends that were essentially born on tape or camera rather than passed down purely by word of mouth — the same category that produced America's Fresno Nightcrawlers, a cryptid that started as a 2007 backyard security camera clip. In both cases, a piece of footage did what centuries of oral storytelling used to do on its own: it gave a vague regional fear a specific, arguable, endlessly rewatchable shape.

FAQ

Is the 1998 Little Girl in Red video real?

The broadcast itself is documented: Taiwanese media covered a paranormal program airing a home video that caused a public sensation in 1998. Whether the figure in the footage is a genuine unexplained phenomenon, a misidentified hiker, or a fabricated addition to the tape has never been independently verified. Treat the footage's contents as unresolved, not confirmed.

What is a mo-sin-a?

A mo-sin-a (魔神仔) is a mountain spirit in Taiwanese folklore, usually described as small and child-like, blamed for luring hikers off trails and causing disappearances. The belief predates the 1998 video by generations and is still referenced by hiking communities in Taiwan's mountain regions today.

Is The Tag-Along based on a true story?

The film franchise is inspired by the Little Girl in Red legend and directly references the 1998 video, but it is a scripted horror film, not a documentary. Plot details, characters, and the supernatural mechanics on screen are fictional dramatizations built around the older folklore.

Where did the video footage come from?

According to the accounts that circulated after the 1998 broadcast, the footage was shot on a V8 camcorder during a family hiking trip on the Dakeng trails in Taichung's Beitun District, then submitted to a Taiwanese television program after a death in the family prompted relatives to review old tapes.