Bangkok's Ghost Tower: Why the "Bribe the Guard" Blogs You're Reading Are Dangerously Outdated
The Short Answer
No — you cannot legally get inside the Sathorn Unique Tower, Bangkok's infamous "Ghost Tower," anymore. The steel door across the ground-floor stairwell has been welded shut, active security patrols circulate the property, and the owner has a documented history of filing criminal trespassing complaints against visitors who post proof of entry online. If you're reading a blog post that tells you to "just tip the guard a few hundred baht," it was almost certainly written before 2015 and it is not current information.
Why So Many Blogs Still Tell You to Bribe the Guard
Here's the thing that trips up almost every traveler who Googles this: the outdated advice isn't wrong because someone made it up. It's wrong because it used to be true. For a window of a few years in the early 2010s, the 49-story unfinished skyscraper really did have an unofficial "admission fee" system — pay a guard a small amount at the ground floor, and he'd look the other way while you climbed 43-plus flights of open stairwells to the roof.
That era is the one still living rent-free in the SEO rankings. A huge percentage of the articles and videos that come up when you search for the Ghost Tower were published between 2012 and 2018, and Google has never bothered to demote them just because the situation on the ground changed. Search engines don't know that a building's security posture is time-sensitive the way a flight price is.
What actually happened: as urban-explorer videos of the tower went viral — including a widely shared freerunning video shot on the rooftop — the owner, Pansit Torsuwan, started filing police complaints for trespassing against people who posted footage online. He's been explicit that the goal was deterrence, not revenue. The bribeable guard system got shut down, and at some point in the years since, a welded steel gate went up across the stairwell that used to be the standard entry point.
Zensseys Tip: If a travel blog about the Ghost Tower doesn't mention a publish or update date anywhere on the page, assume it's telling you how things worked five-plus years ago, not how they work today. This building's access situation has changed dramatically more than once.
What Actually Happens If You Try to Get In Now
The most useful data point here isn't a warning sign — it's a very public example. In April 2025, a foreign Instagram user posted a video of himself and a friend cutting through a lock to climb to the roof, captioned as if they were the first people to reach the top in five-plus years. It did not go the way they hoped. Thai and international commenters criticized the stunt heavily, and it reinforced, publicly, that the building is privately owned, actively monitored, and that unauthorized entry is treated as a real trespassing case rather than a harmless urban legend.
The physical risk is just as real as the legal one. The tower's structural shell is roughly 80–90% complete, but the interior finishing work — railings, floors without gaps, sealed elevator shafts — was never done. Multiple firsthand accounts describe unlit stairwells, holes straight through the floor slabs, and no railings anywhere near the open edges on the upper stories. Bats and birds have moved into the interior in the years since it was abandoned. None of that is exaggerated for effect; it's the same building whose concrete shell, notably, survived the magnitude-7.7 earthquake that shook Bangkok in March 2025 without visible new damage — a strange bit of trivia that says more about 1990s Thai concrete engineering than it does about the building being "safe" to wander through in the dark.
The Real Story Behind the "Ghost Tower" Name
Construction started in 1990, when Bangkok's real estate market was booming and developer-architect Rangsan Torsuwan envisioned Sathorn Unique as a 49-story luxury condominium — 659 units, 54 retail spaces, and a horseshoe-shaped riverside position aimed at the city's newly wealthy families. It's worth knowing the building's twin: Torsuwan also designed the State Tower a short distance away, the building that today houses the famous Sky Bar from the movie "The Hangover Part II." One brother-building got finished into one of Bangkok's most photographed rooftops. The other one didn't.
The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis is the reason why. With the tower already 80–90% complete, the baht collapsed, financing evaporated, and construction simply stopped — one of roughly 300 unfinished high-rises left scattered across Bangkok that year. Most of the others were eventually completed as the economy recovered. Sathorn Unique never was, in part because Torsuwan was separately tied up in a lengthy, unrelated legal case in the 1990s and 2000s that further stalled any resolution for the property.
The "haunted" reputation predates any specific incident — Lonely Planet notes locals have long believed the land was once a cemetery — but it hardened considerably in December 2014, when the body of a Swedish traveler was discovered inside the tower. It's a genuinely somber footnote to the building's history, and one of the real reasons security around the property tightened in the years that followed.
Where to Actually See (and Photograph) the Ghost Tower Legally
You don't need to trespass to get a striking shot of this building — you just need to know where locals and photographers actually go instead.
The 10-story parking garage directly across the street (north side of the tower) is the most commonly recommended legal vantage point among travel writers who've researched current access, and it puts you close enough for a genuinely dramatic photo without setting foot on Sathorn Unique's own property.
Wat Yannawa, the riverside temple immediately next door, gives you a totally different angle — the gilded temple roofline in the foreground with the derelict tower looming behind it, which is a far more interesting composition than a straight-on shot anyway.
A Chao Phraya River cruise or long-tail boat will carry you right past the tower's riverside face. Several of the sunset dinner cruises that depart near Asiatique or the Saphan Taksin pier pass close enough for a clean photo without any detour.
Lebua State Tower's rooftop Sky Bar, on the tower's architectural sister building across the river, gives you the reverse view — Bangkok's skyline including the Ghost Tower's silhouette, from a rooftop you're actually allowed on. We've mapped out where else in the city to catch a sunset from height in our guide to the best sunset rooftop bars in Bangkok.
Zensseys Tip: Golden hour (roughly 5:30–6:15 PM most of the year) is when the parking garage vantage point photographs best — the low sun catches the tower's exposed concrete and turns the whole silhouette a warm orange against the skyline instead of a flat gray block.
Pack a real zoom lens or an action camera with strong stabilization for any of these — a GoPro Hero action camera handles the boat-cruise angle far better than a phone camera fighting river glare and movement, and it's small enough to bring on the parking-garage climb too. If you're spending a full day chasing angles around the Sathorn riverside on top of everything else on a Bangkok itinerary, an Anker Portable Power Bank is worth having in your bag — between navigation, photos, and ride-hailing apps, phone batteries do not last a full afternoon of this kind of wandering.
Bangkok's Other "Ghost" Traditions Worth Knowing Before You Go
If the Ghost Tower has you curious about how Thailand actually relates to the supernatural, it's worth knowing that Western-style "ghost stories" and Thai spiritual beliefs aren't quite the same category of thing. We've broken down why Thailand's naga folklore is a completely different tradition from Western dragon mythology, and separately, why the closest thing Thailand has to Halloween isn't the festival most articles assume it is. Both are useful context if the Ghost Tower is the first stop on a trip that's going to involve temples, spirit houses, and local superstition more broadly.
The Zensseys Verdict
Sathorn Unique is genuinely one of the more visually arresting things in Bangkok — a half-finished, bat-inhabited monument to 1997 sitting on prime riverfront real estate, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to see it. Just see it from the outside. The version of this experience where you climb it is a 2013 experience wearing a 2026 disguise, and the legal and physical risk-to-reward ratio has gotten worse, not better, every year since. Build the legal vantage points into a broader Sathorn riverside afternoon — Wat Arun, IconSiam, and a sunset cruise all sit within easy reach — and you'll walk away with better photos and zero police reports. If quirky Bangkok landmarks are your thing, pair it with the three-headed elephant at the Erawan Museum on the same trip. If you'd rather have someone who already knows which pier, which rooftop, and which golden-hour window actually works handle the logistics on a full Thailand travel itinerary, that's exactly what Zensseys is built to do.
FAQ
Is it actually illegal to enter the Sathorn Unique Ghost Tower? Yes. The property is privately owned, security patrols are active, and the owner has a documented pattern of filing criminal trespassing complaints against people who post evidence of entry online — including a formal police complaint against a pair of freerunners whose viral video prompted the initial crackdown.
Can you still pay a guard to get in like the old blogs describe? No, not reliably or safely. That system existed for a window of a few years in the early-to-mid 2010s and has since been shut down, with reports of a welded steel door across the former entry point. Assume any blog describing a "bribe the guard" method is outdated.
Is the Ghost Tower actually haunted? That depends entirely on what you believe, but the building's eerie reputation is well documented — rooted in long-standing local rumors about the land's history and reinforced by a genuine 2014 tragedy inside the tower. Zensseys can't confirm or deny ghosts; we can confirm the legal risk of finding out for yourself.
What's the best place to photograph the Ghost Tower without trespassing? The parking garage directly across the street, Wat Yannawa next door, a Chao Phraya river cruise passing by, or the Sky Bar atop the architecturally related State Tower across the river are all legal, commonly used vantage points.
Will the Ghost Tower ever be finished or torn down? As of now, neither. Demolition cost estimates run into the tens of millions given the building's height and urban location, ownership issues remain unresolved, and there's no confirmed redevelopment plan — so for the foreseeable future, it's staying exactly as it is.
About the Author
William Harris is a service-disabled veteran and the founder of Zensseys, a luxury travel advisory specializing in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia/Bali, and the Philippines. Ready to plan a Bangkok trip that goes well beyond the ghost stories? Book a free travel consultation or explore full trip planning and booking starting at $199, or call/text (210) 239-7540. You can also subscribe to get travel intel like this before it hits the blog.
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