Dark heritage under a football pitch: locating and interpreting an East Asian Second World War-era mass grave in urban Hong Kong

King George V Memorial Park in Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, long rumoured to be haunted, sits atop a mass grave from the Japanese occupation (25 December 1941- 30 August 1945). This paper locates and interprets the mass grave at the Park, where the site was obscured by urban development and excavation is infeasible, by joining historical research methods, digital spatial humanities, and geospatial technologies. Combining archival study, oral history, georeferenced wartime aerial photographs, and Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR), the study locates a burial pit in a mass grave that contained at least 2,632 bodies, according to post-war exhumation records. By mapping the spatial and social context, this paper also argues that the site reveals the spatial inequality experienced by the urban poor during the Japanese invasion and occupation. This paper offers an example of investigating dark heritage sites across Asia, where post-war urbanisation has obscured civilian wartime suffering.