On a low rock hill in Al Dhait North, on the inland side of Ras Al Khaimah, stands a four-storey palace of thirty-five rooms that was finished to an extraordinary standard and then left to the weather for roughly three decades. It has been called the most haunted place in the United Arab Emirates for most of that time. The odd thing about Al Qasimi Palace is that the documented history is stranger, and considerably sadder, than the story that made it famous.
The Horror
The palace was commissioned by Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Humaid Al Qasimi, a member of the family that has ruled Ras Al Khaimah since the eighteenth century. Exactly when is unresolved. The Ras Al Khaimah tourism authority and most UAE press reporting give 1985. A 2020 feature in The National dates the commission to 1975 and says the work took fifteen years. Gulf News, reporting the building’s sale in 2025, gives a construction span of 1980 to 1991. These cannot all be right, and no source resolves them; the safest statement is that the palace was conceived in the 1970s and substantially complete by the mid-to-late 1980s.
The cost is reported at more than 500 million dirhams. No audited figure has been published, and lower estimates circulate, so the number should be read as a press figure rather than an account.
What the money bought is not in dispute, because it is still there. The interior mixes Islamic, Indian, Persian and Moroccan idioms: Moroccan tilework, marble walkways, forty crystal chandeliers from French and Belgian makers, painted gazelles and birds, and sculpted plaster animals set into the walls. There is a pyramid structure inside the building, and the grounds held a lake, gardens and a fountain. It was designed to be looked at.
And then nobody moved in. Gulf News, reporting on the basis of the current owner’s account and the family’s position, states plainly that Sheikh Abdulaziz never lived in the palace, and that the reason it stood empty was objection within the family to the sculptures and paintings depicting human and animal figures. That objection is a recognisable religious position rather than an eccentricity. A substantial strand of Islamic jurisprudence holds the three-dimensional representation of living creatures to be prohibited, and figurative sculpture in a family home would be, to observant relatives, a serious problem. The palace was not cursed. It was, by the standards of the people who were supposed to live in it, unusable.
The same source records that religious men were brought to the building and that artwork was deliberately defaced, in the belief that the images were attracting jinn. That much is documented behaviour. It is evidence of what people believed, not evidence of what was there.
Jinn, and Who Believes in Them
Jinn are not a local ghost story. They are part of Islamic cosmology, named in the Quran, which contains a sura bearing their name. Belief in them is orthodox rather than folkloric, and it is held very widely. The Pew Research Center’s 2012 survey of the Muslim world found belief in jinn ranging from 86 per cent in Morocco to 55 per cent in Iraq across the Middle Eastern and North African countries it covered. The UAE was not among the countries surveyed, so no comparable figure exists for Ras Al Khaimah itself.
Two things follow that a visitor should hold together. The first is that a Ras Al Khaimah resident who says the palace has jinn in it is not telling a campfire story; they are applying a belief their tradition affirms. The second is that this does not translate into approval of the tourism. Pew also found that only small minorities anywhere regard appealing to jinn as acceptable Islamic practice, and reporting by The National from the abandoned village of Jazirat Al Hamra, a few kilometres down the coast and the emirate’s other famous jinn site, found residents thoroughly divided: one man will tell you what he saw, and the next will dismiss the whole business outright. Both responses are common, and often in the same street.
The specific legends attached to the palace are these. That a tree standing on the site was cut down during construction and that jinn living in it were displaced, which Gulf News reports as a local explanation. That children’s voices are heard inside, and children’s faces appear at the dark upper windows. That furniture was found thrown about the rooms. That a girl is present. None of these has any documentary support beyond the fact that people say them, and the site’s reputation appears to predate its completion: The National records that the rumours were circulating before the building was even finished.
The Single Night
The story that travels furthest is that the sheikh and his family moved in, spent one terrifying night, and left before morning, never to return. It is repeated in almost every listing and every video about the building.
No record supports it. The single-night account appears in the UAE press only as rumour, and the property write-ups that carry it say as much in terms, noting that the reason for any abrupt departure “continues to be a mystery”. More to the point, it is directly contradicted by the better-sourced reporting: Gulf News states that Sheikh Abdulaziz never lived in the palace at all. A man who never moved in cannot have fled after one night. The story survives because it is a better story than a family declining to occupy a house full of statues.
The Modern Relic
The building was bought in 2019 by Tareq Ahmad Al Sharhan, an Emirati businessman and art collector, who acquired it from Sheikh Abdulaziz’s heirs after a long negotiation and restored it in roughly six months. He renamed it Al Qasr Al Ghamedh, the Palace of Ambiguity, which is a more honest name than the one the internet uses. His stated purpose was the art and the history: the goal, he told Gulf News, was always to share the palace’s story.
It opened to the public in December 2019, at first as a limited run advertised to April 2020, and has operated since as a museum across all four floors and thirty-five rooms, showing the original chandeliers, sculptures, paintings, musical instruments and furnishings. Tickets are AED 75 per person, AED 50 for groups, bought in cash at the gate. Photography inside is prohibited and a fine of AED 200 is advertised for it. Published opening hours do not agree between the tourism authority and the press: some sources say 9am to 7pm, others 9am to 8pm.
The access position is the part most likely to be out of date in anything you read, including this. For years before 2019 the palace was simply an abandoned building that people entered without permission, which is how the YouTube genre around it was built. Since 2019 it has been a ticketed, staffed, legitimate attraction, and the ghost-hunting footage that still ranks highest in search results describes a site that no longer exists in that form. Then, in October 2025, Al Sharhan listed the palace for sale at 25 million dirhams, telling Gulf News the sale was purely an investment decision; under Ras Al Khaimah property rules the buyer must be Emirati. Gulf News coverage updated in September 2026 still describes it as open to visitors.
What that means in practice is that the palace is almost certainly open, and may change hands. Do not turn up on the strength of a page you found online, this one included. Confirm with the site or the tourism authority first, and bring cash.
