PETALING JAYA, June 10 — A grisly image left many in chills when it went viral on Twitter recently, before the gasps quickly turned into chuckles.

Upon closer inspection of the image which appears to be a long-haired figure hanging by a rope from an upper floor of a building corridor, the image turned out to merely be an optical illusion of hanging laundry.

Twitter account @TypicalMsian shared the image last week, garnering  over 38,000 retweets and more than 22,000 Likes.

Malaysians weren’t the only one taken in though.

Indonesian Twitter user @miIktyea had originally posted the photo just hours before, with a simple caption of "kaget” or shocking before it went viral, sparking reuploads and social media conversations and news reports in Thailand and the Philippines as well.

The origin of the image is reportedly a result of the discovery of the ‘body’ by a student in Huaqiao University in Xiamen, in the Fujian province of southeastern China.

While it was not determined when the image was taken, media reports stated that police were called in only to discover nothing but hanging wet laundry.

The image which also went viral on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, had the usual share of horrified, and later amused reactions, with one user chiming in, "You thought it was a body because you did not use a Huawei phone to take a photo."