Chinese Ghost Stories

As the granddaughter of a folklorist, I will always remember those summer nights. The old man would wave his palm fan and use his pipe to draw sinister talismans on the stone slabs, stitching half a century of strange encounters into his stories. He said he had once been a “Yin Goods Peddler,” delivering goods that could never see the light of day for things that were not human: medicinal wine steeped with a child's corpse, human skin inscribed with sutras for the dead, the tongue of a mountain goblin sealed in a clay jar... Then, one night, when he got to the “Hundred-Ghost Wardrobe,” he suddenly fell silent. His cloudy eyes reflected the lantern swaying behind me.

When the first key opened the iron box marked “Bone China Grudge,” a black-and-white photograph slipped from the yellowed manuscript inside. In front of a porcelain kiln in 1943, my young grandfather was pushing a struggling human-shaped figure into the flames. As twenty-three tales of the past came to light, I gradually realized each story corresponded to a real object: a blood-soaked wedding dress that tightened by itself, a wine jar filled with human teeth that bubbled in the dead of night, and a carved mirror that always showed my grandfather wearing burial clothes.

When I finally opened the last rusted lock, I found twenty-three talisman-inscribed teeth lined up neatly at the bottom of the box, each one engraved with my birth date. Then the cinnabar on the last page of the manuscript suddenly ran, revealing the ending my grandfather had never finished telling: “Whoever opens the box must retrace all twenty-three roads of the dead within forty-nine days. Otherwise...”

At that moment, the old pagoda tree in the courtyard swayed without a breeze, and twenty-three contorted faces appeared in its bark. When the first rays of dawn fell on the wedding dress, the hundred-child pattern embroidered in gold thread had unmistakably become a mass of tightly packed infant corpses with their eyes closed.