This is a collection of strange tales set in the bustling streets and narrow alleyways of everyday life, gathering eerie secrets passed down in mountain folklore and whispered over tea. It recounts, in measured detail, the uncanny events erased from official histories and buried by time: a funeral procession bound with red cord, escorting souls as it travels the main road at night; the reflection of a dead person appearing in the mirror of an old mansion; a white bone lotus lantern rising from an abandoned village well whenever the moon is full; a fisherman dredging up a jade bangle buried with the dead, engraved with its owner's birth date and hour...
These stories are not invented. Each is drawn from surviving fragments of folk accounts of the strange, annotated in vermilion ink to cut through the mist: the haunted house where a midnight death seems the work of ghosts is actually a curse unleashed by a century-old vengeful spirit trapped in a feng shui formation; behind the "flesh-and-blood Buddha" worshipped in the ancestral hall lies a sacrificial rite involving cannibalism, passed down through generations of the clan; and the "Ghost Soldiers Borrowing the Road" incident that shook the whole city turns out to involve a soul-devouring pact from the era of warlord warfare...
