The Ghost Bride in the Coffin

[A blood-red coffin wrapped in scarlet silk traps a vengeful spirit; at the third watch, a ghostly wedding comes to claim its bride]

During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the failed scholar Wang Feng was passing a mass grave at night when two blood-red lacquered coffins burst from the earth. Inside lay an uncorrupted corpse dressed in bridal robes: his fiancée, who had died suddenly three years earlier. That night, three thousand strands of black hair surfaced in the ancient well at the village entrance, and an infant’s cries rose from its depths. From then on, the unmarried daughters of the Huo, Liu, and Guo families were plagued by one bizarre incident after another: a bronze mirror showed a double of the bride, a living person heard wedding wine being poured inside a coffin, and human blood seeped from the soles of embroidered shoes, bearing the date of a birth...

Daoist Qingfeng pursued the mystery with a peachwood sword and discovered that beneath the ancestral graves of all three families lay burial coffins wrapped in red silk. Each woman inside was missing a finger, and the finger bones fit together to form a sinister marriage contract. Whenever the moon turned blood-red, a bone-white bridal sedan chair carrying a headless bride wandered the wilderness. When its curtains parted, Wang Feng’s own painting of a lady was revealed inside.

“I’ll make nine generations of all three clans spend every night marrying ghosts.” The female ghost’s bloodcurdling curse had endured for a century. But when the Daoist pointed his sword at the heart cut from a locust tree spirit, he unearthed the truth of a ghost marriage in which the bride had been buried alive. It turned out that the deadly wedding of years past concealed a debt to the dead, paid for with an array built from the bones of forty-nine brides...