The rural ghost stories you’ve heard about were once part of my everyday life.
These aren’t made-up tales collected in a book. They’re real memories branded into my flesh and buried deep in my mind. When I returned to the old house, hemmed in by mountains and tangled with the roots of ancient trees, the “playmates” and “sounds” I’d tried so hard to forget from childhood weren’t figments of my imagination. They had been there all along.
Who was receiving offerings from the cold, nameless memorial tablet hidden at the back of the wardrobe? Though no one claimed it, every night it gave off the stale smell of burned incense.
The rustling beneath the bed wasn’t a rat. It was the neatly folded shroud, reeking of grave mud, “stretching out.” The elders said it was looking for its owner.
Then there was the scratching of fingernails coming from the cracks in the wall, so clear it seemed something would break through at any moment… It wasn’t the wind or a hallucination. It was the daily whisper of something imprisoned.
I saw them with my own eyes, heard them with my own ears, and felt them with my own body. Those “things” beyond the reach of scientific explanation followed ancient, eerie rules, lurking in the gaps of everyday life and sharing the shadows beneath the same roof as the living. Were they kind or malicious? Their purpose was unclear, but their existence was terrifyingly real, challenging the limits of what I believed.
When the truth about my blood relatives became a mystery, when every brick and tile in the old house began to “breathe,” and when the familiar villagers started avoiding my gaze and keeping their secrets… I finally realized I hadn’t “stumbled across” them by chance.
Open this book and you won’t find cheap scares. You’ll find the chilling outline of another world, one I measured with my own flesh and blood. There are no celestial masters battling demons here, only ordinary people struggling, searching, and being chilled to the bone by real fear.
