This collection gathers more than a hundred ghost stories passed down through the countryside, recorded from the oral accounts of elders in different regions. They are not as strange and fantastical as the tales in old books of the supernatural, but carry the earthy warmth of everyday life. Perhaps it's a chance encounter on a mountain road late at night, a strange scratching at the window of an old house, or a human figure reflected in an ancient well. Each conceals an ordinary person's unfinished longing.
Like the old woman on Qingshi Ridge searching for her late husband. Her blue cloth jacket is stained with old blood, and the sound of her bamboo cane tapping the stone path still makes people returning home at night shudder. Or the dry well in Lijia Village, where half a shoe embroidered with flowers appears whenever the moon is full. They say a new bride once threw herself into that well because her husband's family hid the silver bracelet she had brought as her dowry. These stories have no spirits that command the wind and rain, only lingering attachments, misunderstandings that cannot be resolved, and kindness that cannot be forgotten, playing out again and again in the moonlight, in old houses, and beside field paths.
They are the "taboos" passed down from one generation to the next, and metaphors hidden in everyday life, reminding the living that some debts must be repaid, some longings laid to rest, and some farewells properly said. Open the book, and you can almost hear the swish of a fan beneath the old locust tree at the village entrance, followed by the words, "Once upon a time, something happened..."
