Midnight Ghost Stories: A Collection of Horror Tales

The elders often say, “In the countryside, dark forces gather and filth takes root. Leave others a way out, or you may find your own path cut off.”

This collection has no earth-shattering monsters, only the “karma” lurking in field ridges, graveyards, and the corners of old houses:

A bachelor digs up a neighboring village’s ancestral graves to pay for a bride. At night, he keeps hearing a coffin being dragged across the floor. In the end, grave grass grows all over his body, and he drops dead on his own kang bed;

A village bully drives an elderly loner to suicide to seize his homestead. On rainy nights, he sees a bloodied head hanging over his windowsill, and eventually goes mad and jumps into the deep well at the village entrance;

A village official pockets disaster relief grain, leaving villagers to starve. In the dead of winter, he always feels as if his throat is packed with shards of ice. When he is found in the ancestral hall, moldy rice is still stuck in his mouth…

Every story is rooted in real tales passed around the countryside. There’s no fancy embellishment, only horror that cuts straight to the heart: a white figure that follows you along a field ridge at midnight, sudden funeral wails beneath an old pagoda tree, or paper ash appearing out of nowhere on the dinner table.

They say, “Heaven sees everything you do,” but in these remote villages, what’s watching you may hold a grudge longer than Heaven itself.

Open this book and hear the taboos village elders dare not speak of aloud. See how evildoers are claimed by the dead, and remember: the land has a spirit, and retribution never misses its mark. Never take things too far.

After all, the countryside is darker at night than the city, and the strange things it hides are closer than you think.