The Ghost Tapping My Shoulder

Old folks often say, “In the countryside, yin energy and filth lie hidden. Leave others a way out, or you may leave yourself with none.”

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

A bachelor steals a neighboring village’s ancestral graves to pay for a bride. At night, he hears a coffin scraping across the floor. In the end, grave grass grows all over his body, and he dies suddenly on his own kang bed;

A village bully drives a lonely old person to death to seize their homestead. Every rainy night, he sees a bloodied head pressed against his windowsill. In the end, he goes mad and leaps 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 his throat stuffed with shards of ice. When he is found in the ancestral hall, moldy rice he never managed to swallow still hangs from the corner of his mouth...

Every story comes from real local rumors. There are no fancy embellishments, only horrors that strike straight to the heart: a pale shadow following you along a field ridge at midnight, funeral wails suddenly rising beneath an old locust tree, or ash from paper money appearing out of nowhere on the dinner table.

They say, “Heaven sees all that people do.” But in these remote villages, the thing watching you may hold a grudge even longer than Heaven.

Open this book and hear the taboos the village elders dare not speak of. See how evildoers are claimed by death, and remember: the countryside has a spirit of its own, and retribution never fails. Don’t ever go too far in how you treat others.

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