Ghost Borrowed Fetus

In 1996, the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth lunar month, it was freezing cold. Wu Gensheng, an old bachelor from Liujiagou, knocked himself to the foot of the stove and died without leaving a word.

The funeral was held in the main hall of the old house, and incense was filled with smoke. I took my daughter Yadan to kowtow, but the six-year-old child was staring at the ground in front of the incense burner, trembling all over: "Mom... Grandpa in black clothes, with blood on his face, stood there and looked at me."

I looked down and saw a pair of dark gray adult footprints on the dry concrete floor. The toes of the left foot were skewed, exactly the same as Wu Gen's crutching posture when he was alive.

Yadan had a high fever that night and kept talking nonsense. The goddess Masangu at the east end of the village lit some incense and said in a deep voice: "You are distracted in front of the spirit and are disrespectful to the deceased. He is unwilling to accept it and wants to use your daughter's clean body to 'speak'..."

Paper figures were used as stand-ins, and the incense burner exploded into ashes. Although the child had a chance to escape, the bricks where the pair of footprints were were smashed overnight, as if they were covering up something.

However, it's not over yet. This is just the beginning. Wu Gensheng's death was far more complicated than it seemed; the footprints in the ashes appeared again and again in front of more people's mourning halls in the village...