Northeastern Folk Tales of the Supernatural: Evil Spirits of the White Mountains and Black Waters

The White Mountains stretch far and wide, and the Black Waters flow on. Beneath this black soil lie countless folk secrets. The red-clad apparition mountain hunters meet at night, the eerie shadows in an old village house, the millennia-old taboo things bursting from the frozen earth... The rules passed down by the elders were never made up out of thin air. A young man returning to his hometown goes into the mountains with an old hunter, only to encounter one strange thing after another: a woman’s sobs mingling with wolves’ howls on a snowy night, a bronze bell turning by itself in a shrine to the fox immortal, and bones hidden beneath an old elm wrapped in red string. The beings people call “evil spirits” lurk in the folds of the snowy forests and cling to the patterns of old objects, inextricably entwined with the lives and folk customs of the people of Northeast China. These chilling folk tales of the uncanny hold not only the bleak heart of the black earth, but also reveal the struggle between human nature and evil spirits. Open this book and listen as Da Xiu Zhe Tian recounts the forbidden tales of evil spirits from the White Mountains and Black Waters.