Haunted by a Water Ghost

After the 1998 floodwaters of the Yangtze receded, strange bubbles began rising from the mud in Linjiang Town.

Ten-year-old Shen Yiliang discovered a human silhouette crouching at the bottom of Jianjun's well, a red cord tied around its ankle. It matched the description of the drowned child in the town's missing-person notice. Soon afterward, Jianjun disappeared, but his slippers had been placed neatly beside the well.

Children kept going missing around town, always near the water. Water stains began appearing on Shen Yiliang's neck, and at night someone called his name in the voice of a dead playmate. His father scattered salt around the courtyard, laid scissors across the doors, and sealed the mouth of the well, but the thing still followed them thirty li away to his maternal grandmother's house.

His grandmother said that the “guests” drowned in the great flood during the Xianfeng era returned every year when the waters receded to claim a substitute. Beneath Linjiang Town ran an underwater road connecting every well. And the children with red cords around their ankles crouched forever at the bottom, waiting for the next person to come down and play with them.

When Shen Yiliang discovered that the same red thread he couldn't remove was tied around his own ankle, he knew: it had come.