When the last rays of the setting sun are swallowed by thick fog and the flagstone path takes on an eerie, cold glow, the whispers sealed away in the beams of an old ancestral hall, the lonely spirits wandering among the weeds of abandoned graves, and the forbidden tales passed from mouth to mouth that no one dares touch will quietly awaken at midnight.
A Collection of Chinese Folk Tales of the Supernatural and the Horrifying is like a bronze mirror reflecting both the living and the dead. It gathers a hundred strange accounts from bustling alleys, remote mountain temples, and riverside towns: midnight knocks at an old house from a shadow with no feet; a woman’s corpse in red dredged up from an ancient well; a cursed opera troupe singing an incomprehensible song to summon spirits beneath the moon; and a strange book bound in human skin that always gains another page of bloody handprints at the end...
Some of these stories may have come from the trembling mutters of an old storyteller. Others may have sprung from records erased from yellowing county gazetteers. And some are warnings purchased at the cost of a lifetime of memories by those who lived through them. They do not rely on gore to frighten you. A chill wind, a sigh, a fleeting shadow is enough to send shivers down your spine on a midsummer afternoon and make you keep looking back when walking alone at night.
If you have ever felt your heart skip at the low laughter outside your window during sleep paralysis, or heard your own footsteps behind you on an empty old street, then be careful. When you open this book, the “things” lurking in the darkness may be whispering softly to you through the pages: “You’re next.”
[Warning: This book is based on folk stories gathered from the public and contains descriptions of supernatural phenomena. Please leave a light on while reading, and don’t let the shadows climb onto your shoulders.]
