Supernatural Tales from the Countryside of the 1980S and 1990S

Those of us born in the 1980s and 1990s grew up without phones or the internet. Our strongest memories are the cicadas singing through long summer nights in the countryside, the lights swaying at the village entrance, and the hush-hush taboos and legends the adults told. In isolated villages, there were always places children were forbidden to go: abandoned houses, bottomless old wells, empty ancestral halls beneath the moon, and the overgrown hills behind the village. In those years, we heard too many strange stories: a playmate who vanished into a house of the dead during hide-and-seek, a woman weeping by the well at midnight, a white figure flashing past on a field path, and a towering ghost in an old house that grabbed people and wouldn’t let go… These supernatural tales from rural China in the 1980s and 1990s aren’t made-up stories meant to shock. They’re childhood nightmares etched into the bones of an entire generation. They linger in villages swallowed by dusk, in the half-spoken warnings of the elderly, and in the darkness we still dare not look back at alone, even after growing up. This book collects strange and eerie stories from the countryside, taking you back to an era of scarcity and widespread belief in ghosts and spirits, and revisiting the uniquely spine-chilling childhood memories of those born in the 1980s and 1990s.