Grandpa's Hundred Magic Drives

Henan, Eastern Henan Plain. Under the old chun tree in Shaiguping, twelve-year-old Liangzi saw a ghost for the first time. She was an old woman who stole wheat. She was hunched over and walking back to the root of the chun tree from the wheat pile one grain of wheat at a time. Grandpa said that she was not a thief, she was just hungry and scared. The water ghost in the brick kiln pit grabbed the child's feet and dragged her down. Grandma sewed a rag doll and burned it, and she never came out again - she just wanted to have a child too much. The red lanterns in the mass graves were followed by a string of emaciated figures. Granny Zhang was holding the lantern. Granny Zhang, who sold her eldest daughter for half a bag of sorghum noodles, starved to death and was still lighting the way for other ghosts. The embroidered shoes in the Dikengyuan of Shaanxi County, the white-haired man in the Taihang Mountain Temple, the face on the wheat straw pile, the shadow that has been waiting for forty years behind the curtain of the shadow play... Grandpa said that most of the ghosts in this world are not here to harm people. They just have some things that haven't been done, some people haven't waited, and some words haven't had time to be said. A rural ghost story, a ghost story from the southern countryside. Ghosts are not scary, they are pitiful.