In the dense forests of the wild mountains, strange stories were common, and the little village at the foot of the Taihang Mountains was no exception.
Of them all, the most famous was the legend of the headless dutiful son who burned incense at his mother’s grave.
It happened in the early 1990s, one foggy morning. A villager had gone up the mountain to gather firewood when he glimpsed a man in black kneeling before a grave, apparently burning incense for someone.
At first, he paid it no mind. But as he drew closer, he was horrified to discover that the dutiful son burning incense had no head!
The young man stumbled in terror, and the cord holding his bundle of firewood came loose, scattering the wood across the ground.
The noise behind him startled the figure kneeling at the grave, who slowly turned around.
Now the villager could see more clearly. Strictly speaking, the man wasn’t completely headless—his entire upper face was gone, leaving only a hollow jawbone. It was a truly horrifying sight.
That wasn’t a living person!
Terrified, he bolted home and then fell seriously ill for several days. Whenever he heard someone come into the house, he would panic and crawl under the bed, nearly going mad.
After he recovered, he often told other people what had happened, but hardly anyone believed him.
Later, someone curious suggested they go to the spot and take a look. So a large group picked a scorching midday, when yang energy was at its strongest, and went up the mountain to “solve” the mystery.
After searching for a while, they finally reached the place where it had happened. The bundle of firewood and the ax the villager had dropped that day were still scattered on the ground, now so damp from the forest that black mold was beginning to grow on them.
Sure enough, there was a grave here. It was said to belong to Old Madam Yang, who had died a few years earlier in the village.
Suddenly, someone slapped his forehead as if remembering something and said, “Wasn’t the Yang family’s son executed by firing squad?”
Old Madam Yang had only one son, and the two of them had depended on each other. Because they were poor, her son eventually went out to make his way in the world, and supposedly became quite successful. But it turned out he was involved in murder and robbery. The police had tried to arrest him several times during the Republic of China era, but failed. Still, he was a dutiful son. Once, when his mother fell gravely ill, he risked returning to visit her. The police caught him right there, and he was quickly taken to the execution ground.
They said that when he was shot, the top half of his head was blown away. His body was brought back in such a pitiful state that it was painful to look at—all that remained was his chin attached to his neck.
When word reached her that her son had been executed, Old Madam Yang soon died of grief, too. His mother’s grave was at the eastern end of the village, while his was at the western end, because the villagers believed that the west led to the main road and would guide evil spirits away. No one had imagined that the headless dutiful son would turn into a ghost and still come to burn incense for his mother.
Moved by their plight, someone suggested relocating the Yang son’s grave so that at least the two of them could be reunited in death and prevent such horrifying events from happening again. When they dug up his body to move the grave, the dutiful son’s corpse had still not decomposed.
The village elders said it was because he still had an unfulfilled wish.
After he was buried beside his mother, the villager who had witnessed what happened dreamed a month later of a headless man kneeling to thank him. From then on, peace returned to the village.
On the train, after Old Khương finished telling this mysterious legend, I only smiled. “Looks like we’ve come to the right place.”
Old Khương, Sài Thìa, and I weren’t tourists with nothing better to do, looking for haunted places.
Our line of work was, to put it plainly, pretty grim and unusual. We were ghost hunters. It sounded cool, but if you passed us on the street, you’d probably see only a scruffy guy, a leering older brother, and a musclebound blockhead brimming with hormones.
While I chatted with Old Khương, Sài Thìa sat beside us, absorbed in a nine-linked-ring puzzle. With his brains, it would probably take him quite a while to solve it. Frustrated, he put on such a menacing face that he scared the passenger across from him into running away.
By the way, he’d snatched that nine-linked-ring puzzle from a child when he boarded the train.
“When this job’s done, I want to go back to my hometown and get married,” Old Khương said.
“Getting married again?”
“What do you mean, ‘again’? This time I’m serious!” he said cheerfully.
“I’ve even held her hand. I’ve definitely got a chance. My second spring is just around the corner!”
“Ha, your winter sure has lasted a long time.”
Just then, the train attendant announced, “The train is approaching XX Station. We’ll be stopping for 30 seconds. Passengers getting off, please hurry.”
A town where the train stopped for only 30 seconds—you could imagine how remote it was. And our destination was a little village in that very town. As the train let the three of us off, I took a breath of the cold, dry air and could only hope we’d make it back safely this time.
After a day on the road, we reached the little village in XX Town.
After a brief discussion with our client about the fee, we settled on a price. Since this line of work depended on specialized skills and we had a monopoly on them, raising the price was easy. Threatening people and exaggerating the danger were Old Khương’s specialties.
After “working on” the village head for a while, we settled on the “reasonable” price of three thousand yuan.
He arranged a place for us to stay: an ordinary village house that had been abandoned for years. After sunset, we ate a little and rested, saving our strength for the work at midnight.
At one in the morning, we took our gear up the mountain. In truth, this ghost was only a C-rank threat. Ghosts that harm people usually have three tricks: bewitching, blinding, and frightening them.
The kind that rip out your heart as soon as they appear, or kill you with just a glare, exist only in movies—it’s pure artistic exaggeration. Ghosts are ranked by how dangerous they are:
– The most common are those who haunt people because they have an unfulfilled wish or were buried in an unlucky place. They pose little threat, only scaring timid girls, and they’re our favorite “bread and butter.”
– A little more dangerous are ghosts forced to harm people. Folk legends say that someone eaten by a tiger can become a ghost who lures others to be eaten by the tiger, hoping to free himself. That’s where the idiom “toady to the tiger” comes from.
– The most dangerous are evil spirits consumed by deep resentment, who deliberately harm people. You’d need at least three thousand yuan to deal with this kindI absolutely refused to take the job.
This time, the situation was roughly as follows: a few days earlier, a villager had been walking home at night. As he walked, a flash of light caught his eye. There on the ground was a bright red 100-yuan bill, practically “calling” to him.
He picked it up and checked. It was real money! Then he spotted another bill farther ahead and hurried to grab it. One after another, he kept picking them up, thinking Heaven had showered him with good fortune.
He kept collecting as he walked, never realizing he’d gone deep into the woods. He was scared, but each bill he found was worth several days’ wages, and greed soon took over.
After he’d gathered a whole armful of cash, a gust of icy wind suddenly blew past. He looked down—and it wasn’t real money at all. It was clearly a pile of stiff paper spirit money!
An abandoned grave lay in front of him. Just then, a hand reached from behind and patted him on the shoulder. Panicking, he threw down the money and ran for his life all the way home. He then passed out and was still lying unconscious.
Similar things happened several more times, until the whole village became a place where “no one picked up anything left on the road.”
If you threw a 100-yuan bill on the ground at night, it would still be there untouched the next morning.
The village chief wisely concluded that a ghost was haunting the village. The villagers pooled their money and invited a nearby Taoist priest to perform an exorcism at the site. But the next morning, the priest was found dumped in front of the village chief’s house, foaming at the mouth. With no other options, our professional team was called in.
That night, the three of us went into the woods and waited beside the haunted grave.
I’d been at this job for a long time, so I was pretty brave. I wasn’t scared; I just felt cold.
We smoked and talked, analyzing the ghost. In theory, it was an evil spirit that deliberately harmed people, but its methods were pretty low-level, so its threat level was only C-rank.
Suddenly, a gust of icy wind swept by, and rustling came from deep in the woods.
Sài Thìa said it was going to rain. Old Khương said, “Are your ears just for decoration? That’s the sound of people playing cards!”
“Playing cards?”
All three of us were startled.
Who would be playing cards in the depths of these mountains?
Old Khương slapped his thigh. “Let’s go take a look!”