Ghost Stories

Zheng Liu met a woman in white on an empty road at dusk and spent the night in a great house that was not there the next morning. She was a fox, she told him so, and she stayed with him for years.

Xi Fangping went down to the courts of the dead to clear his father’s name, and found the same thing there that he had left behind: a rich man who had already paid everyone off.

For a month Cheng Ming hunted crickets for the emperor and found nothing, and the magistrate promised to beat him again. Then his nine-year-old son opened the cage.

A young man walking a night road is joined by a stranger who does not breathe. Asked who he is, the stranger says he is a ghost. Asked the same question back, the young man lies. What follows is the oldest joke in the Chinese supernatural record, and it is told on the ghost.

A young scholar falls ill over a girl he saw once at the Lantern Festival. He finds her in the hills, in a household where nobody can stop laughing. What she is takes half the story to come out, and when it does, she asks him for one thing.

A scholar spends the night in a ruined temple and refuses both a beautiful woman and a bar of gold. The next day two men die in the east wing with tiny holes in their feet. Then the woman comes back and tells him what the gold really was.

A scholar brings a beautiful stranger home and hides her in his study. A Daoist priest sees evil on him and is waved away. Then one night the scholar looks through a hole in the window paper, and the most famous horror scene in Chinese literature begins.