紅衣小女孩 | Red-Shirted Girl in the Mountain

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 26
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/23/2019
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

1:

When people travel through the mountains (台中風動石, a mountain whose name the Informant tells me loosely translates to “Wind Moving Rock”), they will sometimes see a little girl dressed in red. If she begins to follow you, “bad things happen”. The Informant goes on to suggest “maybe the girl will possess you”, and explains that “you have to say other people’s names or you will be possessed until you die”.

2:

The little girl is believed to be a “Mountain Spirit” which has transferred their self into a little girl, wearing red. One family, between 1999 and 2000, went up to this mountain and recorded videos of their family walking through the trail in a line. When they reviewed the footage, they saw that there was a girl in the line of family members who was not a part of their family. She stands out because of the red she is wearing. One of the family members ended up dying afterwards, and the video was given to a TV Station in order to broadcast it. The Informant stated that “some people say that it’s maybe because the resolution of the video is too low” and implied that the presence of the girl was just a visual aberration due to the VHS-era technology it had been recorded on.

The story was made into a movie in 2015 called “The Tag-Along”.

3:

The elements of Nature Spirits being mixed with technology (VHS cameras, potentially capturing the existence of such a spirit) is interesting in that it creates a mystical story related to the cultural heritage and geographic identity of Taiwan that can still be recorded and distributed via the then-40-year-old infrastructure of television stations.