Tag Archives: Taiwan

Jade Mountain Ghost

Information about the Informant

My informant is a freelance editor and translator living in Taiwan. She was born in Taiwan and has lived there essentially her whole life, except for a few years in America. She told me about a ghost story that she heard from one of her college classmates that he actually supposedly experienced.

Transcript

“The first one is our class—my undergraduate classmate told me this. He’s one of those—he belonged to a club for…for—mountain climbing kind of stuff—a hiking club. So, they went to the tallest mountain in Taiwan—that mountain’s called Yu Mountain. ‘Yu’ is for like ‘jade.’ Jade Mountain. Although if you just pronounce it, it’s just Yu Mountain.’ So they went to the place that was just…just very remote, with no one around. So they—some people would build little huts for their—so that they could all be together. Sleeping. So they were all sleeping at night. Then—because Yu Mountain counts as a…um…a—lots of people who go there to climb have accidents, that kind of mountain, so there are a lot of ghost stories. So their…their hut, so people say, used to be some people—because Taiwan during springtime sometimes has times when it suddenly gets really cold, and it seems some people don’t bring enough clothes there, so they froze to death. So…so…that hut people said was haunted.

So my classmate, his team had a total of about twenty people. Both guys and girls. He said at night, he’d been sleeping till late at night, he…he…maybe it was early morning or midnight, he felt that there was a girl trying to wake him up. Telling him, ‘I’m cold.’ She borrowed from him a pair of socks. And so he just kept sleeping like that, half-awake, walked over to his sack, and got a pair of socks for that girl, and that, dong, fell asleep again. And then—and then, the next morning he woke up, he suddenly remembered this event, and so…and so he began to ask all the girls on the team, ‘Last night, did one of you come and borrow a pair of socks from me?’ Everyone denied it. So he went to look at his socks and, sure enough, he was missing a pair. And so…so they began to be very scared. And everyone went to check their pairs of socks—everyone went to check if they had—who had slept—because, you know, when you get tired on high mountains—to see if one of them had in a drunken-like state stolen his pair of socks. Everyone—no one’s socks had his—his pair of socks. No one’s sack had his pair of socks.

[laughs] They were so scared that they hurriedly packed up and quickly ran away from that part! And when he got back, he told us this ghost story.”

Analysis

This is an interesting piece for me as the story strongly resembles a variant of the Western “Vanishing Hitchhiker story. In the Western version, a driver picks up a hitchhiker and, because it is cold, the hitchhiker borrows a piece of clothing, usually a jacket or a coat, from the driver. The driver drops the hitchhiker off at his or her destination, which is usually a cemetery. One way or another, the driver will meet with someone who knew the hitchhiker after this incident and the person will reveal that the hitchhiker has been dead for years. In the variant that this account by my informant reminds me of, the driver then goes to the cemetery and finds the gravestone bearing the name of the hitchhiker, with the borrowed piece of clothing draped over it. I was surprised that, in this case that my informant told me about, there was no ending where the borrowed socks made a reappearance in a cemetery or some area associated with the deceased, but then as the ending of this purportedly real experience had all those involved run away in fear, that would not have been possible if they never returned to the site. It is interesting the resemblance this bears to the Western hitchhiker story though, so much so that I am almost inclined to suspect some tampering, either someone setting up the situation deliberately such that it was similar or some changing of details after the fact. But if true, then this would be a strong case of a memorate, where someone’s actual experience becomes part of an established folkloric culture.

For more about “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” visit:

Brunvand, Jan Harold. “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” Uploader. Bernd Weschner. 1981. <http://bernd.wechner.info/Hitchhiking/vanish.html>.

Original Chinese

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The Sitting Ghost

Informant was teaching and boarding at a high school in the mountains, a three-hour bus ride away from the city. The dorm was a foreign environment that frightened her. When she finally fell asleep, she was awoken by a strange presence that she sensed at the foot of her bed. She was unable to move, feeling as though something were pressing down on her, though nothing was above her. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed a man standing at the foot of her bed, fully clad in an ancient Chinese military costume. Since he was watching her peacefully, she assumed that it was an acquaintance from a past life or simply a passing spirit and fell back to sleep in peace, believing that he was there to protect her.

—

In Western cultures this phenomenon is known as sleep paralysis, and psychologists have come up with scientific explanations. In Taiwan, however, the cause is attributed to ghosts. The phenomenon is known as “鬼壓床” (gǔi yā chuáng), which literally means “ghost pressing the bed,” and the symptoms are strikingly similar. Author Maxine Hong Kingston describes this phenomenon as the “sitting ghost” in her memoir The Woman Warrior.

Due to the prevalence of Taoism and Buddhism in Taiwan, the vast majority of the population—regardless of religion—believes in ghosts. Ghosts are not necessarily evil, as anyone could potentially become a ghost after they die. 

Pointing at the Moon

If you point your finger at the moon, you would anger the moon, and the deity living on the moon will slice off your ear when you sleep.

—

The informant is not sure why this is so or who the deity living on the moon is. However, this superstition may be rooted in respecting the deities, and could possibly be linked to the myth of Cháng’é (嫦娥), the Chinese goddess of the moon. She lives on the moon because she had swallowed the elixir of life and became light, floating away from the earth. Her husband Hòu Yì (后羿) was a mortal archer known for shooting down nine of ten suns that were scorching the earth. Cháng’é lives on the moon with a jade rabbit.

It is interesting to note that pointing is disrespectful in cultures all around the world.

The Story of Hǔ Gū Pó

[Translated from Mandarin Chinese]

Once upon a time, the hǔ gū pó (虎姑婆; a tiger spirit) lived atop a mountain. She wanted to become human, but the only way to do so was to eat children. From time to time she left her mountain to visit the village below, where she would sneak up on children from behind and eat them. After a while, the villagers discovered that wearing a mask on the backs of their heads would confuse the hǔ gū pó and prevent her from eating them. She was starting to look very human, but she still had a tiger’s tail to hide. With no more children to catch, the hǔ gū pó wandered down to the houses.

In one house lived a girl, her younger brother, and their parents, but the parents were out of town for the day. The tiger spirit tucked her tail within her pants and disguised herself as the children’s aunt.
“Your parents asked me to look after you today,” she said, and the children let her in.

In the middle of the night, the little girl woke up to a strange crunching sound.
“What are you eating?” she asked the hǔ gū pó.
“I am eating peanuts,” came the reply. “Would you like some?”
The hǔ gū pó handed over one of the little boy’s fingers.
Understanding that the tiger spirit had already eaten her brother, the little girl escaped from the house, pretending that she needed to use the bathroom.

The next morning the tiger spirit found the little girl hiding atop a tree.
“Come down,” the hǔ gū pó demanded, hungry.
“Fine,” the girl said. “But you should prepare a vat of boiling oil first, so I’ll taste better.”
The hǔ gū pó did just that.
“Now, hoist up the vat to me. I will cook myself and then jump into your mouth. Close your eyes and open your mouth.”
The tiger spirit did just that. The little girl poured the oil into the hǔ gū pó’s mouth and therefore killed her.

—

The story of hǔ gū pó is a well-known children’s folktale in Taiwan, and this is one of the many versions. It has been compared to the western tales of the Little Red Riding Hood, and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”. It has been adapted into a less violent nursery rhyme telling children to stop crying and to go to sleep. The informant (my father) had learned the story from his parents and in turn told it to me many times as a kid. 

When I first heard it, I did not think much of the plot points—upon retrospect, however, the story seemed unusually gruesome for a children’s tale. While “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats” has a similar premise, it is not as violent. The wolf deceives the goats and gobbles them up, but the youngest goat is able to cut open the wolf and save his siblings from its stomach, replacing the weight with rocks, which eventually drown the wolf. In the story of hǔ gū pó, the brother is not only eaten, but the sister receives the dismembered finger as food. She also kills the tiger spirit quite directly/actively. This may be a reflection on the differing cultural contexts of these two tales, in terms of ethics, etc.

Nonexistent Fourth Floor

Text:

“In Asia, all buildings skip the fourth floor when they are numbering their floors.”

Background:

My informant said she noticed this when she was in Taiwan since every building followed this custom. She said that it’s because the character four in Mandarin sounds very similar to the character for death.

Context:

This is a custom that all buildings follow in Taiwan.

Personal Thoughts:

This custom is similar to how some buildings in the U.S. skip the 13th floor. However, since there is a higher chance of buildings to be at least 4 floors, than 13 floors, it’s more prevalent. I also believe that Chinese/Taiwanese people tend to be more superstitious than Americans.