You cannot whistle or play any wind instrument after sundown, or you would end up summoning a ghost, because ghosts sound like whistles when they move swiftly through the air.
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This is an interesting superstition because it plays upon the fear of ghosts, yet it also plays on contagious magic—how making a sound summons something that sounds just like it. This could be a more magical/convincing way for parents to tell children to not disturb neighbors at night.
[Translated from Mandarin]
The clerical script, or lìshū (隸書), is a form of Chinese calligraphy that is said to have been invented by Chéng Miǎo (程邈), who had somehow offended the emperor Qín Shǐ Huáng (秦始皇) of the Qin dynasty. Qín Shǐ Huáng threw Chéng Miǎo into prison. However, during his time in prison, Chéng Miǎo was able to simplify Chinese script. You see, before the clerical script was invented, Chinese characters were written in seal script, or zhuànshū, which had many curving strokes that were complicated to write.
The prison guards discovered that Chéng Miǎo’s clerical script was much more efficient to write than seal script, and they showed Qín Shǐ Huáng. Qín Shǐ Huáng was very pleased with Chéng Miǎo’s new script and decided to change the Chinese kingdom’s writing to clerical script. Because of this, Chéng Miǎo was released from prison and rewarded with a high governmental position.
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The informant is a calligrapher and had learned this legend from friends from whom he first learned calligraphy. Though Chéng Miǎo’s feats sound realistic, there are people who doubt that Qín Shǐ Huáng would be so lenient on someone who changed a writing system that the emperor had just unified shortly before. Recent evidence has also suggested that clerical script may have been invented by a team of people, as opposed to one single person. It is interesting that even the development of Chinese calligraphy has such debatable folklore.
Kappa (河童) is a creepy child-like, frog-like creature that has a bowl of water in its head. They also have a shell and a beak and webbed fingers and toes. They’re very mischievous and they’re excellent swimmers becuase they live in the rivers and lakes. They always have to have water in their bowl though, because the water gives them strength. It’s like their blood.
They like playing pranks on people, and sometimes they do worse things too, like drowning people. But if you can somehow get it to spill the water on its head by making it bow down to you or otherwise, you can make the kappa subservient to you.
They love eating cucumbers. Some people say that if you eat cucumbers before you go swimming, you’ll get attacked by a kappa, but others say it could prevent that from happening.
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Informant had studied abroad in Japan and considers herself more Japanese than Chinese or American. She learned such folklore from her Japanese friends. The story of the kappa may be used as a cautionary tale in Japan to keep children from playing in water without supervision.
There was an urban legend where Atari had made this game called E.T. in like the ’80s, based on Steven Spielberg’s movie, but it was very bad and no one wanted to buy it, and that was when Atari was very successful for all their other games. Rumor was that Atari decided to take back all the E.T. cartridges in the market and even the ones they didn’t sell, and then they buried it somewhere in the desert in New Mexico. People would go there just to look for the cartridges, but they couldn’t find anything.
But very recently people did find something, and after a long excavation, they uncovered the cartridges!
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Informant frequents Reddit, a very up-to-date “social network”, from where he first heard the rumor of the buried cartridges. This is one of the less common instances in which an urban legend is later revealed to be true. It in a way reflects the question of how urban legends arise—perhaps first with leaked but vague information, later growing due to exaggerations and variations in telling.
One day an old woman was washing her clothes by a stream and a giant peach floats down the water. When she took it home to show her husband and to share the peach, a boy popped out, claiming to be their son sent from the gods. Because he came out of a peach, the couple decided to name him Momotarō (桃太郎).
When Momotarō grew up he decided to go on an adventure, and he befriends a monkey, a rooster, and a bear. Together they fought oni (鬼; ghosts) on an island and claimed their treasures, which Momotarō then took home to his parents. They lived happily ever after.
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Informant had studied abroad in Japan and considers herself more Japanese than Chinese or American. She learned such folklore from her Japanese friends.