10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China

Part II: True Tales from the Locals

Chapter 8-4: WeChat about Ghosts: The Forgotten Graves—微信鬼-一无名冢

Previous Chapters 前章: Part 1: Chapter 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5-1, Ch 5-2, Ch 5-3, Ch. 6

Previous Chapters 前章: Part 2: Chapter 7, Chapter 8-1, Chapter 8-2, Chapter 8-3

Now, in America, Chinese students have kind of a reputation for being wet blankets. All they do is study. They don’t go to parties and they don’t do any sports. They just devote every waking hour to studying and homework.

”We do eye exercises together.”

However, if you lived here, you’d see that teenagers in China are like teens everywhere. They have their own way of finding a good time, and what’s more they’re much better at keeping it all under hat. Whatever they’re like with their friends, they give a completely different impression to their parents. It’s practically schizophrenic the way they can sow their wild oats and then in the blink of an eye become the Church Lady when an adult appears.

I know this because I’m a foreigner in China. We’re “different.” They don’t have to hide from us. Chinese friends tell their foreign friends all kinds of secrets they’d never divulge to another local. Likewise, expats can get away with a lot more because we are expected to be different than the Chinese, to be more open, more adventurous, than the typical local. Thus you can do things in front of your Chinese friends you might not do at home for fear of the social consequences, but that might get you accolades in China.

AS far as I know, my friends and I threw the first Halloween party in Shenzhen at the Old Town Bar where a Canadian friend moonlighted as the manager. That was Up-All-Night-Stan, who you may recall from chapters 1 and 4. We became very close friends and to this day, though only occasionally in touch, retain an abiding respect and affection for one another. But that’s another story.

Stan and I welcome Captain Canada to the party.

Old Town was on Bao’an Lu in Luohu District just up the road from the famous Diwang Building which was at that time the 10th tallest building in the world. Now it seems like taller buildings are popping up like weeds all over Asia, including in Shenzhen, but at that time Diwang was a point of local pride. Old Town bar was also in the same building as the famed Michelle’s House, quite possibly the best bar ever in Shenzhen, but Michelle had sold it and moved on to open a new place in the Huaqian Bei neighborhood of Futian District called Ibiza.

At that time, Halloween was still a strange and exotic custom of foreign lands to the locals. Nowadays it seems every bar in town throws a Halloween party. It caught on so fast you could witness the spread of it every year. There were already trick or treaters in my neighborhood by 2008. Every school has some kind of Halloween activity and every shopping mall has Halloween decorations. But in 2004, hardly anyone knew about it.

We were a sociable bunch and we told all of our students at the Youth College about it. We encouraged all of them to dress up and come. Some of the students were in a weekend program for high school kids to supplement their English classes at school. They said they’d be stuck at their private school which closed that gate at 9:00pm and was surrounded by a wall. We didn’t expect them to come.

As the party developed and the night was mild, we milled around outside the bar, drinking, showing off our costumes and taking a lot of pictures. The locals always stopped and stared. I don’t think a single person went by that couldn’t stop and wonder, often with bovine amazement, what these crazy foreigners were up to. I was dressed up as a bloody and beaten soccer referee. At times I’d go over to the gawkers, blow my whistle and hold up a red card while gesturing for them to move on.

Putting on a show for gawking locals outside Old Town

”我要给你红卡”(“I’m about to give you a red card”)

To our amazement, the private school kids showed up. In marvelous costumes. I remember that one girl was dressed up as a vampire and took the role pretty seriously as if he was in a cosplay. That was the Asian touch they added to the celebration. I can’t remember what the other kid was dressed up as, but after I go through the photos for inclusion in this book, I’ll probably recognize him. And so, here it is, a skeleton.

Their school wasn’t nearby either. It was way up in Xili, or someplace like that in another part of town and a good 30-40 minute cab ride away. We asked how they were able to get there and they told us they just climbed over the wall. It wasn’t the first time they’d done it and they’d never been to a Halloween party before. So they reckoned it was worth it. At the end of the night they’d just take another taxi to get back and knew exactly how to get back in without being busted. No one ever ratted on anyone else, so it was all OK as far as they were concerned.

Couple of students who sneaked out. Maybe she just had a crush on me. She hasn't changed into her costume yet. The other is lurking behind us in skeleton costume. Only pic I had scanned on disk. Derned old prints!

Whatever impression you may have of Chinese kids, however well-behaved or conservative and reserved you think they may be, I know better. And they tend to do a much better job of avoiding trouble when they get into it. They know how to keep their antics secret because they have to—the consequences would be far worse for them than for similar kids in the US or UK.

Knowing this about Chinese kids, I found the next story by News Brother to be somewhat credible. It’s about a group of kids like the ones I’ve just described. For all I know it may have happened at exactly the same school.

One night this group of kids climbed over the wall of their school on their way out to have a good time. As they gathered at the base of the wall, they noticed the dark figure of an old man some yards away at the edge of some trees waving to them to come over.

As they got closer, they noticed something strange about his appearance and smelled something awful. They thought he might be a homeless beggar who was going to ask them for money. But as they came up on him, they noticed that even though he looked to be alive, he must have been dead for some time because his flesh was decaying and in places hung from his bones. The rotten smell was the putrefaction of his decomposing flesh! They high tailed it out of there, terrified.

Over the course of the next few days they put their internet skills to work. Whatever criticisms Westerners and the Western media may have of the Chinese Internet, the Chinese are exceptionally accomplished web surfers and have an uncanny knack for digging up information you’d think would be impossible. Sometimes they literally band together by the thousands, or even millions to ferret out important bits of info. They call this "人肉搜索," or Human Flesh Search Engine. I’m not making this up, and in fact I can say with absolute certainty based on my own experience that complete strangers in China are often better at cooperating with each other than the best of friends are in America.

So the kids got together and started their “Baidu-ing”. Baidu is like the Google of China. And what they turned up was this: The school was built next to an old burial ground. The whole area was peppered with random, unmarked graves from deceased prisoners and the impoverished who couldn’t afford decent burials.

images (1-2-7-8-9, all the rest mine)