Ghost Tales

A gentle scholar shelters a beautiful runaway he finds weeping by the road, never guessing that the Taoist priest who warns him speaks of a thing that wears a painted human face like a garment. What follows is a slow, patient horror that ends in blood, and a demon's true face beneath the beauty.

👁 615 reads

When a young man dies unwed, his grieving parents do what the old custom allows: they find him a bride among the dead, so that he may not be alone in the dark. They do not expect her to come and thank them. They do not expect, either, to be so gently understood.

👁 435 reads

After a frontier battle, a young courier slips into his commander's tent and finds the impossible: the headless general seated at his desk, calmly brushing dispatches, his severed head resting beside him. The officer explains he is simply not finished, and the tale becomes a wry meditation on a duty that refuses to die with the body.

👁 322 reads

Four travelers, overtaken by a winter storm, beg shelter at a lonely peasant inn where the daughter of the house has died that very day. They mean only to sleep until dawn; the dead woman means to see them all on their way before the sun is up.

👁 272 reads

A young man on the road at dusk falls into talk with a pleasant traveler, and only slowly realizes his companion is no man at all. Most people would have run. Song Dingbo had a better idea: cheat the ghost out of its own shape, and sell it at market while it bleated.

👁 247 reads

A blameless scholar is summoned one twilight by two silent attendants and led, not to a county office on earth, but to a hall of judgment beneath the world, where the dead are examined and the virtuous promoted to spirit-office. When his essay on hidden virtue so moves the judges, he is given a post no living man would envy — and his family must learn to mourn a man who has not yet died.

👁 171 reads

A long-form fan adaptation of the classic tale 'Nie Xiaoqian'. A candidate for the civil examination shelters from the rain in a temple with no monks. The east wing has no door, and at night someone reads aloud from the room next to his.

👁 3 reads

A fan work based on The Examination for the City God (聊斋志异《考城隍》). A licentiate lies sick in bed and hears hoofbeats no one else can hear. The horse has been waiting at his gate for three days. Someone is coming to take him to an examination—and his mother tells him: if you hear something, do not answer it.

👁 1 reads

A long-form fan adaptation of the classic tale 'The Painted Skin'. A licentiate picks up a lost embroidered shoe on the road, and the woman who lost it is already waiting in his study. The evidence in the county court case says she never wore it.

👁 0 reads