My mother’s ghost stories

When I began to listen carefully to my mother's ghost stories, I found out that they were all about girls who died wronged, killed by poverty and patriarchy, and whose misfortunes cast long shadows in the hearts of the girls who survived

I don’t really believe in things like spirits or the supernatural. But the world is vast, and there are always people who do. My mother is one of them. A while ago, when she was staying here, we were chatting casually, and she once again brought up the paranormal incidents she had either experienced herself or heard about. Back home, we use the phrase “being touched” to mean the soul of the dead attaches itself to the living.

I listened carefully this time, and what I noticed was that all the stories followed a similar pattern: rural villages in an earlier era, young women who met tragic, untimely deaths, and then other young women whose lives were affected afterward.

One incident my mother claims to have witnessed herself happened when she was around 14 or 15, sometime in the 1970s. It involved her close friend Aimin, a girl in her class. During a classwide cleanup, Aimin got into an argument with a boy. The boy went to report her to the homeroom teacher and then came back to tell her he had done so. This teacher, according to my mother, never hid his belief that “when boys and girls fight, it’s always the girl’s fault. Girls are just troublesome.” Aimin lay face-down on her desk and didn’t say anything.

Later, my mother tried to call Aimin outside to do something, but no matter how she called, there was no response. Others tried as well, with the same result. She didn’t react at all. People eventually realized something was wrong. They sent her home and brought her mother over. But Aimin insisted that this woman was not her mother. When asked whether she recognized her usual friends, she said she didn’t. When asked who she was, she said her name was “Fenglan.”

Who was Fenglan? Fenglan was a 17-year-old girl who had died unjustly after “eating eggs dipped in saccharin.” I expressed my doubts: how did they know that was what killed her? My mother said that was simply what everyone said. Supposedly, Fenglan had wanted her mother, who had gone to the city or somewhere else, to come home. When her mother refused, she killed herself in a fit of anger by eating eggs dipped in saccharin. At the time, this was widely believed in folk lore to be a lethal combination, though there was no scientific basis for it. My mother said she had heard of many people supposedly killing themselves that way.

Because Fenglan died with unresolved resentment, her spirit kept “touching” others. The worst victim, according to my mother, was Fenglan’s former desk mate. This girl, she said, “couldn’t go to school or do any work for years.” Fenglan had died under a bed, and afterward, those who were “touched” would crawl under beds as well. My mother claimed she had personally witnessed such a scene.

“When someone dies so young,” she said, “they don’t accept it. Their soul wanders around, and they’re the most likely to latch onto others.”

Later, Fenglan’s mother arrived. Aimin, who was believed to be possessed by Fenglan, suddenly burst into tears. My mother said, “I had never seen anyone cry like that in my life.” Through Aimin’s body, Fenglan began speaking to her mother. She complained that her shoes were too big, that the heels kept slipping off.

It turned out that when Fenglan was buried, she hadn’t been given shoes of her own. She had been buried wearing her older brother’s shoes. Fenglan’s mother comforted her, saying she would send her proper shoes and other things, and then said, “let’s go home”. After the two of them reached some kind of reconciliation, Fenglan’s spirit followed her mother away. According to my mother, Aimin suddenly sat upright, returned to herself, and had no idea what had happened during the time she had been “away.”

My mother then told me about another incident, one in which she herself may have been “touched.” The deceased was her cousin, nicknamed “Sannier” (meaning the third girl. These names are common in rural families in our area, where people just name girls “first girl”, “second girl”). When she was alive, the two of them were fairly close. The year my mother was admitted to a nursing vocational school, she left home to study in another place, and that was when the misfortune happened to Sannier.

Sannier’s leg began to hurt badly. Looking back now, it was probably something like arthritis. But her family insisted she keep working in the fields. They called in a doctor who gave her a so-called “blocking injection.” Given how poor hygiene was in those days, the injection site became infected, possibly leading to septicemia or something similar. Her leg swelled terribly, “so much that her pants had to be cut open just to fit.”

Her father, my mother’s uncle, refused to get her proper treatment because he “didn’t want to spend the money, because he was stingy”. My mother said that whole family was extremely tight-fisted. Years later, the uncle’s wife (Sannier’s mother) was run over by a car right outside their home. The driver disappeared without a trace. When she died, my mother said, they found that “her waistband was stuffed full of cash.”

When my mother returned from health school, she heard about what had happened to Sannier. One day she went to spray pesticides in the fields. That plot of land wasn’t far from Sannier’s grave. Later, she suspected she had been “touched” as well. She described it as a sudden dizziness, followed by an overwhelming sense of grievance, so strong it felt alien, as if it didn’t belong to her, something she had never experienced before. She went home and told my grandmother. My grandmother believed she had been touched, whipped her with a peach tree branch, and then made her lie down and sleep. When she woke up, she was fine.

I said to her: you knew Sannier was buried around there. Maybe you were just feeling sad for her. My mother replied that when she first arrived, she did feel a bit sad, but it passed quickly, and she went on working as usual. It was only after she finished spraying and was about to leave that something felt wrong: that overwhelming sense of grievance rose up again, feeling as if it wasn’t her own. She said she had never felt anything like it before.

After listening to all her ghost stories, I still don’t believe in possession by spirits. But I do believe that village was full of girls who were harmed and killed by poverty and patriarchy, and that their misfortunes cast long shadows in the hearts of the girls who survived. Maybe it was empathy; maybe it was collective healing; maybe it was trauma-related mental illness, like in the case of Fenglan’s desk mate who couldn’t live a normal life after Fenglan’s death. However, people in that time and space could not possibly have the language, knowledge, or access to healthcare services to make sense of these.

Ghost stories, as a form of folk narrative, may be a way of acknowledging and remembering the suffering and injustice these girls endured: She died wronged. She died unwilling. Of course she would come back for us.

May they rest in peace.