What makes someone believe? I could just ask you if you believe in ghosts, but that is just a question. Most people will roll their eyes and laugh. The answer they give isn't important, that laugh tells you exactly what they think of your question. Do you believe in snow? Another roll of the eyes. Ask a bedoin in the middle of the desert if he believes in snow and you might get the same response as the one I got asking about ghosts. (And vice versa.) Just because you haven't seen it before doesn't mean it doesn't exist, OK? Don't put a wall around your mind or you'll be stuck all alone inside.
My name is Hank. Ghosts have become an everyday part of my life, even though a few years ago I didn't believe either. It sounds sappy or naive, but again, that's because you haven't seen what I've seen. I grew up on a farm in New York state and was going to go back and work with my family after university, but my parents encouraged me to go and explore my roots before I settled down to a life of tractors and seeds. Our family is ethnically Chinese, which doesn't mean that we actually speak or eat Chinese, but that we look Chinese. I had a distant cousin who was working in Taiwan as an English teacher and my parents told me I should go over and do the same thing for a few years. I suppose they were hoping I could go to the other side of the world and sow my wild oats so I could come back and farm for the rest of my life, I don't know. Maybe they really wanted to learn about my heritage, whatever that means. I went, though, and I'm still in Taiwan. It turns out that teaching conversation classes is a lot easier than harvesting grain or running cattle, and I like life here. My Chinese has never taken off though. One of the hard things about living in a Chinese country if you are an ABC (American-born Chinese) is the prejudice. Oh, you're Chinese but you don't speak any Chinese, how interesting. (Roll of the eyes.) Hope you enjoy your vacation here. I usually don't want to spend the energy to tell people I've been here for 15 years, they aren't interested in a Chinese they don't consider to be Chinese.
No matter how "in touch" I get with my "roots," I still act like an American. Want me to believe in your silly traditions? Fat chance John Chinaman, show me the evidence and I'll show you my belief. I'm a realist, like most Americans are when it comes to folk traditions and strange customs. Taiwanese people think they see ghosts everywhere, and maybe my doubt is what got me a meeting with the creepy one in the first place. Every year during the seventh month of the lunar calendar (sometime in late August) Taiwanese celebrate ghost month. To them it is a chance to offer sarcifices to ghosts so that the ghosts will leave them alone for another year. To me it always seemed like a great chance to sell lots of "gold paper" for burning as offerings. It's just a racket set up by the traditional vendors to pick up their profits during a slow time of the year, right? Ask your normal Taiwanese on the street and they'll tell you they burn the gold papers and offer food because they think they probably should, not because they think it really does anything. Some really believe the customs work but not most. But even though most people tell you the money and the sacrifices don't do anything they still believe in ghosts.
I'd been teaching English for a few years when I first talked to a student about this. We were having a conversation class and I asked who believed in ghosts. Everyone raised their hand. I laughed and asked if they were serious. They laughed and seemed embarrassed, but the ones who would talk about it said they believed in ghosts, they had a distant relative who had seen one once, and then they would tell an urban legend, at least that's what it seemed like to me. It made for a fun conversation class, but I knew they couldn't be serious.
The next class I asked if anyone had actually seen a ghost before. One girl in the back of the class raised her had, looking pretty timid. She told us that when she was in university she lived in a small house with three other students. They were in the same department but came from different areas in Taiwan. Not long after they started living together she would wake in the night and hear the sound of running water. (She was a light sleeper.) Every time it was the tap by the washing machine. She just assumed one of her roommates had been washing clothes and forgot to turn the faucet off. The next day she would mention it but none of the girls admitted to washing clothes the night before. No big deal, just make sure you turn off the water, and they would go on with their lives. A few months later she woke up when the TV turned on. They had a really old TV set with a dial to change channels and a button that had to be pushed in hard to get the TV to go on. When she'd go out to see who was watching TV no one would be in the room. Once or twice when this happened one of her roommates would come out to see why the TV was on as well, but they never saw who had turned it on.
The months passed and these kinds of things would happen from time to time but never consistently or in any kind of pattern. One night one of her classmates brought a boy to the apartment after their date. They were sitting in her room with the door closed when all the lights in the apartment started to flicker and then went out. The boy helped them to find the fuse box and change the master fuse, then left for the night. The next week when he came back the same thing happened. Two weeks later when he tried to kiss the girl in her room the light bulb exploded and cut his arm. At this point all of the roommates were starting to get scared and talking about ghosts. One of the girls said she had an aunt who was a fortune teller and could see spirits, so they asked her to come over and tell them what to do. After the aunt asked for a fee (because the third eye needs some money to lubricate its vision), she told them that as soon as she had walked into the apartment she saw the ghost of a teenage girl. The girl watched them all talk, and whenever one of them spoke about a boy the ghost's fists would clench and she looked angry. The aunt told them she would do some research and get back to them. She came back a few days later and said that a girl had committed suicide in their house 20 years earlier after her boyfriend had broken up with her. The aunt's final advice? Don't bring any boys home and the ghost would be happy to share the house with them. The rest of the time my student was in university they didn't bring any boys into the house and there were no more problems with the ghost.
What a lame story, right? Spurned ghost on an eternal quest to keep female students chaste. Not exactly the stuff of horror novels.
Some other students told stories of seeing lights or waking up in the night and not being able to move. Most stories ended with an appeal to Buddha and an eventual release. For the most part they seemed like poorly strung together groups of coincidences, but the students believed them. Whatever, I usually thought.
~~~
Around that time I started to take my own students and opened a small school myself. I rented a spot in an office building and had a couple of classes of elementary school children that would come and learn English after school. It didn't take long before I had enough students that I needed an assistant to help me with paperword and coordinating with parents and students. Brenda was recommended to me by a friend that knew I was looking for help and we started to go out to dinner a few times a week not long after.
I was living in a cheap apartment not far from a hospital back then, one that I rented for really cheap. When I told people how low the rent was they always seemed amazed that I had found such a great deal and asked me how much the roof leaked. (The roof was fine.) I wasn't spending much time there because of my growing classes and my time out with Brenda. We started to date seriously, going out every night after class ended and spending weekends together at her place. (See mom, sowing my wild oats!) Months went by and I was happy with the relationship, happy with the classes and happy with the money we were making. We started to talk about getting married, but weren't in any rush.
One weekend the water in her building was out and so we decided to spend Saturday night at my apartment watching a movie. We were cuddling on the couch, enjoying the movie and the good company when the light and fan over the stove suddenly turned on. I got up to see what the problem was and found that both of the switches had been pressed on. Strange. I went back to the couch and was about to sit down when the both came back on again. The switches I had just turned off had been turned on again. My student's story of exploding light bulbs jumped into my mind, and I firmly tossed it out with a good laugh. I unplugged the electical chord and we enjoyed the rest of the movie uninterrupted.
That night as I lay in the dark waiting for sleep to come I thought about ghosts. Most of what I thought made me laugh, visions of Casper floating in my kitchen, struggling to get the button pressed as beads of translucet sweat ran down his cheeks. The light and fan were probably made in China, nothing else that the landlord furnished the apartment was good quality, I'm sure the kitchen stuff had to be cheap as well. I drifted off with the vision of Casper struggling to get the chord plugged back in so he could turn the light on and interrupt my movie again. Ghosts!
~~~
There were no more electrical failures or strange occurences during the next few weeks. It seemed like the flare-ups with the kitchen stove happened about once a month, never on the same day, sometimes when I was alone and sometimes when I had company. The more it happened the more convinced I became that it was just some kind of short that flared up when the humidity got bad or something like that. Since it only happened once a month and unplugging it solved the problem I never even thought about asking anyone to look at it.
Summer came and with it a big schedule change. When my students started their summer vacations it meant that English classes moved from the evening to the daytime, giving me free nights for the first time in most of a year. Brenda and I used the nights as best we could (wild oats!), knowing that it would only last until school started again. There was one more crazy fan incident in July while she was at my apartment, and we got a good laugh out of it. I told her the ghost story my student had told me, thinking that it would get a good laugh as well. It didn't.
"Tell me that story again, slowly," she said. I told her about the maiden ghost making noises and giving the college girls a hard time when they brought boys home. "We'd better not meet in your place next month, it's Ghost Month. If you really do have a ghost here that's when it will have the most time to bother you."
"What's the Ghost Month? I've never heard August called that, aren't you thinking of Halloween in October," I said.
"Halloween is just an excuse for American kids to get candy, it has nothing to do with ghosts. Ghost Month is the seventh month of the Lunar calendar, the time in the year when ghosts can travel freely. The only other times they are out is on the 15th of each Lunar Month."
I'll admit that I had a little chill go down my back when I heard that the 15th of the month was a ghost day, but logic shouted down goosebumps. "There's no such thing as ghosts. You're just trying to scare me."
"Today is the 15th, maybe that's why the fan went off again tonight."
With the soggy blanket of ghost talk smothering any hopes of a romantic evening, Brenda ended up going home early. I lay in bed for a while wondering what a Taiwanese ghost would look like. The Scream? Dripping ghostly blood from its long fangs? The more I thought about it the funnier the images became, until I couldn't stand it any more. I burst out laughing and yelled "come out ghostie, let me see your ugly face!" The fan went on immediately. I went out and unplugged it, but there were no ghosts to be seen.
~~~
Ghost Month starts with people all over the city burning all kinds of gold money and leaving fruit and burning incense out on table near the road. The first omen that bad things were afoot came in the morning. I was riding down a main road on my way to class when a fat old shopkeeper dumped an armful of money into his burning bin just as I rode by. The wind was just right, blowing towards me, and the flames lept up and burned my leg. The shopkeeper felt really bad and went to a clinic with me. I came away with singed pants, a second degree burn on my leg, and a prescription of thick green goop to apply to the burn three times a day. I missed my morning classes, the boss of the school I taught at in the mornings told me to take the rest of the day off when I called to explain what happened. It was Friday and a three-day weekend sounded nice, so I cancelled the afternoon classes at my school and went home to rest.
I slept through the afternoon and into the evening. Brenda called to tell me she was exhausted from teaching alone during the afternoon, she wouldn't be coming over. I hobbled around the apartment for a while and fixed some dinner, then decided I'd watch a movie and head back to bed. HBO was showing "The Exorcist" in honor of the beginning of Ghost Month, and it scared me. When it ended I got ready for bed, images of the little girl's head spinning around on her neck floating through my mind.
I had only been asleep for a little while when something made come full awake. The room became frigid and I could feel something on my leg. I looked down, I had kicked the covers off because of the heat, and saw a line of goosebumps popping up on my thigh. It looked like someone was drawing a line on my skin with a piece of ice, but there was nothing there. When I moved my leg the cold air whoosed out of the room and I was back in the heat of the August night. The goosebumps settled down and I wondered in my grogginess what in the world had been touching me. The rest of the night I had nightmares of "The Exorcist."
The next night I was wary when I went to bed, it had been a very strange day. Brenda listened to my story about the night before and decided I needed professional help. She took me to a local temple to see if the master could tell me what was wrong. We were part of a huge group of people waiting to see the master for "ghost decontamination," all of the people there had been frightened by ghosts in the night and wanted a special poultice made to calm them down. When it was our turn the master took one look at me and said "You have a ghost following you. You need to be very careful." I asked him what the ghost looked like, but he said it wasn't the form of a ghost, it was a disruption in my aura, he could tell because my aura had a color that shouldn't be there. I was getting this all in a choppy translation from an increasingly worried Brenda, so it didn't make much sense to me. After about three sentences she stopped translating and just talked to the master in Chinese, so I had no idea what they were saying. Finally she turned to me and said it was time to get a mirror.
What good is a mirror against a ghost? It turns out that ghosts can't look into special Fengshui mirrors, so if you position them correctly in your house it corrects the bad Fengshui that lets the ghost in in the first place, leaving you a mortals-only house once again. I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. The "master" smelled like a two day drinking binge and bad barbecue, the mirrors he told us to buy were crappy little things that screamed "made in a Chinese sweat shop," and I didn't want any part of it. Brenda insisted, and I became proud owner of two Fengshui mirrors. I drew the line at the master coming over to install them himself, though. He told Brenda where to place them and told me to come back if the ghost came back. Right buddy, I'll be back when hell freezes over.
We installed the mirrors and then Brenda took me out for lunch. We couldn't find a parking spot close to the restaurant where we wanted to eat and ended up walking a long ways. My leg was throbbing by the time we got back to the car so I was sent home with instructions to rest easy and not worry about the ghosts coming back.
That night as I was laying down to sleep I felt the cold come back but no icy touches. It had to be a stray draft of freon flavored goodness from a neighbor's house, nothing more, I thought. It stayed for about three minutes and then slowly dissapated. I was so relieved I fell asleep almost immediately.
I began to have a dream about a beautiful girl. She never spoke and never smiled, just seemed to go through the room like a black cloud. She was petite, had long black hair, a real modern Chinese beauty. As she walked she trailed a set of vague forms behind her, some that looked like people and some that looked like possessions, books and things. She was walking across the dream room slowly, coming in my direction but not in any hurry. As she got nearer to me she lifted her face and brushed her hair back behind her ear, and I could see a horrible mark around her neck like she had been strangled with a thick rope. As she looked at me and our eyes made contact she seemed to shoot across the room in an instant and was suddenly right next to me. I felt the cold touch return on my leg and I heard a sceam.
My eyes shot open and I looked around the dark room. The scream was mine, and the cold touch on my leg was still there. So was she. She was rubbing my leg with her index finger, head down. Her long hair was covering her face completely. She moved slowly, her finger tracing along my skin. I screamed again.
I closed my eyes and started to panic. That was the girl, she was in my room, touching me. I snapped my eyes open again and she was gone. The cold in the room lingered but I was out of bed and into the front room as fast as I could move. I wanted to call Brenda but realized my cell phone was back by my bed on the nightstand. There was no way I was going back into that room tonight, Brenda would find this all out first thing in the morning anyways. I got a beer from the fridge and sat down in a chair to decide what to do next.
I couldn't go back to bed, but I couldn't leave the house either; I was only wearing boxers and a t-shirt. All my clothes were in the closet in my room. I checked the clock, it was 3:10. I turned all the lights in the apartment on and watched Sports Center and the Discovery Channel until I finally passed out just before six. That's how Brenda found me at 8:30, snoring on the couch with the TV blasting, all lights on and the floor covered in empty beer cans.
"What happened to you?" she asked after she shook me awake. I grabbed her and hugged her. She looked at me like I was a crazy stranger. "What's wrong with you?"
"The mirrors didn't work," I said.
"What do you mean? Did you see something?"
"I had a terrible dream, and then she was right next to my bed." I told her what I remembered, and although it seemed burned into my memory I couldn't describe it very well. I was afraid she wouldn't believe me.
"Are you sure it wasn't just a dream?" she asked.
"Positive. She was there, touching me."
Brenda wanted to go straight back to the temple, but I didn't want to go back and have that oily "master" tell me more about my aura problems. I got dressed and we went out. We spent the whole day together, but in the late afternoon Brenda said she needed to get home. She had told her parents she would go home for her sister's birthday that night.
"I'm really sorry I can't stay with you. Do you want to stay at my place tonight?" she asked. I wanted to cry out "yes!" but was feeling pretty sheepish by this time. Maybe it had been a bad dream. Maybe it wouldn't happen again. Maybe I was just going crazy, or maybe watching "The Exorcist" is a bad idea just before bed. I told Brenda that I'd be fine, she should go and enjoy herself at her sister's party.
It was after six when I left, but I couldn't bring myself to go home yet. I killed time walking the aisles at a supermarket, got some greasy comfort food from the night market and had a drink for an hour or so in a bar not far from my apartment. At 9:45 I was feeling pretty stupid and decided it was time to go home and face the ghost. I had another beer to steel myself and went home.
I'm not sure what I expected to see when I walked in. Perhaps I expected to open the door and see an alternate dimension filled with ghouls, Ghostbusters style. It was just my apartment. The beer cans all over the floor looked pretty bad, so I cleaned them up and then sat on the couch for a while. I suddenly felt really tired. Maybe it was all the alcohol I'd had, maybe something else. Whatever the reason, I picked myself off the couch and went into the bedroom. It was nice and hot, humid as hell. Usually I would be kicking myself for not fixing the air conditioner yet, but tonight I was happy to sweat. Anything but the cold like last night.
I dropped off to sleep the moment my head hit the pillow. I don't know how long after I was asleep before the dreams started (judging time while you're asleep isn't very easy, now is it?), but I was soon back with her. The details were clearer this time, we were in a room, but the ceiling was so high I couldn't see it. She came towards me just as before, working her way across the room as if time didn't matter. I wanted to run, to hide my face, anything to make sure our eyes didn't meet again. She raised her face and looked at me, and I was paralyzed. Our eyes met and she shot forward, stopping inches from me. The marks on her neck were more pronounced than before, and her color seemed more solid as well. I opened my mouth to scream but she raised her finger to my lips as if to hush me. My lips burned as if I had kissed a block of dry ice, and my eyes shot open.
Back in the apartment, her finger still on my lips. I was lying flat on the bed, unable to move, and she was directly on top of me. Her long hair fell over her face, hiding it completely. Her weight was far too light, as if she were only the shadow of a real person, but the weight was there. Wherever her skin touched mine the burning was intense, the burning of ice on bare skin. She lifted her finger from my lips slowly and traced her finger down my cheek, the caress of a lover. If I could see her face I was sure the look I would see would be desire, her whole body seemed to cry out. I tried to speak again and her finger went immediately to my lips, searing them again. I tried to move my head away but couldn't, my legs wouldn't move either. When I tried to bring my hands up they moved slowly, as if moving through a strong current of water. I brought my hands up, but didn't know what to do. I didn't want to alarm her but I wanted to be out from under her. The pressure on my chest was making breathe harder and harder to take. I raised my hands and decided to brush her hair back so I could look at her face. Maybe if she could see my fear she would leave me. Her hair felt damp and dark, like touching a puddle of not quite viscous ink. I pushed her hair away from her face, but the she had no features at all, her face was just a blank piece of skin with the vague outlines of features but no breaks for eyes, mouth or nose. My scream ripped through my body and as she pushed back from me her featureless face expanded as if to scream, but her scream sounded only in my mind. As she disappeared I passed out into sweet dark oblivion.
~~
I didn't check the time when I woke up, I ripped out of my confused covers and tore through the house. I grabbed my keys and wallet and hit the door at a run. I tried to call Brenda to find out how to go back to the temple, but she didn't pick up. As I made it out the door I looked around. It was still dark, but a hint of light was peeking over the horizon. I had no idea how to get back to the temple, but I knew where a local temple was. You can't live here for as many years as I have without having some idea of the way people pray at the local temples, so I decided I would hit the 7-11 and buy some food and see if the local god could help me out until I could go back to the ghost master with Brenda.
What does a local god like for offerings? I had no clue. I picked up a two-liter bottle of coke, a couple of packs of Oreos, and a steamed bun and rode as fast as I could to the temple. There was only one old woman there, lighting her incense and saying her prayers to the idol, no master around to show me what to do. I asked the woman if she could help me, but she didn't understand English. Feeling frantic, I lined the food up on the table before the god and started to genuflect. I guess the lady realized what I wanted to do because she lit a stick of incense for me and then stood next to me and showed me how to go through the motions of the offering. I wasn' sure what to say, so asked the little idol if he could ask the ghost to find another house to haunt. I wasn't interested in the romance she had to offer me. I felt pretty stupid talking to a little wooden idol, so I said I appreciated any help he could give me and then stuck my piece of incense in the big bowl of ash with the other smoldering sticks.
I turned and thanked the old woman, and she gathered my food up in her arms and gave it back to me then shooed me away. Exhausted, I went home and sat on the couch, sure that if I fell asleep the dream and the ghost would come back, but after most of the coke and half a pack of Oreos I fell into an exhausted sleep.
She never came back. I have to suppose that the local god decided to help me, maybe he had a netherworld conference call with her and asked her to come onto someone else, I don't know. Brenda asked the people in my building for any information on anyone who had lived there before me, whether there had been suicides or murders in that apartment, but no one knew anything. The dreams have never returned, and the fan over the stove has never shorted out again. I hope that I'll never see her or any other ghost again.
But I know they're out there. Some nights I can feel the places she touched, just like old joints stiffening up before a storm comes. I know when ghost month comes because my lips burn and I dream of her blank face, screaming back at me as she fell back out of my world and into hers.