10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China
Part II: True Tales from the Locals
Chapter 8-1: WeChat about Ghosts: Don't look under the bed—微信鬼-不看床下面
Chapter 8-1: WeChat about Ghosts: Don't look under the bed—微信鬼-不看床下面
Hell, even the official logo looks like a couple of ghosts:
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
For a long time in the West, people have poo-pooed Chinese Internet products, and in fact they are still widely criticized and ridiculed. But I have to say that Chinese Internet giant Tencent has developed the best goddamned messaging app in the world. It’s called WeChat in English. The Chinese name is Weixin (微信). I teach English to the people who work on this app and I can assure they are among the brightest, hippest and most interesting people I have ever taught here. Some pretty smokin’ hot babes on that team too.
WeChat does just about everything. It’s the ultimate all-in-one app. It serves as an instant messenger, free phone call maker, social network (SNS), news source, and shopping app. You can buy movie tickets, download discount coupons, and even pay your bar tab with it. Chinese netizens don’t go online with their computers much anymore, because they do everything through WeChat. It’s pretty frikkin’ useful and I recommend it to all my readers. You may recall @Jamonchina mentioning it here.
It is on WeChat you can find Xinwen Ge(新闻哥). It means “News Brother” in English, though not many native speakers would choose that moniker for promoting themselves. If an English speaker were branding himself on social media like this guy is, he might use “Newsmeister,” so you get the picture. News Brother scours people’s WeChat moments, the SNS feature of WeChat, for interesting real-life stories. When he finds them, he scrubs the names and other identifying information, and then posts them in his own feed.
One of the news sections he maintains is called Lingyi Gongshe (灵异公社) or “Paranormal Community” in English. This is a collection of real-life ghost stories culled from the moments of other WeChat users.
Now, we could argue about whether these ghost stories are really real or not. The users who post them certainly think they are. There’s no fame or fortune involved, no glory-seeking, no ad revenues. It’s just a matter of friends sharing a moment from their lives the same way we would on Facebook or some other social media site. When News Brother re-posts them, he scrubs the users’ names and identifying information, so there’s no 15-minutes of fame and no traffic driven towards the original poster’s moments.
I feel absolutely certain we can take these stories at face value. You might have your own explanations for them. That’s fine. A lot of people in this world, especially the so-called skeptics, can’t accept that there are as yet unexplained things in the Universe. Sometimes, if they bend over backwards far enough they can come up with an explanation for some strange event that seems rational and materialistic on the surface, but ends up being even more bizarre than the paranormal one. If a satisfactory explanation can’t be conjured, then we dismiss the tale as a lie, a hoax, a fabrication, even when there is no compelling reason to do so.
In an officially atheistic and spiritless culture, posting ghost stories to your WeChat feed is not the best way to gain admiration. The Chinese government even banned science fiction and fantasy on television at one point because they didn’t want to encourage fantasy and useless dreams among the population. And this was recently—maybe in 2013 or 14. So people don’t post ghost stories in order to impress their friends or other users who might stumble onto their feed. These are genuine people telling genuine stories, whatever the actual explanation may be.
To give you a for instance: One summer when I was about 10 years old, I think, my sister and I were in the family room watching The Rockford Files on TV. My parents were up in the living room with a friend of the family. It was the same summer we built this deck, clearly a family photo (below):
All of a sudden, these red lines started to run horizontally across the TV screen. They were straight, broken red lines in regular patterns. Some of the lines were long red streaks with breaks in between, others were short. They were reminiscent of a visual representation of Morse code. The picture remained clear, but these lines ran from left to right over the images on the screen. I jumped up and started playing with the tuning bezel around the dial and trying to adjust the aerial, but nothing changed. “What’s wrong with the TV?” I asked my sister. She didn’t know. Obviously this was pre-cable in our area.
Then from upstairs we heard my father: “Thorny, quick, get your camera! There’s a UFO outside!”
We rushed over to where my parents and their friend stood at the front door looking out. We saw a swirling, orange fiery ball hovering over the house across the street. At least it seemed to be. We stood marveling at it for several seconds when my father repeated, “Quick! Get your camera!”
I ran upstairs and got the Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera I kept in a drawer in my nightstand and ran downstairs again. When I got there, everyone was still by the front door but now stood around looking disappointed and looking at one another.
“It’s gone,” my father said.
“What happened?” I asked. “How did it go away?”
“It started to move away, and then dipped and zoomed off,” he answered while imitating the flight with his hand in a swooping motion.
We’ll never know what that was. Professional skeptics will come up with their own explanations, but the fact is they have no real data to base any explanation on. They weren’t there, they didn’t see it. Nothing was measured, no evidence was collected, and there are no still or moving pictures of it. It was a flying object and remains unidentified, so it is, in the strictest sense, and unidentified flying object or UFO. Was it ball lightening? We don’t know. Was it some other rare little-known weather phenomenon? We don’t know. Was it a military or government experiment? We don’t know. Was it something alien? We don’t know. It will just have to remain an unexplained mystery forever.
These stories from News Brother are the same. We weren’t there; we didn’t see it; there was no evidence collected. All we have is the ostensibly genuine account of someone’s experience shared with their friends on a social networking app, and they are very mysterious indeed.
Before we go further, I should satisfy the @steemcleaners by mentioning this is an original translation.
Take for instance the case of this businessman. While away on one of his business trips, he had to spend one night in a hotel. He was up and awake that night working on a report when he hears a knock on the door.
“What is it?” he asks without looking up. He sat at the room desk with his back to the door.
“Have you seen a guy with a red tie and black suit on?”
Still enthralled with is work and never noticing who it was, He answered that he hadn’t.
A little while later, what seemed to be the same guy knocks again and asks the same question. Again without looking up from his work the businessman gives the same answer.
Finally it happens a third time. He becomes angry. He turns around and shouts at the interloper, “I haven’t seen anyone!” At this moment he notices the door isn’t even closed. It’s wide open, the hallway outside is clearly visible, and no one’s there!
At the same moment, his pen rolls and drops off the table. He bends over to pick it up, and he sees something under the bed. Still on his hands and knees he crawls over to peek under the bed and see what it is. It’s a dead guy. And he’s wearing a red tie and black suit!
He immediately calls the police who arrive shortly after to investigate. The body is stiff and cold. Apparently it had been dead for quite some time, a couple of days the police suppose.
Just a silly urban legend, you say? Well, check out this photo from the Dailymail.co.uk. People really do find bodies under their hotel beds, in this case in nearby Thailand:
I wish the gentleman who had originally posted this story had posted the name of this hotel, or that News Brother had passed it on if he did, so I’d know never to stay there. The cleaning staff obviously leave a lot to be desired.
We'll be back tomorrow with another chilling tale from Xinwen Ge, same bat time, same bat channel.
