Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Fengmen Ghost Story (封门鬼故事)


No one knows if Fengmen Village is in deed haunted as of today...

The Fengmen Village (封门村) is located in Henan Province (河南省). This village is abandoned since 2007 but somehow rumours of the village to be haunted started to spread in intranet starting 2008. Gradually, the Fengmen Village became a ‘ghost village’ somehow… but after some investigations performed by Henan TV, the village is indeed not haunted.

A Chinese friend of mine now in his 70s has visited the Fengmen Village in 1963 with two of his friends did encounter some ghostly apparitions.

In fact, the Fengmen Village was only vacated after 1981 after a government enforced mass transfer.

Back to the story proper, in 1963, my friend Lee and his two friends came to Fengmen Village to do sketching and oil painting. The reason they visited the village is because of its special building structures and scenery.  The day the three pals entered the village, coincidentally speaking; a household of three suddenly died of high fever and they were just in time for the funeral ceremony of the unfortunate family. It was a custom of the village to throw the pillows of the deceased villagers onto the middle of the front road. Unfortunately speaking, Lee and his pals thought the pillows were blocking their way; so they kicked the pillows aside… Little had they know that this was the beginning of their nightmare during their stay in the village.

After the three companions has entered the Fengmen Village, they visited the headman so as to find a dwelling place as there were no hotels in the village. Since there was just an empty house left over by the deceased family, the headman asked the 3 fellows to stay in the vacated house. Even though the 3 of them were afraid and somehow reluctant to stay in a house of the recently deceased, no one dares to open his mouth for the fear of giving trouble to the headman; and they didn’t want to insist.

Having said so, the three of them did have their fair shares of ghostly incidents after they had moved into the house…

First, the three of them always hear children shouting for mother… when they ventured out, they could not find anyone in the house vicinity.

Other than that, the tree pals coincidentally had the same bad dream about ghosts jumped into their beds. One sunny morning, one of Lee’s friends opened up a wardrobe to get his clothing; he suddenly shrieked and fainted. Lee quickly rushed to the friend’s room and found him fainted on the floor. When the pal was revived, he claimed to have seen a ghostly face hiding behind his clothing. Incidentally, the ghostly face resembled the one that he saw in his nightmare. However, Lee and the other friend went back to search their wardrobes but found nothing. The unfortunate friend started to fever on that night itself…

Two days later, another Lee’s pal dreamed of a ghostly face and he awoke in horror. Then he heard of the noises of water splashing in the garden. Out of curiosity, he opened his room window and saw the naked woman bathing beside a well; she scooped up some well water and splashed the water onto her body. The young man was baffled by the scene he saw and suddenly the woman turned her head… she gave the young man an evil smile and then the lady jumped into the well! The young man’s first reaction was not to rush to the well to save the lady but he was frozen solid and stood beside the window dumbfounded! Because he knew that what he saw was not human but a ghost…

Anyway, after the young man bewildered for a while, he decided to wake up Lee and the other pal to approach the said well with torchlights to perform investigation. When the three of them was at the well, they found the surface of the well water was as calm as a mirror, the sides of the well were quite dry as well; the scoop and the pales were just as dry. There were no traces of water anywhere! Of course, everyone dismissed the young man’s vision was due to his craze for a woman… after all, all of them were in their early 20s then. Having said so, the young man who thought he saw the woman jumped into the well experienced high fever in the very morning…

Lee was a little panic seeing two of his pals had high fever but little had he known that on that night he too dreamed of a ghostly face. Not only that, Lee also felt that he was hack ridden and he couldn’t breathe. As soon as Lee opened his eyes, he found the one riding on him was none other than one of his best friends. This pal used both of his hands to squeeze onto Lee’s neck while yelling: “I want to strangle you!”

Luckily speaking, the other friend heard the commotion and managed to knock the person out cold. After the incident, the three pals finally came to consenses that there were some evil entities in the house. So, they quickly visited the village headman and after listening to their ordeals, the headman brought them to the graves of the house owner to perform prayer. Soon after the prayer, three of them had recovered from their fever and they had not had any bad dreams for the duration of their stay.

After returning from their trip, Lee concluded that although the family of three had died, their bodies were buried nearby their house. Perhaps it was that the restless souls of the deceased wanted to return home as it was the village custom that even the dead are buried within the compound of the village; thus making the livings live amongst the spirits possible. It was perhaps that the roads within the Fengmen Village was so entangled that the spirits of the dead were trapped within the maze like village for ever. Further, there was no Buddha statue or Taoist statue in the village to overpower those wandering spirits.

Whatever case that might be, Fengmen Village may become the thing of the past as I heard that the government planned to build a dam nearby soon.

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