This will be the last 10 creepy legends for now! The last one to end the Halloween month will be 10 Creepy Chinese Legends though we only managed 8 due to the difficulty to find anything like this from China but either way let’s dig into it!
8) Fox food
There are two stories of Da Ji: the true story of Da Ji, the wife of King Zhou, the last ruler of the Shang Dynasty; and the mythological tale of Da Ji. History remembers Da Ji as an evil woman who, along with her husband, was sexually aroused by seeing people tortured. In fact, she invented her own torture device: the paolao, which was a bronze cylinder to which victims were strapped. It was then heated up with hot coals, resulting in a long, painful death as the victims were slowly cooked.
Eventually, the people rose up and overtook the government with a successful coup, ending the Shang Dynasty. Ji Fa, ruler of the new Zhou Dynasty, sentenced Da Ji to death, and she was executed. The myth of Da Ji is much different, however. In Investiture of the Gods, a 16th-century Chinese novel full of tales about Chinese mythology written by Fengshen Yanyi, Da Ji is a fox spirit that is able to take a human form after years of work. She was summoned by the goddess Nu Wa to corrupt King Zhou because he disrespected her in her own temple. If she managed to get the King’s people to overthrow him, Nu Wa promised Da Ji immortality.
Da Ji did manage to get the King’s subjects to overthrow him, but Nu Wa did not give Da Ji immortality. Instead, she had her killed, because Da Ji had gone to such extreme lengths in completing her task that even Nu Wa, who wanted Da Ji to instigate a coup, was like, “Nah, this lady is too crazy.” The lesson here appears to be, “Maybe don’t go off the deep end trying to please someone, because you might do something you can’t take back.”
7) The Binzhou alien
Although China has its cultural peculiarities, the basic mindset of its citizens is similar to everyone else when it comes to thirst for attention and quick profit. In June 2013, a resident of Binzhou called Mr. Li (or Lee, depending on the source) had a close encounter with an alien. Luckily for him, the alien had a close encounter with his electric rabbit trap first. Being an enterprising kind of man, Mr. Li took the incapacitated alien, put it in a freezer with a glass lid, and called the newspapers.
Mr. Li says that the alien’s ship had been flying over Shadong province when it malfunctioned and crashed to the ground. Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, immediately went insane over the story and its many photos of the alien. The authorities were less convinced: Upon taking a glance at the ”alien,” they immediately saw that it was a fairly unconvincing doll Mr. Li had made out of rubber. In the end he has been convicted to time in jail for this stunt.
6) Jian Ziweng
Jiang Ziwen was a brutal, arrogant tyrant who presided over the Moling province of ancient China. He died before his time, in a fight against a group of bandits that ambushed him. However, this was just the beginning of his story.
After Jiang Ziwen died, many locals reported seeing his ghost around the province, unwilling to let go of the power he had achieved in life. According to legend, the reason for Ziwen’s haunting was simple: He still wanted to rule. The ghost demanded that he must be worshiped as the deity of the area, and it looks like he was successful—research indicates that the cult of Jiang Ziwen was active in the area for hundreds of years.
Although some scholars say Ziwen was never an “official” deity, it looks like he was a fairly powerful unofficial one: Although historians disagree on whether his cult was used by the rulers to reinforce their power or by the common people to undermine the rulers, the fact remains that the worshipers of Jiang Ziwen were a force to be reckoned with in medieval China.
5) The Midnight bus
There are several versions of this legend going around, but this is one of the more famous versions.
A young man was on his way home late one night. The streets were empty except for the occasional motorists, and the only one at the bus stop with him was an old man (some say an old woman). The midnight bus arrived and they boarded it without any fuss. The old man took a seat near the front of the bus while the young man sat a couple of rows behind him. There were no other passengers with them.
After awhile, the bus stopped and two new passengers climbed aboard and sat behind the driver’s seat. Several minutes later, the old man suddenly stood up and confronted the young man. He looked angry, and accused the young man of stealing his wallet. The young man was angry at being accused of something so preposterous. The argument became more heated until the old men angrily declared that both of them must get off the bus and settle their argument at the nearest police station. The young man at first did not want to go with the old man, but then relented just to settle the matter and prove his innocence.
When they got off and the bus zoomed away, the young man was startled to see that the old man was no longer angry — in fact, he looked relieved. When he asked the old man what it was all about, the old man answered: “I just saved both our lives.”
To which the young man responded with a confused “Huh?”
“Did you see the two passengers?”
“Yeah, so what?” replied the young man, still miffed and bewildered.
“Well, unlike you, I took a closer look. They have no feet; they were just floating on air. Those two were ghosts!”
The next day the news was all about the midnight bus – it had gone missing along with its driver. For several days, the police tried to locate the bus, and finally found it more than a hundred kilometers away from its regular route. Inside the bus was the badly decomposed body of the driver. The authorities were even more perplexed and horrified when, upon checking the tank, they found blood instead of petrol.
4) The Hello Kitty Murder
In 1999, Hong Kong was horrified to hear the details of a grisly murder that happened in a third floor apartment in Granville Road 31. The victim was a 23-year-old nightclub hostess, Fan Man-yee, who was abducted by three men and held captive for more than a month. During the time of her captivity Ms. Fan was tortured mercilessly almost every day until she died. Her body was chopped to pieces and disposed along with the household trash. Her decapitated head was then sewn inside a Hello Kitty doll, and since the media are not known for their subtlety, the crime was dubbed the Hello Kitty Murder by the press.
For several weeks, authorities were oblivious of Ms. Fan’s murder until a 13-year-old girl, a girlfriend of one of the murderers, went to the police complaining that she’s haunted by the ghost of a woman her boyfriend helped kill. The police just dismissed the statement of the girl, but she was persistent. Deciding that it would be less of a hassle to check the story than be berated by an angry teenager, they inspected the address given and were horrified with what they saw.
The suspects were quickly rounded up and given life sentences, but the story did not end there. In the months following after the murder, CCTV cameras of nearby establishments captured images of a female form lurking in the shadows. Reports of eerie sounds and ghostly flames abound. Due to the ghostly haunting, the tenants moved out and no one else seemed interested to move in. The owner of the building was forced to close it down and finally demolish it in 2012.
3) The Souls of the drowned people
The souls of the drowned people, also known as the Shui Gui are vengeful spirits of the people who have drowned. They are hiding at the exact spot they died and wait for people to swim by. Once the day comes, the Shui Gui drowns the person and they will be stuck as the new Shui Gui.
I won’t be swimming anytime soon now..
2) Hungry ghosts
They are doomed to waste away in the underworld. They will be forever hungry, but will never be able to eat. Exactly, we are talking about Hungry ghosts!
These souls became hungry ghosts because they were selfish and cruel in their lives, and due to this they shall be punished in one of the most painful ways, Forever starvation.
Every year in the middle of the 7th month on the Chinese calendar, the people hold an Hungry Ghost Festival. This is believed to be the only day the Hungry ghosts will be able to consume the food the people offered to them. You can read a bit more about this festival here
1) The Hidden City’s mass slaughter
The Chinese Ming Dynasty lasted for 276 years (1368 – 1644 AD), and has been described as “one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history.” While at the same time it has seen some of the darkest more gruesome era’s. The cruelty of the Ming emperors knew no bounds, and was specifically targeted towards the imperial concubines. Some Ming emperors had upwards of 9,000 concubines, many of whom had been kidnapped from their homes and were forbidden to leave their gilded prison except when they were called to the emperor’s bed. Since the barbaric practice of foot-binding was prominent at this time, the hobbled women could not run away or even walk into the emperor’s bed chambers, but instead had to be carried naked to the expectant man.
The Yongle Emperor is famous for creating a second capital for China, besides Nanjing, and named it Beijing as it is still called today. Here he built “The Forbidden City,” the imperial Chinese Palace at Beijing, which lasted from 1420- 1912. His reign provided a mix of military, economic, and educational reforms in his dictatorial style of government. However, his acts of cruelty were numerous and well documented. In 1421, shortly after Yongle unveiled the Forbidden City on New Years Day, there were rumors that one of the emperor’s favourite concubines had committed suicide because she had an affair with a palace eunuch due to the emperor’s impotence.
Humiliated, the emperor set to work silencing all that knew of the situation as well as everyone involved. He told the rest of the palace that the concubine in question had been poisoned, he then rounded up 2,800 women from this harem and had them all executed by slicing. In this mass execution girls as young as 12 years old were put to death. While there is no mention of this massacre in the official record, a written account exists from another one of his concubines, Lady Cui, who had been away from the palace at the time. Shortly after, Lady Cui as well as 15 of the emperor’s remaining concubines were hung from white silk nooses in the halls of the Forbidden City on the day of Yongle’s funeral.
Source: Lot’s and lot’s of Google and Wikipedia
