Chapter 17 PART FIFTEEN: TWO THINGS RELATING TO GHOSTS

There are naturally many stories to write about how to reclaim the land and grow cotton and food on the large wasteland along the coast of northern Jiangsu, but first let me talk about two strange things that must be related to ghosts that I experienced in that place. The first strange incident can only be understood by explaining the living environment at that time.When we got to the wilderness, there were naturally no houses to live in, and the local folk customs were strong. At that time (1952) there were still bandits haunting us, so the vanguard was a platoon of troops, some cadres, and some reform-through-labourers. , a total of no more than two hundred people, to live together.

They live in relatively large shacks with pillars tied up with thick bamboo and reeds, crossing with the ground to form an equilateral triangle, and reeds are spread on the two slopes to slightly shelter from the wind and rain.The widest part of the shack is the ground, which is about four meters wide, leaving a passage in the middle. Sleepers on both sides must face the passage with their heads. If they face the other side, their heads will touch the foot of the pillar.I once jokingly called this shack a pyramid. The big shack is quite long, about 50 meters, and each side has to sleep a hundred people, so when allocating it, each person occupies a width of 50 centimeters and cannot exceed it.One end of the big shack was for entry and exit, and the other end was sealed off. It was a mud stove, which provided food for more than two hundred people.

And of course there is no mattress, not even a bed board, and the thatch under the body is cut and slightly dried thatch, which has a strange fragrance, and I still miss it to this day.And the passage in the middle is just for people to walk through. The environment has been introduced. The vision is that everyone is exhausted from working in the field. When it gets dark, everyone is loud and loud, and there is no such thing as insomnia. From the third or fourth night, every night, when everyone is sleepy When it was thick, someone pushed the sleeping person, and someone said in the ears: "Let me go, let me go, it's so hot, let me go and cool off!"

The people who were pushed were very sleepy, and most of them shrank back, turned over, and didn't care if they gave way.After two or three weeks, everyone was pushed and felt surprised!Who is it that must go out every night to cool off?So, the platoon leader and captain gathered everyone to ask, but no one said that such an action had taken place! This is naturally very suspicious. The platoon leader suggested that someone should be on duty at night, and he himself was the first to be on duty. But in the middle of the night, he was extremely tired and fell asleep, just as someone was blocking the passage, and he was pushed awake again in a daze. , He woke up suddenly, shouted who was it, and without answering, he shot three times into the sky. After one night, there was no result.

Until dawn, the person in charge of lighting the stove was a hired local villager, who was very old, and hesitantly said: It may be a ghost. The leader of the platoon denounced it: Where is the ghost?Nonsense! The old villager said: Maybe it's because he said it was hot under the stove. It's already cool in autumn, how can he be hot, unless there is a fire burning him all the time! Things have been developing up to this point, and there are still various scientific explanations. Seeing that many people believed the old man's words, the platoon leader and the captain decided to break the superstition, ordered the stove to be dismantled, and dug down. One meter away, there was a very complete skeleton. At this moment, everyone turned pale, dumbfounded, and didn't know what to do.Everything had to be done by the old man, and the bones were relocated to a good place. After the stove was rebuilt, no one woke people up in the middle of the night to go out to enjoy the cool.

Although this area is desolate, it is a place where warlords of all sizes often fight. There was a tsunami several decades ago, and many people were drowned. My dear friend who went out to enjoy the cool, naturally he didn't know what kind of soul it was. Another thing is even more strange, also in the local area, in a small market town called Dayoushe. We whispered to each other, the young woman was very strong, she was a typical rural young woman, and she was shopping, and there was nothing unusual. Curious, I went over and asked, and the villagers said that this young woman would go crazy every other week, and her strength was boundless. What I was doing, I must ignore it, ran to a big elm tree and pointed my finger, and the big elm tree yelled loudly at the mouth of Zhuangzi in words that no one could understand, and it would take at least half an hour to stop.

I had heard it before, but I didn't know that when I was going back in the evening, I saw that the big elm tree was surrounded by people, and some people were shouting loudly. I squeezed past and saw that young woman, dancing and talking loudly. The expression was extremely excited, but the language used was not understood by anyone. Several people went up to stop them, but they were all pushed away by her. Everyone who watched the fun looked very strange. Obviously, they were used to seeing This situation, however, also felt very strange and terrifying. About twenty minutes later, the young woman let out a few howls, then stopped abruptly, lowered her head for a moment, then raised her head again, with a dazed expression, as if she didn't know what happened at all.And the two men who were beside her just now, most of them were her relatives, they went to help her to leave, chatting a few words in a low voice, others would go up to talk to them, but they didn't want to talk to them.

At that time, seeing this situation, the only answer that came to my mind was: the upper body of a ghost!