Jinan Ghost Stories: Burning Paper at the Intersection

Zhang Anzai turned on his signal and slowly followed the curve of the one-way road, judging as he did so, "It's not exactly that there's something wrong with the program. I remember this show—it had a male host named Xiao Dong and a female host named Qing Xue.

"But they always told stories separately. And Midnight Stories and Jinan Ghost Stories were the same program from two different periods. This has clearly jumped to a specific episode..."

Zhang Anzai became even more certain that something was wrong with the broadcast. "Could this episode be connected to this dungeon exploration?"

He watched the darkness outside drift endlessly behind the car while listening to the story on the radio.

"This happened when I was in elementary school. I can't remember exactly which grade. Anyway, that was the year Jinan-made Mulan motorcycles had just hit the market. Wei 12th Road was also under renovation that year...

"My grandmother's home was beside the Central Big Locust Tree west of Wei 12th Road, quite close to West Market..."

The host spoke clearly as he recounted a story from long ago. Perhaps because it was told as a recollection, the details were somewhat scattered.

For instance, the place where the story happened had now become a residential complex, but back then it had been all single-story houses separated by maze-like alleys.

For instance, the protagonist and another childhood friend would always arrange to visit each other's paternal and maternal grandmothers, listing the streets and various routes they took.

Until the story finally reached its main point:

"One Saturday afternoon during winter break, the two of us set off together as usual..."

The protagonist and his childhood friend took a different route, passing along a north-south road west of Provincial Hospital and arriving directly on Jing 4th Road.

Yet before they reached the Wei 12th Road that was under renovation, they heard a commotion and saw a crowd gathering. The two realized there had been an accident over there.

The two children squeezed to the front of the crowd to look.

"There was an eight-ton Big Yellow River truck carrying dirt, stopped right there. The driver's face had gone deathly pale. One of the wheels was pressed directly over a woman's head. Blood covered the windshield and the front of the truck.

"The woman wore a black dress and lay twisted on the ground. Five meters in front of her was a deformed little red Mulan motorcycle, still leaking oil..."

What followed was a lengthy, bloody description. The two protagonists were still young, and the overwhelmingly horrifying sight left them completely terrified.

Zhang Anzai listened to the steadily unfolding story and unconsciously furrowed his brow.

Especially later, after the police arrived. Since repairs on Wei 12th Road were only half-finished, something went wrong while they were collecting the body.

"Because the truck's right front wheel was pressing on that woman's head, they had to remove all the stones around it before moving the body.

"But after one officer pulled out a fairly large stone, the truck's wheel suddenly sank into the hollow where the stone had been..."

In short, the mangled head of the corpse was completely crushed.

The horrified crowd backed away, knocking down the protagonist's childhood friend. Something sprayed from the pit left by the wheel and splattered all over him.

Zhang Anzai kept driving as he listened to the radio, with its subtle background music and occasional horror sound effects.

The vivid storytelling really did make him a little tense.

This voice was the stuff of nightmares when I was a kid. Listening to it now, in a dungeon that could actually kill me... how could I not be scared? At least I won't fall asleep.

The darkness ahead was endless. Sometimes there was wilderness around him, sometimes forest, but the highway ahead was usually nothing but a perfectly straight road with no other vehicles. The motions were repetitive, making the drive dull and sleep-inducing.

If he had really been listening to music or an equally boring news broadcast, he might have fallen asleep by now.

But this story was short and gripping, hooking him almost immediately.

In the story, the protagonist told his childhood friend to pat plenty of dirt over himself, covering the warm, revolting blood and other fluids that had splashed onto him.

Yet after they returned, the friend's grandmother, who believed in ghosts and spirits, refused to let the matter pass just like that.

Using a stick, the grandmother stripped every piece of clothing from the friend's body. She told the two children that by watching from the side, they had already angered the deceased woman.

So, a little after ten that night, ignoring the stares of the nearby construction workers, the grandmother took the two of them back to the intersection of Wei 12th Road and Jing 4th Road, bringing yellow paper and incense with her.

Offering comfort to a restless spirit was not an uncommon practice. Many people of the older generation did such things.

However, when the story reached the part where the grandmother muttered prayers and urged the dead woman not to cling to her children, Zhang Anzai froze.

"?"

The scene outside the car was no longer utter darkness. In the dimness ahead, flickering firelight had appeared.

Zhang Anzai's pupils contracted. He leaned forward slightly and looked carefully.

An intersection had appeared ahead, seemingly where Highway 44 crossed another road.

On an empty patch of ground by the roadside, unconnected to any buildings, a figure of indiscernible appearance had appeared from nowhere. It squatted beside the road, burning paper over a small fire.

The swaying flames curled upward as sparks drifted wildly through the air.

Zhang Anzai could clearly see the scraps of unburned yellow paper, as well as three incense sticks planted beside the fire.

The ashes beneath the flames did not seem to consist solely of shredded paper. Just like in the story, they looked like a child's set of clothes.

"Fuck!" Zhang Anzai tried to keep his eyes straight ahead as he slightly increased his speed and instantly drove past that stretch of road.

By then, the radio story had long reached its later part.

After burning the paper, the grandmother led the two children back. But when they passed a corner, the protagonist's childhood friend suddenly slipped into a small alley without looking back.

The protagonist dragged the grandmother back to look for him, only to find that the alley was completely empty.

The grandmother searched like a madwoman all night. At dawn, she finally found him on the steps outside their home.

The child had returned, but he was sleeping so deeply that nothing could wake him.

The grandmother said his soul had been lost. She went back to Wei 12th Road, nearly coming to blows with the construction workers, and forcibly dug up the freshly laid asphalt to take a large bag of soil from underneath. After worshipping with it for many days, the child finally woke up.

More than a year passed. Then, one sunny afternoon, the protagonist finally asked his childhood friend what had happened to him that night.

He said he had not wanted to enter that alley, but his body would not obey him, and he could not make a sound.

After entering, he went into a room and suddenly heard a woman's voice. Terrified, he ran down a small path to the right and ended up in a dilapidated courtyard.

In the southeast corner of the courtyard, he saw a woman whose face he could never make out.