Haunted Houses’ Chronicles – Vol.1, Chapter 8

Another house that we bought later was a new one. Everything was normal during the few months that the original residents lived there. The apartment I wanted to talk about lay on the 20th floor of a high-rise building consisting of 28 floors in total. Indeed it was quite a high position.

It was a pretty bizarre tale. What happened at first was that a thief fell to his death from this building. The cause of his fall was purely coincidental. Somehow, he managed to reach the window of the 20th floor, probably wanting to climb into one of the houses to steal things. As bad luck would have it, the family staying on the floor opened the window from inside, accidentally pushing him down. After the police came, they concluded that this was just a petty thief, so there was no point trying to solve this and the family also didn’t have to take any responsibility.

It was worth mentioning that the family was totally unaware of the thief falling down when it happened. I would guess that the thief was taken aback when the homeowner opened the window so unexpectedly. It was winter and freezing outside, so his limbs had gone stiff and he just slipped. Only early next morning that someone on the lower floor discovered the thief’s body, which had been so distorted one couldn’t bear looking at it. From what the residents of the ground floor had to say, if you didn’t take a closer look, you would have thought that it was actually a fallen watermelon.

Just a short while later, the owner suddenly hanged himself. There were no signs at all. The most important thing was that he chose to die on the happiest day for most families – Chinese New Year’s Eve. They said that after watching the Year End Gala, he told his family that he needed to do something. He then went to change clothes to head out and later was found hanged in the bedroom.

However, things didn’t stop there. The owner’s wife and younger daughter claimed that every day they could hear him knocking on the door. I believed many people knew this feeling: You could recognise the familiar footsteps of someone you were close with, or you could tell it was your best friend’s car passing by your house. So the wife and daughter insisted that must be the owner who knocked on the door.

The knocking lasted for a long time. The wife and daughter were not afraid at first, instead, it made them miss him even more. At first, they would open the door every time, hoping to meet his ghost, but they never saw anything. After a while, they could only cry when they heard this knocking sound. As the knocking continued on, the wife and daughter’s grief slowly turned into fear. They moved to the wife’s parents’ place and the house was left empty. Because the rumour of the owner knocking on the door every night had spread around, no one dared to rent it.

Qin Yiheng and I came over after receiving the information from Yuan Zhen. This house wasn’t very close to us, but because it was in a newly built high-rise, the appreciation value and the potential must be great, so we were both tempted. The distance was large but there was a direct flight anyway. Not much travelling time was wasted and we only needed to spend a bit of money on the ticket.

We reached out to the man’s wife through the contact Yuan Zhen gave us. She was a charming widow who didn’t speak much. As we discussed the price, she kept her head down and patiently listened to my bullshit.

I actually didn’t want to be pushy, but bargaining was a must. In order to maximise profits, I must keep talking about how scary and how dangerous this house was. But she hesitated giving an answer, so I had to shut up and first look at the house with Qin Yiheng, then we would decide what to do.

This house was not small, its decoration rather sophisticated. The area totaled about 140 square meters, with balconies both at the front and the back. It was just that since no one had lived here for a long time, quite a bit of dust had accumulated. Just like before, Qin Yiheng went to inspect what was in the house while I stood at one spot chatting with the lady. Usually, it took him less than 10 minutes to complete the inspection, but this time it was different. 20 minutes later, he was still not done.

I kept winking at him. He looked at me and pursed his lips. Finally, I couldn’t help it anymore and found an excuse to pull him to another room. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

His brows furrowed deeply as he said, “This house has been ‘touched’.”

I became suspicious, ‘touched’? After all, I had been following him in this business for some time now and could begin to understand the jargon that came out from his mouth. Being ‘touched’ means that someone had deliberately changed the feng shui formation of the house.

To tell the truth, Qin Yiheng never had a deep understanding of feng shui. He only knew the surface of it,  but you not being able to drive didn’t mean you couldn’t tell the different car brands. So if he said the house had been ‘touched’, I wouldn’t doubt him. The issue was that we couldn’t decide if we should buy this house now. Qin Yiheng suggested we went back to discuss first, as this house was basically a no-dare for anyone anyway.

I thought to myself that it was better to stay safe, so I told the lady a petty excuse and headed back to the hotel with Qin Yiheng. At the hotel, Qin Yiheng thought about it while smoking, looking completely focused. I stayed on one side, watching him thinking. As there was no help I could offer, I just joined him to smoke. After a long time, Qin Yiheng still shook his head in annoyance and concluded that he couldn’t understand. We needed to find an expert to look at this.

“We are here already. It won’t be easy to find an expert,” I said.

Qin Yiheng thought about it again and said, “The only other way is to sleep in it and see what comes at night.”

After he finished speaking, he gave me a malicious look.

My blood ran cold. The motherf**ker was going to use me as the bait again! Fortunately, Qin Yiheng said that he would go with me tonight, but we had to get a lot of things ready beforehand.

In the afternoon, I followed Qin Yiheng to prepare things for the evening. It was a complicated list of items that we needed to buy. We first bought a lot of soybeans from the supermarket and killed a chicken to get its blood. We soaked each soybean in the chicken blood, then prepared some common items such as incense and paper money (I said they were common items but actually there wasn’t much practical use for them most of the time, but, well, just in case). Qin Yiheng also bought a bottle of rice wine and some braised dishes. I thought he wanted to buy these as offerings, but when asked, he said they were for us to eat at night, otherwise it would be boring to just sit there.

What surprised me the most was that Qin Yiheng also went to the pet store to buy a small-sized shepherd dog for more than 1,000 yuan, then tied it with a red string. That was puzzling. 

He said simply, “Dogs have Yin Yang Eyes¹, and at night a dog is equivalent to an extra helper.” 

¹ 阴阳眼 [Yin Yang Yan], lit. translated as “Yin Yang Eye” or “Third Eye”, refers to the psychic ability of seeing ghosts or things that ordinary people cannot see. 

Then he gave me a detailed explanation, “Many people who have raised dogs will experience it, especially when walking out at night, the dog will often bark at darkness or at direction where there seems to be no one. It is because the dog can see ‘unclean things’. In some villages, usually after one dog barks, every dog in the whole village will follow. Perhaps it is because a soul escorted by a Hell officer is passing by the place.”

Soybeans, on the other hand, could be weapons against evil as they could ward off evil spirits. Chicken blood was obvious – it had been a common item used in exorcism since ancient times.

Although these preparations might seem ridiculous, they all had their own reasons. But I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when Qin Yiheng prepared the last thing – topping up 500 yuan to both our phones. I couldn’t get this at all, yet he also refused to explain much, insisting that I would know when the time came.

In the evening, we went get the key from the wife, saying that we wanted to see the house again at night. She directly gave us the key and didn’t want to follow. It seemed she herself knew that we wouldn’t dare to make any disturbance to such a house.

When everything was ready, we took the dog and our bags, then headed straight to the house. To be honest, although I didn’t know what was going on, I wasn’t afraid. First of all, it was because Qin Yiheng was here, and we also had prepared in advance. Secondly, this building was very new and there were many people living there, so it didn’t feel eerie inside. Entering the elevator, we directly pressed for the 20th floor. After pushing the door in, Qin Yiheng began to arrange the items. I couldn’t understand much, so I just smoked and played with the dog.

After 10 minutes of preparation, Qin Yiheng laid out the wine and the dishes. We sat on the floor, waiting and helping ourselves to the food. Everything was normal as I expected, and until 10pm, still nothing happened. As we were afraid we might drink too much, both of us restrained ourselves. In addition, we had already eaten before coming, so we fed almost all the braised dishes to the dog.

Although I already knew in my heart that there would really be a knock at the door, the feeling of having to wait for it still gave me the jitters. The shepherd dog ate too much and soon found a corner to sleep. When I saw it, I told Qin Yiheng that the dog you bought wasn’t reliable. He shook his head and said it wasn’t time yet. Upon saying that, he called me with his phone. After I picked it up, he put my phone in the bedroom where the owner committed suicide. He then turned on his phone’s loudspeaker and placed it on the floor in front of us.

Only then did I know why he topped up so much before coming, but I still couldn’t figure out what this meant. He explained that this was double insurance, or to put it bluntly, things had advanced with time, so there were many ways to find ‘unclean things’. One didn’t necessarily have to follow the old routine. Usually, the radio wave of the phone could be sensed by us, thus in such a quiet house, we could hear when something disturbed the wave. If both the dog and we could not notice the presence of that thing, at least this would help us.

I had no idea if there was any logical basis to what he said, but listening to him had all my attention turned to the phone. The phone was silent, looking as though it was ready to transmit the sound of us talking. I began to quiet down, held my breath and listened carefully. With a melancholic expression, Qin Yiheng also stopped talking and just stared at the shiny phone screen. In no time, the entire house fell into absolute silence.