There was a man named Tan Sheng who was forty years old and had no wife, and who used to sit up late reading the Book of Songs and feeling sorry for himself.
One night, past midnight, a girl came to him. She was fifteen or sixteen; her face and her dress were such as no one else in the world had; and she told him she had come to be his wife.
Tan Sheng asked no questions.
She said only one thing. “I am not as other people are. Never look at me by lamplight. After three years, you may.”
They were married. She bore him a son. The boy was two years old, and there had been no lamp, and Tan Sheng had kept his promise for nearly three years.
Then, one night, he could not bear it.
He waited until she was asleep, and he brought a lamp close, and he looked.
Above the waist she was living flesh, warm and whole, like any woman. Below the waist there was nothing but dry bone.
She woke, and knew at once what he had done, and said: “You have betrayed me. I was almost alive. One more year — could you not have waited one more year?”
He wept and tried to explain and could not stop weeping. She wept too, and then she stopped, and she said:
“I cannot stay. But the child is yours and I will not see him starve. Take this.” And she gave him a robe embroidered with pearls. “Go at dawn to the market and sell it. Do not haggle; take what is offered, and keep it for our son.”
Then she tore a strip from the garment Tan Sheng was wearing and said: “I am taking this. If you ever need to find me, this is the token.”
And she went out, and there was no one.
Tan Sheng sold the robe at dawn. It was a thing of the dead, and it was worth a fortune; the buyer, who knew what he was looking at, paid a thousand cash without a word, and Tan Sheng took the money home and raised his son on it.
The boy grew up. In time he became a magistrate — the tale is careful to tell us this — and his father’s house was comfortable, and it was all paid for by a robe.
As for Tan Sheng: the record says that later, when he was an old man, he took the torn strip of his own clothing and went out to look for her, and did not find her, and came home, and lived, and died.
The story is barely three hundred characters long, and it set the template for everything that came after: the girl who comes at night, the condition, the unbearable curiosity, the half-completed transformation, the gift for the child, and the man left holding a scrap of his own clothing. Pu Songling read it. Everyone read it. Two thousand years of ghost-wives are standing on this one page.