Xiang Ming, a mountain villager of Kanglang in the Hongya district of Yugan, had taken a singing-girl named Hu as wife; after more than ten years she bore a daughter and died. In the first year of Longxing a shaman came from another district saying he could summon the souls of the dead, and Xiang asked him to call his wife. At the word she came at once.
Xiang saw nothing, but their daughter, now twenty, alone saw her — truly her mother — and so she stayed and would not leave. By night she shared the husband’s bed with separate covers, and stayed with the daughter. Everything she needed she conveyed through the daughter.
Two months later she suddenly said her parents had come, bringing servants, and wanted to eat and drink; Xiang at once prepared the offerings. At first the seats were set together, but the wife said master and servant should not share equal courtesy, and so they were set apart. Then she said her father’s house was damaged and he meant to build a new one, and asked for money to help; they burned several hundred bundles of paper cash. She said there was much money but no one to carry it, and so they called a painter to make two paper bearers; when done she found them short and weak and had them remade.
Presently she announced she was leaving, to help her two parents repair the house; more than a month later she came again. A familiar old woman named Li visited her husband, who said nothing; asked the daughter, she said the mother had struck her on the waist with a pestle. The old woman went home with a great pain in her waist and could not walk; a diviner determined Hu was the cause, and only after prayer was she cured.
After a year together the wife gradually shrank, and at the end was like an infant, then vanished.
