A man of the Lü family outside the south gate of Danyang had a soapberry orchard which brought in very good money. Whenever the pods were ripening, father and son kept watch over it to guard against thieves.
One night in the moonlight the father sat on a stone watching the trees, and out of the ground beneath the trees came something with hair all tousled. He was frightened and would not look at it, and called his son to come and pull it out.
A woman in red clothes started up. The father fell to the ground in terror and the son ran for his life into the house. The woman came after him. When she reached the main gate she suddenly stood rigid and still, one foot outside the gate and one foot within.
The son shouted, and the family came running with knives and staves, but they were afraid of the cold air that came off her and dared not go near. The woman got up at her ease, walked stooping, went under the bed, and was gone.
The son revived his father with ginger broth, helped him home, and called the neighbours to dig under the bed. There, sure enough, was a vermilion coffin, and in it a woman’s corpse in red clothes, just as they had seen her in the night. After that, father and son dared not watch the orchard or the trees again.
Three days later, a man fell to the ground under the soapberry trees as well. Lü’s son revived him and asked him how it had come about. He said: “I am your neighbour to the west. I saw that you had a great many soapberries and nobody keeping watch, so I came to steal them. Then I saw a headless man under the tree beckoning to me with his hand, and I was so frightened that I fell down.”
The son again gathered people and dug, and they found a black coffin with a headless corpse in it, both stiff and uncorrupted. They piled firewood and burned them, and the hauntings stopped.
