Ghosts linger, long after the end of Ghost Festival in Taiwan

After a month of burning paper money and offering food to ghosts, the Ghost Festival ended in August, but to many Taiwanese, ghosts continue to live among them.      

Several ghost stories were reported by the media during the festival, and are believed by most Taiwanese, who are mostly Buddhists or Taoists and believe in afterlife and reincarnation.

One story widely reported was of a train travelling at high speed at night when suddenly the driver saw a man crossing the track. He pulled the brakes but the train hit the man anyway.

But when the train stopped and the driver checked the track, he found neither the body nor blood stains. Taiwan newspapers concluded that the train had hit a ghost, not a human being.

The Bureau of Investigation was involved in another ghost story that involved a woman from Nantou County, central Taiwan, who lost her husband in 2004 when he was swept into a river by a mudslide. His body was never found.

Recently, the woman had a dream in which her husband told her that his body was swept out to the sea and found near Keelung, on Taiwan's north-east coast.

"I am cold, I am lonely. Please take me home," the man pleaded with his wife.

The wife contacted the Bureau of Investigation's laboratory to compare her husband's DNA with that of a dozen unclaimed corpses in Keelung, 250 kilometres from Nantou county.

Pu Chang-en, a laboratorian at the bureau, said that when he received the woman's phone call, he thought it was joke.

"But she sounded earnest and gave us the tissue of her husband left over from a hospital test. So I decided to give it a try. We compared his DNA with that of a dozen unclaimed bodies in Keelung, and found her husband's body," he said on cable TV channel ETTV.

"I was shocked because I only believe in science. It shows us that there are things that science cannot explain," Pu said.

The woman brought her husband's remains to Nantou for a proper burial to appease his soul. She said that if it was not for the dream and the DNA test, she would never have thought her husband's body could have been swept by the sea all the way to Keelung.

Yen Pei-yi, 29, has had a personal encounter with ghosts for the past decade.

Yen, 29, is a painter in Taichung, west Taiwan, and claims that ghosts visit her at 10:35 pm every day since her high school days.

"Sometimes it was a bony and cold finger touching my toe, or a dark shadow beckoning me from the staircase or a legless ghost, or a partial face or many eyes, or several ghosts playing a card game and the winner would have the right to take my life," she said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"I was scared at first but later got used to it. After I began to study Buddhism, I came to realize that life and death, and human beings and ghosts are linked because life does not end when we die, so I got over the fears," she said.

Yen documented her encounters with ghosts through 100 paintings displayed at her Ghost Paintings Exhibition, held recently at the Changhwa Cultural Bureau in Changhwa City, west Taiwan.

"Through visiting this exhibition, I want my pupils to know that in this world, there are many things that we do not know or cannot see, but that doesn't mean they do not exist," said one teacher that brought her students to see the art. "But some other people are able to see them. So we should respect different opinions and learn new ideas."

   Perhaps the best policy for Taiwanese is to follow the Chinese saying, "Respect ghosts, but stay away from them." dpa dc pw pb fs