Writings
delicate emotions
horros / thrillers
nursery rhymes / narrative poems
- The Scholar
- Interlude I
- The Boy
- Interlude II
- The Aristocrat
- Interlude III
- The Exorcist
- Epilogue
Dramaturgy / PLAYWRIGHTing
delicate emotions
horros / thrillers
nursery rhymes / narrative poems
Dramaturgy / PLAYWRIGHTing
HORRORS ON THE GRAVES HILL
HORRORS ON THE GRAVES HILL
08/12/2023
Word count: 2065
Approximate reading time: 6-7 minutes
Word count: 2065
Approximate reading time: 6-7 minutes
My grandfather’s passing brought back a lot of old memories, some buried so deep in my brain that I thought I would never remember them again in my life. My father’s side of the family was a mixed bunch. I was told that my ancestors were Taoists in old times, not in a philosophical way – they exorcised demons, used spells, and talked to ghosts and spirits. They were driven out of business when China took a firm stand embracing atheism, so they became sailors. With that said, the knowledge and practices didn’t die out; they were still passed on to the eldest son of each generation. Unfortunately, it stopped with my parents as they refused to believe in any supernatural elements, or so they claimed. Looking back from where I am now, I think partially they just did not want to be involved in any of that. After all, blissful ignorance.
Therefore, the last person in our family who possessed the knowledge would be my grandfather. He used to keep an altar in his house and perform rituals on various occasions. I was too little to remember the details. It was rumored that he wanted to pass the mantle to me as I have the ‘potential,’ which only led to a huge fight between him and my parents. Thinking about all the weird stuff that I encountered growing up, I kind of wished they didn’t push back that hard. Now that he has passed away, I guess I will never have the chance to learn.
I had a dream the night before he passed away; in my dream, grandpa told me that he needed to go be with his mother now and asked me to take care of myself. I woke up with a message from my mum saying that grandpa had passed away. The subsequent phone call was excruciatingly long for both of us; most of the time, we were just crying. When we were discussing funeral details, I remembered the dream and told my mum about it. She suddenly became quiet. I could hear her breathing through the phone line. And she asked me if I remember what happened when I was ten years old.
Ah, something did happen to me when I was ten.
“Do you remember what happened to you on Shungeng Hills?” Mum asked me on the phone.
How can I ever forget? It was the summer of 2008.
My father was a sailor, so he was rarely around. And my mum worked in an arcade every day until late nights. It was summer vacation, no school, no parents, what more could a kid ever ask for? It should be a summer to remember. Yes, indeed it was a summer to remember, but not in a way that I want it to be.
I had dinner at my grandparents’ house as usual. Mum was supposed to pick me up after she finished her shift. It was around six in the afternoon; the sun was about to set. Grandpa and grandma had turned in, and I was allowed to play in the yard. Out of nowhere, a sudden urge took possession of me – go climb Shungeng hills.
Shungeng hills are the three hills sitting between my hometown and the neighboring town. They are around 200 meters high. The left one houses our local TV signal towers, the middle one is a famous tourist attraction rumored to be the place where the legendary emperor Shun used to farm, and the right one was the tricky one. It used to be a quarry but was abandoned after over-mining. Then it turned into the local mass grave where people buried their dead. It was in the early 2000s, and the government was pushing cremation and public cemetery where you had to pay a pretty sum to secure a slot. Many locals did not want to pay up or did not want to cremate their loved ones, so they would carry the body in the dead of night and bury them old-fashioned way on the hill over to the right. Over time it became littered with graves. We locals would stay away from the mass grave and stick to the middle one if we felt like climbing.
Back to the story, I felt almost compelled to go up the hills. A strange feeling I cannot explain to this day. So I snuck out of the house and got up on the bus and made it to the foot of the hills. People were used to seeing kiddies by themselves due to the fact that a lot of parents left their children behind with their grandparents to go into big cities for a better wage. So nobody stopped me on my way. As I approached the hills, people were coming down and on their way home as the sun was about to set.
Now, this was the part where my memory started to get fuzzy. One moment I was at the foot, and the next moment I was up in the mountain. How did I get up there? Surely, people would stop a child from climbing up the mountains by themselves when the sun was setting? I could not believe that ten year-old me somehow evaded all the prying eyes and went up the mountain unnoticed alone.
This was the only part that does not make sense. When I came back to my normal self, I realized that I was not on the middle hill. And I could not see the very obvious TV signal towers. That leads to only one conclusion. Somehow, I found my way up to the mass grave hill.
Panic started to set in as the sky went dark. Thus began my futile attempts of trying to get out. The last bit of sunset lit the place in an otherworldly yellow, and then the yellow was slowly eaten away by an eerie darkness. Walking became running became sprinting. The sounds of tiny footsteps falling on the fallen leaves, the creeps on branches. I felt watched from every hidden crook, in the bushes, behind the trees, under the rocks. Every turn I made there’s a pile of dirt on the ground, grave mounds. I was overcome with fear that I struggled to breathe. Tears were running so hard it left my eyes and my face burning.
I did not care what direction I was heading; in my mind, I was screaming I just wanted to get out of this godforsaken place. I thought, in my little head, if I stuck to one direction and kept my head down, I will eventually reach the ground. I should be, right? Right? Except I didn’t.
A dreadful feeling started to wash over me that I might not be able to get out, that I would be trapped here forever. That feeling of despair was so strong that it temporarily cleared my head and allowed me to think.
How could I have been so dumb? I was carrying a mobile phone with me! I pulled it out of my shorts pocket and flipped it open. The pale light on the screen lit up my face and filled me with hope. My mum had set speed-dial on it in case of an emergency, so I just pressed 1 and the green calling button.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep… beep.
No signal.
I was devastated. The glimpse of hope was snatched away by an even deeper despair. I stopped thinking and started running like a lunatic. Why was I here? Why did it happen to me? What did I do wrong? Will I die here? I miss my mum.
My limbs were numb, my voice was coarse, and my face was burning. I must have been running, crying, and screaming non-stop.
And suddenly, I felt a similar yet different feeling. It was like the voice that compelled me to come here by myself, yet this time it felt protective, almost like a guardian. I followed this strange feeling, navigating my way between the graves and the woods, trying my best not to look at all those tombs. For a while, I thought I was going crazy, literally going back and forth, turning and turning back, walking in circles. My head was filled with all kinds of sounds—wind blowing through the leaves, branches touching together, strange howlings—all of them sounded like creepy whispers somehow. I tried my best to focus and finally found the place where the strange warm feeling was the strongest: a grave, overgrown with weeds. Because it was a place where people bury illegally, there was no tombstone that could tell me whom this grave belongs to. I never would have thought that I would find shelter near a freaking grave in the middle of the night, alone on the mountain. And yet, that was the cruel reality.
I pulled out my phone and almost shrieked. Full bar of signals! My hands were so shaky I had to make multiple attempts to just press one and call my mum.
The phone was instantly picked up, and I was met with a voice so angry it was incandescent with rage. But god, was I happy to hear my mum scold me. I tried my best to explain the situation I was in, that I was somehow trapped on the grave hill and no matter what I do, I cannot get out. I could hear my grandpa’s voice in the background; it sounded like chanting. Mum must have come to my grandparent’s house to pick me up and realized that I was gone. It was only now that I had remembered to look at the time—it was almost 10 pm, meaning that I had been on this goddamn hill for hours.
My mum’s voice was like an adrenaline shot. I found command of my body again. Despite my mum asking me not to move and wait for her to come and pick me up, I started trying to go down the hill again, this time filled with determination. I knew this time it would work. I could almost hear a voice telling me that it is okay now.
It only took me less than thirty minutes to reach the foot. I called my mum again and told her that I made it down, and she said to stay put and would be there in five minutes.
I sat my ass on the ground. There were cuts on my legs and forearms as I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. The adrenaline rush was over, and I was swept away with hunger and fatigue.
Five minutes felt like an eternity. By the time I finally saw my mum getting out of her moped and rushing towards me, I could feel nothing but numbness.
To be honest, I was expecting an ass-whooping. After all, it was me who decided to go on a hike by myself. And I did not expect adults to believe me when I told them that a strange voice forced me to do it. Hell, I did not believe it myself. However, to add to the mystery, mum never scolded me after that. And we never spoke of it again as if nothing ever happened.
A couple of years later, the government was trying to relocate all the graves to public cemeteries and get rid of the bad rep since it’s so close to the tourist attraction. My family was involved as well. That was when I learned that my great-grandmother—grandpa’s mum—was buried on that hill. Something had clicked in my head. I remembered that warm feeling, so distinct from others, and the grave that gave shelter to a scared young boy. I hadn’t mentioned this to my family until now.
“Do you remember what happened to you on Shungeng Hills?” Mum asked me on the phone.
“…Yeah.”
“I do not believe in any of this. But I was so desperate, I asked dad to do his thing to find you.”
Did grandpa ask his mum’s spirit to save his grandson from unknown forces? I have no answers. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if my parents let my grandpa teach me what he knew, but there’s no use in thinking about what-ifs. And the child-trapping grave hill has been removed by the government, so no more kids would be harmed.
Right?
Therefore, the last person in our family who possessed the knowledge would be my grandfather. He used to keep an altar in his house and perform rituals on various occasions. I was too little to remember the details. It was rumored that he wanted to pass the mantle to me as I have the ‘potential,’ which only led to a huge fight between him and my parents. Thinking about all the weird stuff that I encountered growing up, I kind of wished they didn’t push back that hard. Now that he has passed away, I guess I will never have the chance to learn.
I had a dream the night before he passed away; in my dream, grandpa told me that he needed to go be with his mother now and asked me to take care of myself. I woke up with a message from my mum saying that grandpa had passed away. The subsequent phone call was excruciatingly long for both of us; most of the time, we were just crying. When we were discussing funeral details, I remembered the dream and told my mum about it. She suddenly became quiet. I could hear her breathing through the phone line. And she asked me if I remember what happened when I was ten years old.
Ah, something did happen to me when I was ten.
“Do you remember what happened to you on Shungeng Hills?” Mum asked me on the phone.
How can I ever forget? It was the summer of 2008.
My father was a sailor, so he was rarely around. And my mum worked in an arcade every day until late nights. It was summer vacation, no school, no parents, what more could a kid ever ask for? It should be a summer to remember. Yes, indeed it was a summer to remember, but not in a way that I want it to be.
I had dinner at my grandparents’ house as usual. Mum was supposed to pick me up after she finished her shift. It was around six in the afternoon; the sun was about to set. Grandpa and grandma had turned in, and I was allowed to play in the yard. Out of nowhere, a sudden urge took possession of me – go climb Shungeng hills.
Shungeng hills are the three hills sitting between my hometown and the neighboring town. They are around 200 meters high. The left one houses our local TV signal towers, the middle one is a famous tourist attraction rumored to be the place where the legendary emperor Shun used to farm, and the right one was the tricky one. It used to be a quarry but was abandoned after over-mining. Then it turned into the local mass grave where people buried their dead. It was in the early 2000s, and the government was pushing cremation and public cemetery where you had to pay a pretty sum to secure a slot. Many locals did not want to pay up or did not want to cremate their loved ones, so they would carry the body in the dead of night and bury them old-fashioned way on the hill over to the right. Over time it became littered with graves. We locals would stay away from the mass grave and stick to the middle one if we felt like climbing.
Back to the story, I felt almost compelled to go up the hills. A strange feeling I cannot explain to this day. So I snuck out of the house and got up on the bus and made it to the foot of the hills. People were used to seeing kiddies by themselves due to the fact that a lot of parents left their children behind with their grandparents to go into big cities for a better wage. So nobody stopped me on my way. As I approached the hills, people were coming down and on their way home as the sun was about to set.
Now, this was the part where my memory started to get fuzzy. One moment I was at the foot, and the next moment I was up in the mountain. How did I get up there? Surely, people would stop a child from climbing up the mountains by themselves when the sun was setting? I could not believe that ten year-old me somehow evaded all the prying eyes and went up the mountain unnoticed alone.
This was the only part that does not make sense. When I came back to my normal self, I realized that I was not on the middle hill. And I could not see the very obvious TV signal towers. That leads to only one conclusion. Somehow, I found my way up to the mass grave hill.
Panic started to set in as the sky went dark. Thus began my futile attempts of trying to get out. The last bit of sunset lit the place in an otherworldly yellow, and then the yellow was slowly eaten away by an eerie darkness. Walking became running became sprinting. The sounds of tiny footsteps falling on the fallen leaves, the creeps on branches. I felt watched from every hidden crook, in the bushes, behind the trees, under the rocks. Every turn I made there’s a pile of dirt on the ground, grave mounds. I was overcome with fear that I struggled to breathe. Tears were running so hard it left my eyes and my face burning.
I did not care what direction I was heading; in my mind, I was screaming I just wanted to get out of this godforsaken place. I thought, in my little head, if I stuck to one direction and kept my head down, I will eventually reach the ground. I should be, right? Right? Except I didn’t.
A dreadful feeling started to wash over me that I might not be able to get out, that I would be trapped here forever. That feeling of despair was so strong that it temporarily cleared my head and allowed me to think.
How could I have been so dumb? I was carrying a mobile phone with me! I pulled it out of my shorts pocket and flipped it open. The pale light on the screen lit up my face and filled me with hope. My mum had set speed-dial on it in case of an emergency, so I just pressed 1 and the green calling button.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep… beep.
No signal.
I was devastated. The glimpse of hope was snatched away by an even deeper despair. I stopped thinking and started running like a lunatic. Why was I here? Why did it happen to me? What did I do wrong? Will I die here? I miss my mum.
My limbs were numb, my voice was coarse, and my face was burning. I must have been running, crying, and screaming non-stop.
And suddenly, I felt a similar yet different feeling. It was like the voice that compelled me to come here by myself, yet this time it felt protective, almost like a guardian. I followed this strange feeling, navigating my way between the graves and the woods, trying my best not to look at all those tombs. For a while, I thought I was going crazy, literally going back and forth, turning and turning back, walking in circles. My head was filled with all kinds of sounds—wind blowing through the leaves, branches touching together, strange howlings—all of them sounded like creepy whispers somehow. I tried my best to focus and finally found the place where the strange warm feeling was the strongest: a grave, overgrown with weeds. Because it was a place where people bury illegally, there was no tombstone that could tell me whom this grave belongs to. I never would have thought that I would find shelter near a freaking grave in the middle of the night, alone on the mountain. And yet, that was the cruel reality.
I pulled out my phone and almost shrieked. Full bar of signals! My hands were so shaky I had to make multiple attempts to just press one and call my mum.
The phone was instantly picked up, and I was met with a voice so angry it was incandescent with rage. But god, was I happy to hear my mum scold me. I tried my best to explain the situation I was in, that I was somehow trapped on the grave hill and no matter what I do, I cannot get out. I could hear my grandpa’s voice in the background; it sounded like chanting. Mum must have come to my grandparent’s house to pick me up and realized that I was gone. It was only now that I had remembered to look at the time—it was almost 10 pm, meaning that I had been on this goddamn hill for hours.
My mum’s voice was like an adrenaline shot. I found command of my body again. Despite my mum asking me not to move and wait for her to come and pick me up, I started trying to go down the hill again, this time filled with determination. I knew this time it would work. I could almost hear a voice telling me that it is okay now.
It only took me less than thirty minutes to reach the foot. I called my mum again and told her that I made it down, and she said to stay put and would be there in five minutes.
I sat my ass on the ground. There were cuts on my legs and forearms as I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. The adrenaline rush was over, and I was swept away with hunger and fatigue.
Five minutes felt like an eternity. By the time I finally saw my mum getting out of her moped and rushing towards me, I could feel nothing but numbness.
To be honest, I was expecting an ass-whooping. After all, it was me who decided to go on a hike by myself. And I did not expect adults to believe me when I told them that a strange voice forced me to do it. Hell, I did not believe it myself. However, to add to the mystery, mum never scolded me after that. And we never spoke of it again as if nothing ever happened.
A couple of years later, the government was trying to relocate all the graves to public cemeteries and get rid of the bad rep since it’s so close to the tourist attraction. My family was involved as well. That was when I learned that my great-grandmother—grandpa’s mum—was buried on that hill. Something had clicked in my head. I remembered that warm feeling, so distinct from others, and the grave that gave shelter to a scared young boy. I hadn’t mentioned this to my family until now.
“Do you remember what happened to you on Shungeng Hills?” Mum asked me on the phone.
“…Yeah.”
“I do not believe in any of this. But I was so desperate, I asked dad to do his thing to find you.”
Did grandpa ask his mum’s spirit to save his grandson from unknown forces? I have no answers. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if my parents let my grandpa teach me what he knew, but there’s no use in thinking about what-ifs. And the child-trapping grave hill has been removed by the government, so no more kids would be harmed.
Right?