Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. It's just us, but Jerry and Dave are here in spirit. And speaking of spirits, we've got a pretty spooky, real life Halloween adjacent episode even though it's a real deal custom over in China.
That's right, because Spooky Month continues. It's stuff you should know.
Yeah, so we're gonna go Chuck today to the Xiangxi region. There's no way you can't see a region like that. I know of Hunan Province.
Oh my god, you're doing great.
That's in south central China. And if you go there, local custom will tell you that if somebody dies is if someone dies away from their home, especially their birthplace, they have to return back to it to be buried, because if they don't, they will have a restless spirit
that vexes the living, maybe even possessing them. The thing is, sometimes people do die away from home, and there's a remedy for this that the people in Hunan Province have come up with, and that is to walk the corpse back home to be buried.
That's right, And if not, then you're just going to be cursed to wander the earth. Pretty upset, harassing people, possessing people. And here's the thing. If you lived in rural China back then, and you were a rural peasant, you probably died pretty close to home because you didn't travel that much, so it wasn't that big of a deal. But occasionally you might find yourself away from home and
you need to get walked backed. And this is a tradition that dates back to sixteen sixteen and continued into the twentieth century.
Yeah, the Qing dynasty apparently is where it finds its roots, and the idea that they were doing this in the sixties potentially even pretty interesting.
Yeah.
Apparently it was Mao who stamped it out because it was superstitious and therefore counter revolutionary. I don't know if it still goes on in little random pockets, although it's much easier to get a corpse back home these days.
Yeah, traditionally used to be, and you never.
Know, maybe maybe so. But traditionally, speaking of tradition, it was the Taoist priests who were responsible for walking corpses back home. And to do this, Chuck, They basically had two options available. One was much more efficient than the other. The first one was corpse walking, which is essentially what it sounds like. The thing is. We should say this here, like,
I don't know if we've emphasized this enough. This was a magical event, yeah, where a Taoist priest basically reanimated a corpse enough to have it walk behind him to be led by the Taois priest back home to be buried. This dead person would walk back home with the Taoist priest.
That's corpse walking, Yeah, for days, weeks, months, depending on how far away they were from home. The priest would carry a lantern that was a light both day and night, although they would usually do this at night because as we'll see, it was very bad luck for residents of villages that they would go through to see this kind of thing happening. So eventually they would have people runners out in front even saying like hey, we got a corpse coming. I think they were banging a gong to
kind of warn everybody. The corpse is behind the priest, like we said, very very tall, dressed in a black robe and just following the directions of the priest saying yoho, yoho. You know, it's just so the corpse knew which way to go go right.
They would be like, yoho, yoho, we got a pothole coming up on the right, right, and the corpse would kind of like walk around the pothole right. And there was one other thing you would see. In addition to this priest leading this tall corpse dressed in a black robe back home, you would probably see a black cat running along with them. Of course, they essentially did not ever travel without a black cat, because this is how
the corpse was reanimated. Every day, or I should say every night, when the priest and the corpse took their journey back up, the black cat would rub itself all over the corpse several times. And the idea was the static electricity from the cat's fur was what reanimated the corpse to move again.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to take a quick moment since you mentioned cat to tell people who have not yet seen that I have a new kitten that I think we're going to keep now. And it's all on my Instagram at Chuck the podcast or the story of Olivia being rescued from the undercarriage of a car Wow and very sick with worms and bacterium and seemingly near death and had her little butttholest it shut and then unstitched. It was quite a ride. We thought we were gonna lose her,
then we nursed her back to health. We thought there's no way we can keep her because our dog Gibson has no chill.
And it turns out they are in love.
Oh my gosh, Chuck, that is a wonderful story.
It's wonderful so that the other two cats are gonna hate this, but as I said on Instagram, they can get bent because I think Olivia is staying and she's very cute. And you can go check out the story. It's been wildly popular on my Instagram.
That's awesome. Well, welcome to the family, Olivia.
That's right, But Olivia was not a black cat.
And since I took so much time with that story, maybe we should take a break and finish up with corpse walkers.
Yeah, let's do that. So, Chuck, I said that there were two ways for a Dallas priest to lead a corpse back home. The first one was corpse walking, which we just talked about. It was a priest and a corpse. The much more efficient version is corpse herding, and it's very much like how today, if somebody's transporting a car for an owner, they're gonna transport more than one at a time, and they're gonna group the cars together on the back of a truck by the region that they're
all going to. This was basically the concept behind corpse herding.
Yeah, there were more priests involved because there were more corpses, so you'd had like, you know, a priest upfront, priest in the back, maybe a couple of priests.
On the sides. I think this is when.
We talk about the runner being out front. I think this is when they had their runners, yep, that would warn the townsfolk that they were coming.
And the way it's described sounds to me like have you.
Ever seen a at a like an NBA game. They'll have somebody come out at halftime, and it's like a guy that's dancing like like you know, some popular performer, but he's got like a curtain rod running through his outfit on the top and attached them at the bottom, and there are fake, you know, dummies of people, and every movement he's making with the rods, they're making an exact same time, so it appears as if there's like five people dancing in synchronicity.
There's essentially nothing more hilarious that you can see than that.
See you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, definitely, is that what this is sort of like, because that's how I pictured it.
Sort of This was instead of them being on either side of the priest, they would be in a single file line, all following behind the lead priest. Oh okay, and then there'd be priests on either side kind of corralling them in because you didn't want walking corpses kind of wander off and you know, try to possess somebody or steel their cheek. And it did bear some similarities to what you're talking about. We'll see that in a second.
But I want to talk about a Chinese American writer named Louise Hung who wrote an account, a really interesting account of her grandfather's experience way back in the day
when he was a young boy. She posted it on the Order of the Good Death website, which we've talked about them a million times over the years, but just to kind of summarize, if I may please, her grandfather and his brother lived in a town where a corpse procession walked through and they heard the gong coming and they were hiding with everybody else in town, just keeping out of sight, but they were brave enough to kind of peek out, and they saw, she says, a line
of corpses lurching, hopping, swaying through the streets to the beat of the gong. They saw white cloths covering the heads of the dead faces positioned up and forward, supposedly looking toward their final resting place. Yeah, and so like this happened, like this is not like this, like there weren't like legends of corpse walking, right, these happened in
real life. And if you say, I don't really believe in magic, Daoist or otherwise, I don't really think a black cat's static electricity could reanimated corpse if this actually happened, guys, guys, what was going on? Guys?
Yeah, a cat would be more likely to eat the nose off of that person.
Yes, yeah, which is probably something you had to watch out for.
Yeah, what really was going on and it was really going on?
Like you said, is that was a Dallas priest.
And Louise Hung even said, Hey, I'm not even sure all these people were Dallas priests. I think they might have just been doing the job and kind of saying that. But in the case of the solo corpse walker, it would be a Dallas priest carrying a corpse on their back with a bamboo pole stuck up the back to hold them upright as if they were alive, and a big black robe draped over both of them, kind of like the old bits with someone on your shoulders in a big long trench coat exactly.
That's why the corpses that were in a single corpse walking procession always were very tall, that's right, because they were on the back of another priest who was hiding. And just to be clear, they didn't like impale the dead person on the bamboo pole. It was like tied to them. Yeah. So they The way that they did this was they could see kind of through the black robe. They could see the lantern enough to be led. And remember the priests in front would be like, there's a
pothole coming up on the right, Yoho, yoho. So they would do this and then obviously they would switch off night tonight who would carry the corpse and who would do the processing. That was how corpse walking worked. Corpse herding also used bamboo poles, but they used them horizontally, kind of like you were talking about with the basketball halftime guy.
Okay, well, I'm glad it didn't spoil that because people are probably just very confused about what I was talking about. But yeah, it sounds like they are all tied to the pole and the pole kind of runs under their arms, and that's what kind of made me think of the dancer.
I should get one of those systems. I'm sure you can buy those.
Right, surely they can't. I'll be homemade, yeah, or make one.
How hard could that be?
I'm sure there's a halftime basketball dancer being like, yeah, you'll find out, pal, it's really hard.
That'd be a fun Yeah, that'd be a fun Halloween get up. I already have my or I don't have the outfit, but I have my idea this year. So I can't do it this year. I'll pri to you it next year.
Can you reveal your idea on this episode?
Yeah?
If you saw the Righteous Gemstones, I'm going to be baby Billy Walton Goggins, brilliant character.
Okay, awesome. Oh so wait, hold on one second. About the bamboo poles. Yeah, there would be two of them, one running under each arm of the corpses. So basically they were hanging the corpses by their arms by bamboo poles. Then the poles would be the ends of poles would be carried by a priest in front and back on their shoulders, and the way that those two priests would walk it would get telegraphed through the bamboo poles, which would make the corpses look like they were just kind
of bouncing around. Their feet would probably hit the ground and touch it here or there, so it looked like they were walking in line behind the Dallist priests.
That's that nuts, and they would say, NBA, it's fantastic.
That's right. I don't think there's anything that could top that chuck. So I say short stuff is out.
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