A Mysterious Death in the Countryside

This story takes place in a rural village, right next to the narrator's home. While the narrator wasn't present to witness it, the story they heard was so unsettling that it couldn't have been fabricated.

It happened during the summer of 2015, and the protagonist was a woman in her fifties. She met an inexplicable death by drowning in the small pond in front of her house. She and her husband were farmers, taking care of their grandson as their son and daughter-in-law worked in a distant city. She had a strong personality and often engaged in disputes with her neighbors. On the day she died, she was visiting a neighbor's house, discussing daily life, and even in the evening, she mentioned that she planned to go to a distant place.

That night, after bathing her grandson, she washed her hair and changed into clean clothes. The couple slept upstairs. When her husband woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't find her, he searched everywhere in a frenzy but to no avail. It was only the next morning when the narrator's mother, who was out tending to the ducks, discovered her lifeless body in the pond. Her appearance was horrifying; she was covered in dirt and had blood on her nose. Notably, the pond in front of her house, where she drowned, was shallow, only waist-deep, and used for raising waterfowl. It was inconceivable that she could have drowned there.

No one could fathom how she ended up dead in that pond. She hadn't argued with her family that day, and she could have easily gone to a cleaner and deeper river nearby if she wanted to take her own life. However, rumors began to circulate in the village, suggesting that during the Ghost Festival when they offered sacrifices and burned spirit money, someone had left the leg of a table outside, inadvertently inviting evil spirits into their home. According to the stories, this woman's father, brother, and perhaps even her missing sister had all met with drowning deaths. People suspected that these three spirits came back that night to drown her.

The woman's daughter, upon returning home, consulted a spiritual medium, who supported this eerie explanation. The spiritual medium claimed that there would be more victims in the family if they didn't take measures to protect themselves. This period of superstition and fear became so intense that several households in the village started locking their doors before 6 PM every night, out of sheer terror. The woman's husband also mentioned that he felt her presence next to him, as though she was sleeping there, but her body was ice-cold. In his dreams, she repeatedly stated that she didn't want to die and even threatened him with a kitchen knife. In conclusion, it was a chilling tale, full of inexplicable circumstances and superstition, which left everyone deeply unsettled.