Asians are very superstitious when it comes to spirits and souls and ghosts. Just based on movies alone, one can see how much they believe in ghosts here and how often they see them in their daily lives. There are even TV shows consisting of people giving personal accounts of their encounters with ghosts, much less books and I’m sure if you stop a random person walking down the street, they’d have some sort of personal experience to share with you.

If you don’t do scary, then I’d stop reading about here.

We were sitting at dinner the other night with the men sharing army stories when the local Taiwanese folks started sharing ghost stories.

Story #1

One of my friends served in the army a few years ago. His barracks were located on a small hill. Smoking is not allowed during training, but the guys who’ve been there longer could get away with it. It was around one a.m. in the morning, and he couldn’t sleep so he went to smoke a cigarette outside. The door was located at the end of a long hallway which led to the side of the hill. After a bit, he realized he needed to pee. So with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, he walked back into the building and right next door to the bathroom. He didn’t bother turning on the lights since he was just going to be quick. He was doing his business at the urinal when suddenly he heard one of the toilets flush in one of the two stalls. Since my friend was kind of a big shot at his station, he figured it was some newbie trying to secretly smoke in the stall so he shouted, “Oy, trying to be sneaky, eh?” He zipped up, cockily sauntered over to the stalls, and tried to catch them in action.

He slammed open the door of the first one.

It was empty.

He glanced at the next one. The lock was green, meaning vacant.

He walked over to the next one.

SLAM.

It was empty too.

But the toilet had flush. (And these are old toilets that have a cord that needs to be forcefully pulled to flush.) He politely closed the stall door, went to the sink, washed his hands, apologized out loud, and left quickly back to bed.

Fun Facts: Here in Taiwan, when burning incense and paper money for the deceased, people will always light a cigarette and stick it in the incense pot for those who used to smoke while alive. My friend thinks that “someone” probably followed him in to the bathroom via the cigarette smoke. Cemeteries are usually located/people are usually buried on hills and mountains. And here, most of the people all know that if anything like that happened to you, then you should always be considerate and apologize because technically you’re encroaching upon their territory. (Which is why my friend apologized. I still can’t believe he washed his hands after that. I would have tore out of there.)

Story #2

Two guys who claimed they didn’t believe in ghosts and the superstitions and such were told by a friend that there was an abandoned house up on Elephant Mountain where a murder had occurred.

To make a point, the two guys went up to the house, poked around the first floor, being belligerent and swearing loudly about how lame this house was. They wander up the stairs to the second floor. At the landing, they froze because they saw mysterious stains on the floor.

Now the boys were freaked out, assuming they were blood stains, they got goosebumps, turned around, and ran back down the stairs and out the door.

The first guy made it out the door, but as the second guy was about to step over the threshold of the front door, he heard a woman’s voice in his ear ask, “So was it fun?”

Story #3

One of the guys at dinner shared with us that this was a personal account told by his uncle. His uncle and two other friends were driving in the mountain roads around 3 or 4 in the morning. They were speeding along the windy roads because there were no cars around. At one point, his uncle, the driver, looks into the rearview mirror and sees a fourth person sitting in the backseat.

He nudges his friend in the passenger seat and goes, “Hey, I think there’s a person back there.” His friend looks in the mirror and sees their visitor. Their friend was sleeping in the back seat, so he didn’t notice anything.

The visitor just sat in the car ride for minute or two without saying anything. His uncle had slowly reduced the speed when their visitor started mumbling about how cars drive so fast on these mountain roads and how dangerous it was.

The next thing they knew, they heard two cars, drag racing, zoom by. Soon after, the person was gone.

Later on down the road, they saw that the previous two cars had crashed and fallen off down the side of the mountain.

(I wanted to know if they eventually called the cops for the car crash, but I didn’t think of this question until later.)