On the Night the Dead Return: Five Accounts of Fatal Revenants (Sha) from ‘Nighttime Talks’ in Eighteenth-Century Beijing

Abstract

Yetan suilu (Jottings of nighttime talks) by Hebang’e is a late eighteenth-century Chinese collection of ‘anomaly accounts’. Among the roughly 140 entries in the collection, ‘Huisha wuze’ (Five items on fatal revenants) deals particularly with the Chinese belief that a dead person would visit his or her former home on a specific day in the form of a fatal revenant (sha). Besides providing an annotated translation of ‘Huisha wuze’, this article also explicates the uniqueness of the sha-revenant and sheds light on the rich cultural history of a hitherto understudied mortuary ritual that has close connections to Chinese vernacular religion.