I wish I could tell you that the rules protected you.
That a list of magic words, when followed, would confer unlimited immunity to the horrors that loom over us, waiting, in our waking moments. But reality is a gordian tangle of contradictions, coincidence and chaos - you can do everything right and still be subject to a bad roll of the cosmic dice. The Chinese call this phenomenon 緣yuan. The Japanese call it 必然 hitsuzen. They both mean the same thing: a naturally preordained event from which there is no escape.
Trying to remember every rule and every exception to every rule when you’re sleeping 4 hours a night and trying to make rent every month is impossible. Hell, I can barely do that with my taxes.
Still, the rules are the rules for a reason.
1. Don’t look at them
There’s an idea that making eye contact, talking to, or otherwise interacting with them grants them access to you in turn. This is why as kids we were often told to resist the urge to do a double take if we saw a twisted silhouette looming in the corner of our eyes. Is that an old lady with a misshapen head and tire marks across her face staring at us from across the street? There’s nothing there, keep walking. Did your child just wake you up complaining about the angry woman swinging from the ceiling? Just nightmares, kiddo. Get back in there and sleep it off.
But this doesn’t always play out as expected. My dad was the unfortunate witness of one particularly grisly accident on a major rural freeway. Averting his eyes from the dark maroon stains in the epicenter of flames and twisted metal, he helped the shaken survivor to the side of the road.
Turns out, these two were on their way home from a workplace happy hour. The driver had been getting progressively more and more drunk, opening up about being stalked by a woman in white who announced her presence with crying and manic laughter. The passenger, increasingly unnerved by the stories, convinced his friend that they just needed a good night’s sleep, and they jumped on his motorcycle and set off towards home.
They weren’t on the road long before the passenger started to see a bedraggled woman in white under the streetlamps, her head tracking their movement, her mouth hanging wide open. When she started appearing over and over again on the side of the freeway, . They both knew the rule, and they simply kept their eyes downrange, determined not to acknowledge her. But eventually she got far enough onto the road that it was impossible for the driver to keep his eyes forward and avoid eye contact, so he started looking off to the side.
And crashed right into an oncoming semi.
His rider was miraculously thrown clear of the crash, but my dad saw the bike wedged deep into the cab of the massive vehicle, blood dripping off the still turning wheels.
Did she make him look away so he would crash? Or would she have done something worse to him if they had made eye contact? The answer is who the hell knows. There’s no greater insight to confer here other than keep your eyes on the road. And maybe don’t drink and drive.
2. Don’t answer when they call
The curious thing about this rule is that it appears to transcend multiple cultures. No matter where you are in the world, it is almost common sense to never turn around, answer, or acknowledge an attempt to get your attention if you’re by yourself in the woods. The consequences range from getting spirited away to being horrifically and graphically mutilated, depending on the culture.
The Southeast Asian twist on this rule often comes across as a particularly cruel practical joke. A common tale goes like this:
Brandon is a camp counselor at summer camp. In the middle of the night his best friend slash crush Jennifer gently shakes him awake with a whisper,
“Hey, come with me to the bathroom? Don’t wanna go alone.”
Annoyed but also mildly thrilled to be picked as her protector, he groggily follows her to the outhouses in the moonlight soaked fields, taking a spot by the sinks as she shuts the stall door behind her. They’re making small talk - him teasing her about being a scaredy cat, her jousting back in kind.
As the conversation trails off he notices how quiet it is. No bird calls, no insect chirps, no wind, even. Just the sterile drone of the harsh fluorescent lights above them. The silence allows his sleep-addled mind to recall one fact, a little detail that entirely recasts the situation he’s in.
Wasn’t Jennifer sick?
Frowning, he pulls up the attendance sheet on his phone, scrolling until he finds what he’s looking for.
Jennifer Leang - Absent [Medical Leave]
“Huh,” he muses out loud,
“Hey, weren’t you-”
He catches himself. The thought holding his tongue so incredibly far fetched, stupid, even, that he almost laughs at himself despite the growing unease. But somehow, inexplicably, beneath the good humor and the idle chit-chat he’s been enjoying up to this point, an animal part of him has started screaming at him to stop talking and run.
“Yes?” Jennifer asks, her voice slightly muffled by the door.
“Nevermind, I just thought-” he trails off. He’s already begun nervously tapping his foot, somehow unable to just come out and say what he wants to say. Because if Jennifer isn’t here, then who the hell did he just follow to the bathroom?
“Wasn’t I what?” Is that a trace of mirth, amusement, in her voice? He stares at her unmoving sneakers under the gap in the bathroom door. The hum of the fluorescent lights seems louder than ever, and the air is thick with a tension he didn’t even realize was building.
“I thought- I thought you were,” he stammers. He flicks his eyes to the exit, scanning for an escape route, his mind grasping for some half-baked excuse to leave.
“Yesss?” purrs the thing. Brandon’s head whips back to the bathroom stall to find the door open. Pale hands reach down from above to caress his face, terminating in dirt crusted fingers and too-long, yellowed fingernails flecked with spots of dark red.
Sometimes these things just like to play with their food.
3. Don’t talk about them
Otherwise known as shut the fuck up and walk away. Some part of humanity has always held a distasteful fascination with the dead, and while rubbernecking technically isn’t illegal, don’t complain if the departed develop a fascination with you in turn.
But sometimes you can do everything right and still bring something home.
Jeremy was an off-duty Search And Rescue(SAR) operator passing through the cliffsides when he stumbled upon a resuscitation in progress taking place on one of the rocky footpaths. Despite his colleague’s best efforts, CPR proved futile and the victim, a young man in his 20s, was pronounced deceased on the spot.
Jeremy stood by to direct whatever minimal traffic there was and clear the area. When backup arrived, he went back to check on his colleague. A stab of pity hit him as he saw the victim.
“What a shame. So young,” he said.
“Yeah. Don’t know why the kids love swimming here, but if you’re unlucky you end up like this guy. Always around this time of year, too.” replied the other SAR operator.
Seeing dead bodies, even ones that were bloated and blue, was an unfortunately common occurrence in Jeremy’s line of work, so by the time he got home and went to bed - that incident was far from his mind.
But something made it hard for sleep to come. It was probably that persistent, annoying, drip drip drip, coming from somewhere in the apartment, and Jeremy gave it about 10 minutes before groaning in frustration and opening his eyes.
And saw the veiny, distended face of today’s victim looming over his own, body bent at a near perfect 90 degree angle over his bed. Jeremy yelped and scrambled backwards, but if the apparition meant further harm it didn’t do anything else. It just stared at him for a few long minutes through milky, clouded eyes until Jeremy finally dared to blink - whereupon it was gone.
“Nothing to worry about,” said a Taoist exorcist he consulted the next day,
“He was just thanking you for your empathy. Where was this body, again?”
See, the spirits of the dead often need to be led to the afterlife. It’s why we see massive funeral processions in certain cultures - the loud, wailing nature of these parades often serving as a guiding beacon for the deceased. Many lost souls, often the freshly departed, latch on to the first thing expressing an awareness of their situation, such as a rescue officer expressing a token amount of empathy.
Thanking you for your empathy. That’s like the waitress at your favorite steakhouse thanking you for your patronage by ramming a serrated knife through your palm. But it is what it is - sometimes something innocuous to them is traumatizing to us.
5. Don’t be the odd one out
You’ll often hear this alongside Don’t sit at the back of the bus alone and Don’t ride an elevator alone, and various other iterations.
What it means is if you’re with a group, don’t be in a situation where everyone pairs off and you’re alone. Something will notice and try to complete that pattern.
A group of friends are going on a theme park ride - swan boats going nose to ass as guests foot paddle them through a tunnel. They pair off one by one to get in line and realize there’s an odd man out who’s going to have to ride alone. As friends do, they’re relentlessly teasing the solo for not having a partner.
“Bah, fuck you guys,” he says,
“I got my big titty ghost girlfriend right here!”, gesturing to the empty seat next to him.
It isn’t until they’ve all left the tunnel that they notice that his boat, which was positioned right at the end, hasn’t come out yet. As 10, 15, 30 minutes go by, they get more and more worried and ultimately decide to walk along the service walkways that line the tunnel to go check on him.
From a distance he looks fine. The boat’s just motionless, as though he’s decided to just stop paddling. But two things stick out as they get closer.
First, his boat is listing heavily towards the empty side, as though a great weight has caused the vessel to pitch off center. The swan’s already half submerged in water, but that’s far from their mind because-
Second, his face is underwater in the flooded section of the boat, and his hands are scrabbling against the smooth plastic without purchase, trying in vain to pull himself out. The group shouts, some of them jump in to grab him, and it’s only when someone makes contact with him that the boat abruptly and violently lurches upright. The boy is released, blubbering and coughing up volumes of brackish, oily, water.
He relays his version of events later.
As the ride goes on he finds himself needing to put in more and more effort to pedal his boat, almost unnoticeably at first, but eventually building to the point where he has to strain to cycle his feet even once. As the boat starts tilting to one side, he looks over and sees nothing but hands lining the vessel’s edges. Old, young, mottled, smooth- fingers of all shapes. He freezes, briefly considering using the paddle to hit the apparitions, but as more and more hands reach over the edge of the boat and water starts spilling into the interior, he quickly sets his oar down and tries to stand up, intending to make the jump to the service walkway a couple feet away.
But he can’t.
Because wrapped around his midsection are a pair of white, slender hands. He looks down, and sees that the hands are holding the decapitated head of a drowning victim. It’s a she, maybe, far as he can tell, with long hair. The flesh on the neck has long rotted away, which is probably how the head came off in the first place. Pale, cloudy eyes stare back at him, a puffy face giving him the ghastly equivalent of a leering smile.
Then the hands lunge for his face and drag him underwater, where he stays until his friends come for him.
5. Don’t seek them out
There’s a Japanese parlor game known as 百物語怪談会 Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (lit. Gathering of One Hundred Ghost Stories). It involves lighting a hundred candles in a room and gathering round to tell ghost stories. With the conclusion of each tale a candle is snuffed out, until a hundred stories have been told and the room is in complete darkness. Next to Hasbro’s Ouija boards, this is one of many summoning rituals available to the average person.
The Southeast Asian equivalent of the Ouija board is a little game known as Angels’ Teacup. You take a classic chinese teacup, flip it upside down, draw a tiny red arrow on it, and slap it on a spread of chinese words that say “Yes”, “No”, “Goodbye”, numbers, dates, and all the usual paraphernalia. You ask questions, the arrow moves and points to the answers. Every answer you get, you write down on a sheet in red next to the game, sort of like a live transcript. Pretty straightforward.
I don’t really have a Monkey’s Paw style story for this rule - just a memory.
A group of friends adjacent to my friend circle decided to visit an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of the city - the typical adolescent dare. One of them brought a set of talismans used for Angel’s Teacup, intending to summon any lingering spirits. My grandma lunged for the phone the second she heard, something about wanting to be there to personally protect them, but mom talked her out of it.
When they didn’t show up to school on Monday no one really thought much of it, but when Wednesday came around and they still didn’t show, whispers began spreading amongst the students. The teachers were tight-lipped, but even a casual glance showed that they were shaken, bound by some adult pact to not let the trauma of the real world trickle down to their young charges.
But one of our friend’s dads was a rescue operator, and he’d heard the urgent, strained whispers of his parents when they thought he was asleep. Turns out, five out of six of them were found hanging in a straight line from the ceiling of one of the wards. The game was still set up below them, the teacup still sitting on “Goodbye”.
The transcript is harrowing - a macabre black box of their final moments:
YES
YES
NOT JUST ONE
MANY
MORE THAN YOU CAN COUNT
COME AND FIND OUT
EVERYWHERE
NO
NO
NO
NO
NOT ALL OF YOU
NO
FOREVER
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
GOODBYE
It is chilling to consider: did they play the game to the end, each student getting up to hang themselves at each ‘Goodbye’? Rescue workers found the sixth student catatonic in the corner, and he was immediately detained by law enforcement on suspicion of the murder of his friends. But the unofficial whispers from the firefighters and police officers involved were even stranger.
See, word has it that it ended up taking about six men to load this 100lb fifteen year old onto a stretcher. He wasn’t struggling or feral or biting or anything like that, he just sat there. But his body was just so incredibly dense, almost as though he weighed like several people at once.
The police interview was no more helpful. They deemed him unfit for trial almost immediately and had him checked in to the local mental institution for an undetermined amount of time. Here’s a snippet of the transcript:
Interviewer: Is your name Wei Chen?
Wei Chen: どこにいるか? 尋問か? 俺は十八目の歩兵師団の鈴木陸軍少佐だ。これ以上言うつもりはない、このクソ野郎ども！ (Where am I? This an interrogation? This is Lieutenant Suzuki of the 18th Infantry Division, I’m not telling you bastards anything else)
Interviewer: Wei Chen, can you tell us what happened on the night of 15th October 2001?
Wei Chen: Tolong saya! (Help me!)
Wei Chen: 琳儿，是你吗？日本鬼子走了吗? 你过去帮奶奶瞧瞧 (Lin, are the Japanese soldiers gone? Go help Granny take a look, would you?)
The rest of the interview goes on like this - a never ending stream of multilingual non-sequiturs. Not to mention the boy’s affectations and tone changed by the second, his mannerisms in constant flux.
“They’re still there,” muttered my Grandma, upon hearing the news. She made calls to local exorcist friends, to Taoist priests, to Malay witch doctors, trying to get someone out there to perform the kids’ last rites. She didn’t get a single call back.
“All six of them. Trapped at the hospital. Poor children.”
6. DON’T LOOK UP.
This is the easiest rule to follow. Just fucking don’t. There’s some lore I don’t completely understand about how the underworld is really a parallel spatial dimension adjacent to our own and that’s why they’re always showing up in spaces that don’t quite make sense to our mortal brains. This tracks with reports of them appearing in the corners of ceilings, under subway seats, in mirrors, etc, but it’s not really the point.
What I do understand is that those that show up above you are almost always looking to cause hurt, and also the most capable of directly interacting with you.
There’s a story from my high school of a boy taking a shit in the bathroom. As is typical for 80s jocks his age, he pulls out a comb and starts styling his hair. After a couple seconds he realizes that his hair is feeling thicker, more tangled, more resistant than usual. Before he knows it he’s running his fingers through his hair, trying to untangle it before letting the comb do its work.
And his hand comes away with clumps of silver hair that drift noiselessly to the floor as they come apart.
Confused at the source of the hair that clearly isn’t his, he looks up, straight into the eyes of an old woman dangling upside down from the ceiling, her hair drooping towards his face. He’s barely able to scream.
The custodian finds him scrambling on all fours, choking and wheezing. The poor kid eventually chokes to death, and the official reasoning is that he suffered an unknown allergic reaction which closed up his throat. My classmate saw something different. She says when he was being loaded onto the ambulance, she saw a silver mass of hair bursting forth from his mouth, as though it were rammed down his throat.
So don’t look up. Be it to check out a voice whispering your name from above or a strange shape in the trees. Check under the bed, rip open that shower curtain, close the medicine cabinet, just don’t look up. Some things take an intense, perverse pleasure in human suffering, and they’re constantly looming overhead for an opportunity. Don’t give them that.
As with the rest of the rules in this list, though, there’s only one big, glaring, loophole:
You know what position sleep paralysis most often happens in, right?
--
So there you have it. Six rules out of an infinite web of exceptions and special cases. Rules that even when followed to the letter can still twist around on themselves and fuck you anyway. There’s more, of course - we’ve barely scratched the surface. Did you know that Southeast Asian folklore also includes sightings of an impossibly tall man in a tall hat? Not a top hat, mind you, one of these. If you see someone like that, with his hanging tongue purple and distended as he ambles towards you, it’s probably too late to run. There are also runes and symbols that one can carve in the spirit of protection, but make one mistake and the protective barrier becomes a beacon instead.
But there’ll be more than enough time to discuss all of that.