Zombies, Images and Geomancers

Naomi (Shuchen), my accountant, is from Taiwan and is thinking about returning soon for a visit to see her mother. She has a few trepidations and one of them is visiting her Father’s grave. It was broad daylight when she explained the reasons for her reluctance, and her story chilled me.

The graveyards in Taiwan are far from the populated parts of the country. Located high in the mountains, they are remote. Many of the sarcophaguses are quite elaborate, almost like houses for the dead.

“Taiwan is very humid,” she explained. “There is a smell of death lingering in our cemeteries and no one ever visits after sundown.”

Naomi did visit her Grandfather’s grave after sundown once. When one of her teachers tried to discipline her by smacking her palm with a ruler, she hit back with a pencil holder and then ran away, hiding at her Grandfather’s grave until long after dark.

The grave was on her parent’s farm and not part of a cemetery. Still, she felt the presence of spirits around her as soon as it grew dark, and she ran back home to be punished by her Father for striking the teacher.

This is not the only experience Naomi had with cemeteries. She and her family lived in a small village; a place where everyone knows everyone else. One of the families was having problems and consulted a geomancer, a person practiced in the art of feng shui, and he told them they needed to move the grave of their mother that had passed some ten years prior.

No one visits a Taiwanese graveyard after dark, but the geomancer advised that the family should exhume the grave at nine at night. Everyone in the small village went to the cemetery for support of the family, although none of them allowed to dig, or to view the disinterred remains. What the family found when they opened the casket was a shock to the entire village.

The woman’s body had not decayed. She lay there before them - as if she had just died - her eyes open wide. Her hair and her fingernails had continued to grow and she appeared like a wraith, or a zombie, before the horrified relatives that stared down at her body.

The family moved the woman’s body to the spot the geomancer had prescribed, and a hunk of flesh removed from her arm to accelerate decay. The image remained locked in Naomi’s brain as she contemplated visiting Taiwan, her mother, and her father’s grave. The image is indelible and now remains locked in my own brain.

Gondwana