The Strangeness in the Funeral Hall

I work in the funeral industry.

My friends often ask me over drinks and barbecue if I’ve ever encountered anything strange on the job.

In the past, I would always wave my hand and ruin the fun by saying, “There’s nothing strange. When you die, the light goes out. Believe in science!”

But ever since the discovery of ghost particles was announced, I have a feeling that those eerie events can finally be explained…

So, I decided to write my experiences into a book. If you are fated to read this, please believe that karma exists in this world. At the same time, be careful—the people around you might not actually be human…

I entered this industry when I was twenty-six years old. Three years later, I owned my own funeral company.

I’ve experienced many strange things along the way, but the event that dragged me into a whirlpool—one I still can’t escape from—started with a specific case.

That day, our company took on a job for a woman in her thirties who had unfortunately passed away.

The woman’s husband was a man named Mr. Hu. He had come in a couple of days prior to ask about our all-inclusive service, saying his wife might not make it.

When I introduced our services to Mr. Hu, he seemed like a deeply caring man. He told me his wife had followed him for many years without living a comfortable life, and now that she was dying so young, he felt immense regret. He wanted a traditional ritual to help her pass on peacefully.

I recommended a three-person ritual. His wife had fallen at home and hit her head, which isn’t considered a natural death in our industry. It was an accidental death, also known as a wrongful death.

The man agreed immediately. Together with the fee for renting our hall to set up the funeral altar, the total came to twenty-six thousand yuan. He didn’t even blink.

But our company was short-handed lately. Everyone else was busy with other funerals, and even the sales staff had gone to help. As the boss, I couldn’t just sit around; I had to roll up my sleeves and work.

Since the family requested a three-person ritual, it was hosted by me, my partner Han Ying, and our company’s mortician.

On the evening of the first day, we had to perform the opening ritual to clear the path for the deceased. This ritual involves several steps: purifying the altar to invite the gods, breaking through the gates of hell, opening the throat of the deceased to accept offerings, and burning the travel documents for the underworld.

I had repeated this process countless times, but today things felt cursed. The ritual barely started before problems arose.

After purifying the altar and inviting the gods, we had to turn off the electric lights in the funeral hall. Except for the ever-burning lamp, we needed to light ten candles representing the Ten Kings of Hell. This was to prepare for breaking through the gates of hell.

But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t light the candles. We managed to light two with great difficulty, but they went out on their own.

While we were standing there dazed, the deceased woman’s portrait suddenly tipped over for no rhyme or reason.

People in our line of work see plenty of bizarre things, but the relatives inside the hall noticed it too. They were so terrified that they stood up on the spot.

“Brother Zhuang, it feels like the deceased is harboring a lot of resentment…”

The one speaking was our mortician. She was a girl from the Northeast named Hua Yanxi. She was beautiful and had a lovely name, but her voice was very rough and deep. We usually just called her Yanxi.

“She was only in her thirties and suddenly died. If it were me, I wouldn’t be at peace either…” I sighed, thinking that I couldn’t let the deceased keep disrupting things, or we wouldn’t be able to finish the ritual.

In the end, I set the portrait upright and spoke directly to it. ‘If you keep doing this, you’ll scare your son. He’s only nine years old and came to see you off today. If I have to bring out the statue of the Thunder Ancestor later, it won’t be pleasant for you either.’

After those words—half-coaxing and half-threatening—the candles that refused to burn suddenly lit right up.

We let out a sigh of relief and continued the ritual.

Nothing else went wrong, and the rest of the opening ritual went very smoothly.

The ritual took nearly two hours. Since the second ritual wouldn’t start until the late hours of the night, we took a break.

I walked over and sat down next to Han Ying. She was my business partner, thirty-one years old, and two years older than me.

When this shop was upgraded to a company, I lacked funds and brought her in as an investor, making her one of the owners.

Right now, she was staring at the portrait of the deceased, sighing, “How truly pitiful.”

I nodded and agreed that it was indeed a tragedy. Whenever someone young dies early, it is always a terrible shame.

Even though we were used to death, we still held an immense reverence for life.

Han Ying shook her head with a sorrowful expression. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Before I could ask what she meant, two elderly people rushed into the funeral hall. They were Mr. Hu’s in-laws—the parents of the deceased—who had just arrived from a rural village out of town.

The moment the elderly couple entered, they began to wail in grief, crying terribly.

Mr. Hu rushed over to greet them. The moment he reached them, he dropped to his knees, crying and saying he hadn’t taken good care of his wife and had caused them to lose their daughter.

The two elderly parents were crying so hard they were about to faint. I was terrified something would happen to them in my hall, because a death during a funeral is considered an extremely bad omen.

I prepared to go over and offer some comfort. But just as I stood up, I caught something moving out of the corner of my eye.

I froze on the spot, thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me.

Because that ‘thing’ was absolutely not supposed to move.

As I stared intently to get a closer look, it moved again. At that moment, the nine-year-old boy standing nearby—the son of the deceased—took a frightened step back and screamed at the top of his lungs:

“My mom is moving!”

It was true. The deceased was actually moving!

Everyone stood up instantly, looking toward the coffin in unison.

As if to prove to everyone that her son wasn’t lying, the deceased moved once more. We could clearly see her neck turn by about ten degrees.

A series of sharp screams erupted in the hall, and even the two grieving parents stopped crying out of sheer terror.

Yanxi and I froze in place, exchanging a shocked look.

I had seen many strange things during my time in this industry, but honestly, I had never seen anything this bizarre.

My first reaction was that it was a walking corpse, but I had never actually seen a real zombie before.

In a panic, I grabbed a peach-wood sword and ran over, pulling the little boy away first.

At this point, I was inches away from the deceased. It would be a lie to say I wasn’t nervous. Cold sweat poured down my face, and I had to summon every ounce of courage just to raise the peach-wood sword and use the tip to lift the black cloth covering her face.

The moment the cloth was lifted, I shuddered. A pair of weak eyes… were staring right at me.

After freezing for two seconds, a sudden realization hit me. I quickly reached out and pressed my fingers against her carotid artery, then checked the pulses on her wrist.

After checking, I turned around and shouted to the crowd, “She’s alive! She’s not dead! Quick, call 120!”

The moment I shouted, the family members swarmed over in absolute excitement.

However, a deep sense of confusion washed over me.

If the deceased wasn’t actually dead, then who caused those strange occurrences earlier? Who made the candles refuse to light, and who knocked over the portrait?

There was no time to overthink it. Everyone was so overwhelmed with excitement that the funeral hall fell into complete chaos, and nobody was actually calling the ambulance—everyone assumed someone else was doing it.

I looked up at Mr. Hu and loudly reminded him to call 120. But for some reason, whether he was just entirely frozen from shock or something else, he stood by the coffin completely petrified, looking like a statue.

I had no choice but to call out to my own staff. “Yanxi, quick, call 120!”

Yanxi hurried to the side to make the call. Right at that moment, the woman inside the coffin weakly raised her hand. Trembling, she pointed directly at her husband, Mr. Hu, and spoke a sentence that shocked every single one of us.

“He… pushed me. He… wanted to kill me…”

Because she was incredibly weak, her words were interrupted and breathless, but everyone present understood her perfectly.

Every single eye in the room locked onto Mr. Hu, and the crowd instantly erupted into an absolute uproar.

“No! I didn’t kill her!”

“Don’t listen to her nonsense!”

Mr. Hu denied it fiercely, but his panicked expression and his strange behavior earlier made his guilt completely obvious.

This was a case of attempted murder. I didn’t dare hesitate and immediately pulled out my phone to call the police.

“Why are you calling the police?! Why are you calling the police?!”

“This is our family business, what right do you have to call the police?! Do you want to die?!”

Seeing that I was about to dial, Mr. Hu flew into a frenzy and lunged forward to grab my phone.

Fortunately, the wife’s side of the family wasn’t to be messed with. They swarmed over and blocked him completely.

Just as my call to the police went through, Mr. Hu suddenly burst with strength, shoved two people aside, turned around, and fled the funeral hall in a desperate run.

A lot of people chased after him. After finishing my call with the police, Yanxi and I ran outside to look, but unfortunately, nobody managed to catch him. He had gotten away.

Yanxi couldn’t help but ask me, “Brother Zhuang, do we still want the final payment for the funeral…”

I was completely speechless over everything that had happened today. “The person came back to life, so what final payment is there to take? Still, the ritual was half done, so we’ll just keep the deposit as our earnings.”

In any case, Mr. Hu wouldn’t exactly have the chance to come back and ask for a refund.

I went back inside, intending to clean up the funeral hall with Han Ying and Yanxi first.

But after looking around the entire place, I couldn’t find Han Ying anywhere. I assumed she had run outside earlier to chase after Mr. Hu.

Just as I was about to call her to ask where she was, my phone rang. It was her mother.

I felt a bit puzzled but answered it anyway.

The moment the call connected, I heard Han Ying’s mother crying. She was weeping so bitterly that it sent a shiver through me.

“Auntie, what’s wrong? Did something happen?”

Her mother kept crying, completely unable to form words. I could even hear an elderly man weeping loudly in the background, who should be Han Ying’s father.

Finally, her father took the phone over. Choking back sobs, he said to me, “Yiming… Han Ying is dead. She was murdered. The police just called us to come identify the body. Where are you right now?”