How to Feed a Hungry Ghost

“The traditional view of death in China is different from the traditional view of death in the West,” says Nick Tackett, an historian from University of California, Berkeley, who studies traditional Chinese death rituals, especially those from Song and Liao periods. The spirit of the deceased separates into two parts, which one might call two souls. One of which resides—and ideally remains—in the tomb, and one of which resides in the ancestral tablet,” a plaque kept in shrines in homes or temples. After burial, souls need to be fed constantly, Tackett explains. “Regular offerings at the ancestral altar and periodic offerings at the grave helped satiate the souls of the deceased.”

But if something goes awry—forgetful relatives who neglect their feeding duties, an improper burial, or some unfinished business on Earth—a dead person’s soul can wander out of the tomb, hungry. These ghosts rarely meddle in the affairs of the living, but starting on the 15th day of the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar—roughly sometime in July/August—the gates of the underworld unlock, allowing flocks of hungry ghosts to roam freely for a month, the appropriately titled Ghost Month, also known as the Yulan or Zhongyuan Festival. (LINK)

BTW, in the West, the two novels (neither of them mysteries, but...) I know of that are based on hungry ghost legends (The Hungry Ghost by H. S. Norup and Peony in Love by Lisa See), both have hungry ghosts that are beautiful young girls. In Asia, not so. They're ugly, they're frightening, they're starving, even if they are your mother:

Mulian confronts his hungry ghost mother in the Kyoto Ghosts Scroll
late 12^th century. (public domain)

This is why one of my characters, Professor John Franklin says, repeatedly, that “European and Asian vampires are predators, pure and simple. American vampires are children who like to play with their food...” 

Now there's a laundry list of things to not do during Ghost Month, for fear of attracting the hungry ghost:

• Whistling
• Staying up late
• Buying a home or apartment
• Leaving clothes out to dry

But to appease the hungry ghost, you can burn

• Paper money
• Paper goods (from clothing to an automobile)
• Servants
• Houses
• Children
• Mistresses or wives

But how does one become a hungry ghost?

• Suffer a violent or unhappy death
• Neglect or desertion by one's living relatives
• Evil deeds: killing, stealing, sexual misconduct
• Evil desires: lust, greed, anger and ignorance

Especially greed, because greed is insatiable in life, and even more insatiable in death, because there's no way to satisfy it as a ghost. They are all mouth and stomach, nothing else.

Speaking of greed, Japan has its version of hungry ghosts as well:

Gaki are the spirits of jealous or greedy people who, as punishment for their mortal vices, have been cursed with an insatiable hunger for a particular substance or object.

Jikininki ("people-eating ghosts") are the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals who are cursed after death to seek out and eat human corpses. They do this at night, scavenging for newly dead bodies and food offerings left for the dead. But jikininki lament their condition and hate their repugnant cravings for dead human flesh. (Sort of like Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and others.)

MY NOTE: The Japanese also believe in the possibility of turning into a hungry ghost while alive because of jealousy and greed. This happens at least three times in The Tale of Genji when Rokujo a former lover of Genji the Shining Prince, sees Genji's pregnant wife Aoi, and her jealous spirit roars out of her body and becomes a Shiro, who possesses Aoi, makes Aoi extremely ill and in the end kills Aoi. Before that, Rokujo's Shiro might also have killed one of Genji's first loves, Yugao. And after Rokujo herself dies, her Shiro possesses and almost kills the love of Genji's life, Murasaki.

And then there's zombies and/or vampires. These go all the way back to Neolithic times. In Neolithic Greece they used to put millstones or heavy pottery shards on the neck or chest and then a heavy stone on top of the grave to keep the body in the grave and away from the living. No revenants allowed, thank you. They believed in werewolves as well, and knew that werewolves could turn into vampires. In fact, blood drinking demons are everywhere in ancient mythology, probably because it made sense. I mean, if all the gods needed blood sacrifices, why wouldn't the demons as well?

Anyway, one way my household has dealt with things that slither and slide and go bump in the night was to use one of Allan's sculptures as the guardian of our threshold. Life sized, folks. You're breaking in. You have a small flashlight. You look around, and this comes lunging at you out of the darkness.

"The Corner" by Allan Fisher

Very effective. Happy Halloween!

I Didn't Plan for This

Memorial Day is right around the corner. A time for thinking about cemeteries and flags and flowers. A time to reflect on those who've gone before us and decide how we can best honor them. Possibly a good time to ponder over how we ourselves would like to be remembered.
Some honorees are traditional in their ceremonies or may establish their own traditions. Some of these approaches are just plain different.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849( was first buried in an unmarked, weed-covered grave over which the sexton later placed a small block of sandstone with the number 90 engraved into the stone. Later, a marble headstone was commissioned. Because of the immense weight of these memorials, the place where they were carved was next to the railway yards to facilitate easy transportation. Unfortunately, a train ran off the tracks and through the monument yard, destroying Poe's marble headstone before it could be moved for installation at his grave.

About 1949, and possibly earlier, on the anniversary of Poe's birth, an anonymous person would enter the Baltimore cemetery and leave a bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe's grave. This tradition continued until the last official visit in 2009.

Marily Monroe's crypt

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), real name Norma Jean Baker, was interred at the Westwood Village Memorial Cemetery, crypt 24, in Los Angeles three days after she committed suicide. Her ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio, took care of the arrangements. He didn't want the funeral to become a Hollywood affair, so he tried to keep the ceremony private. However, in the years after Marilyn was interred there, it became a popular cemetery for celebrities. Hugh Hefner even bought the tomb next to Marilyn so he could rest eternally beside the first Playboy Playmate.

For three successive years, DiMaggio had red roses delivered to Marilyn's tomb. Over time, her stone became discolored from lipstick imprints of kisses from fans.

Al's grave in Mt. Carmel Cemetery
Photo by JOE M200

Alphonse Gabriel Capone (1899-1947), known as Al Capone, was originally buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Chicago, but after his headstone was vandalized a few times, he was relocated to Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. His original black headstone was left in Mt. Olivet as an attempt to fool sightseers and souvenir hunters as to his final resting place.

The large grey upright headstone in Mt. Carmel with the name Capone carved in it is for the Capone family. Al has his own small flat stone nearby. People still leave various objects on his grave.

Jesse James grave in Kearney, MO cemetery

Jesse Woodruff James (1847-1882) got shot in the back of the head in St. Joseph, Missouri and was originally buried on the family property. His body was later exhumed and subsequently planted in a cemetery in Kearney, Missouri. However, a man named J. Frank Dalton (1850-1951) and claiming to be Jesse Woodruff James, or Jesse passing himself off as J. Frank Dalton to avoid the law (as was claimed), got buried in Grandbury, Texas. To figure out which one was the real Jesse James, both bodies were exhumed and DNA analysis was performed. The body in the Kearney grave passed the James test, while the other corpse didn't live up to the required data. Seems that just because you're right though, doesn't mean you get to rest in peace.

1967 photo of the French graves taken from a Huey
by Jim Bracewell, 229th Avn Bn

After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, French Mobile Group 100 abandoned Ankhe and retreated along Route 19 towards Pleiku in the highlands of French Indo-China. En route, they were ambushed several times by the Viet Minh and lost over half their strength. One of the first to die was a trooper who took a poisoned dart to the head from a Montagnard blowgun. Most of the French dead were buried in Mang Yang Pass on the north side of the highway. Allegedly, they were buried upright and facing west towards France. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Vietnamese Communists were said to have removed the white headstones from the site.

In a cemetery near the New Orleans French Quarter you can sometimes read a brief history or a comment about the occupant of certain graves. A headstone might label the resident as "the consort of" a particular person, or might state that the occupant died of a certain disease. Or, you might see three graves in a row and discover that the occupants had once been involved in a love triangle and eventually ended up in side-by-side tombs.

So, how do you plan to be remembered? Planned anything poignant to be engraved on your stone? Or even possibly safer, are your ashes hopefully taking a flier in some special place? Speaking of which, I had an ex-partner who asked a Sheriff's Deputy he played golf with to scatter his ashes on a certain golf course. A year after my ex-partner's death, the deputy was cleaning out his own closet and discovered he still had the ashes. So much for making plans.

At this point, please feel free to share any graveyard trivia you might have.

The Asparagus Bed

I've had out of town guests the last week and a half.   New composition was out of the question.  So, for your reading enjoyment (I hope), a story of mine that was published in "Green Prints", a gardening magazine, in August of 2002.  Also, historically, the first appearance of Officer Grant Tripp...

     By the end of May, Mary Olson’s future asparagus bed was five feet wide by eight feet long and getting deeper every day.  It looked, we all agreed, just like a grave, and the only question was what to bury in it.  Most of us put her husband at the top of the list, but not Mary.

     “Not on your life!” Mary cried.  “I plan to be eating from this patch for twenty years, and that means I’ve got to lay down enough fertilizer to feed it all that time.  Now you tell me, would you want to be eating off of Ed for twenty years?”  You couldn’t argue with that.

     Nobody had ever seen Mary work so hard.  She’d come home from working at the water treatment plant at four, and head straight for the back yard.  Felix, her cat, was right behind her as always, silent and stiff-legged. He was eighteen years old and he followed her like a dog.  She’d pet him a bit, set her beer can on top of the fence post, pick up the shovel, and have at it.

     She dug it all by hand.  The shovel was way too tall for her, but she wouldn’t use the short kind because they threw her back out.  She wore big heavy work boots and tied her head up in a bandanna to keep the mosquitoes out of her ears.  Her hair, linen yellow and tightly permed, poofed up over the bandanna just like a poodle’s.  From the neck up she looked like Rosie the Riveter; from the neck down like Roseanne.

     You never saw anyone dig so carefully.  She kept the sides straight as a ruler, sifted the dirt clean of trash, and clipped the roots away instead of hacking them with the shovel.  The cleaned dirt went into a big pile by the hole, the roots and trash into a paper sack.  She took her time, and since Ed always lingered down at Mellette’s Lounge, she had plenty of it.  Two hours and two beers, with Felix curled up in his favorite spot under the lilacs, watching her sweating hard, creating the ultimate in cat boxes.  Well, don’t you think that’s what he thought about it?

     God knows what Ed thought about it.  Maybe he didn’t.  As long as he had his dinner hot and ready whenever he floated on home, he didn’t care.  Mary said his favorite meal was frozen fish filets, microwaved to perfection, so the menu wasn’t hard to plan.  She bought them by the case, along with boxed macaroni and cheese dinners and canned green beans, and that’s about what they lived on, because Ed wouldn’t eat anything else and neither would Mary.

     Which is why I wondered about the bed.  I mean, if Mary had finally developed a yen for fresh asparagus, all she had to do was go out and hunt it in ditches like the rest of us.  Instead, there she was, every afternoon except rain and Sundays, digging away.  Oh, well.  Actually, it turned into quite a tourist attraction.  Everyone dropped by sooner or later.  Mary would stand back and sip her beer while Felix hid and we all looked and nodded and wondered, by the time it was a foot and a half deep, if it wasn’t deep enough.

     “I’ve got to go down another foot or so,” Mary said.  “That’s what double digging’s all about.  Then I can work in a couple of good thick layers of manure covered with dirt, and then I can lay out my roots.”  We all nodded like we’d just finished doing the same ourselves.  “I want it to last my lifetime at least, so I’ve got to do it right the first time.”  And we all nodded again like it was gospel.

     She dug the bed two feet deep.  She dug the bed three feet deep, and the kids started asking if she was digging to China.  She dug the bed four feet deep and we started worrying a little, especially when Ed went off to the VFW one night and never came back.  No one even remembered seeing him arrive.  After he was missing three days, Mary called the police and Grant Tripp came out and talked with her while she worked the bed.  They talked about the weather, Ed’s gambling, asparagus, Ed’s drinking, Mary’s cousin (Grant’s wife’s brother-in-law), Ed’s gambling, the weather, and Ed’s drinking.  It was only after Grant got back in his car that he realized Mary had been filling the asparagus bed in instead of digging it out.
    Things got a bit strange after that.  Folks started giving Mary funny looks everywhere she went, like they were trying to gauge if she was big enough to lug a dead man around, and she certainly looked like she was.  After a while she quit going out much, except to get groceries and beer, and when she did she jerked and snapped and glared at you when you spoke to her.  She was way too sensitive about everything, I thought.  I mean, it wasn’t our fault we couldn’t quit thinking about that hole in her back yard.  

     That’s why it was a real psychological relief when Judge Dunn okayed the warrant to search Mary’s house and property.  Grant was there the next day, with two officers, two workers from Hegdahl’s Construction, and a back hoe.  The officers went inside while the back hoe went to work outside.  Mary stood by her back steps and watched them with a face like granite.  And her face collapsed like a mud slide when they dug up Felix.

     We’d all been so worried about Ed that no one had noticed that Felix hadn’t been around for a while, either.  He was so old he must have just died in his sleep, and Mary had buried him in the back yard, the way most of us do, in his favorite spot.

     Well, everyone felt awful, looking at poor Felix, lying in the middle of all that mess.  Mary’s back yard looked like someone had taken an egg beater and whipped dirt everywhere.  It was piled two feet deep in the lilacs alone.  Grant and the back hoe boys offered to help clean it up, but Mary said she thought the cure would be worse than the disease, so everyone went home and left her to it.  It wasn’t until after dinner that it finally dawned on people that Felix’s favorite spot was under the lilacs, not in the bed.  The back hoe was back out at Mary’s the next day.

     This time Mary didn’t come out, and I can’t say I blame her.  I mean, she knew what was out there, and she knew they’d find it, even if they had to tear those lilacs apart.  But Mary hadn’t had time to dig under those tough, tall lilacs.  She’d dug beside them, and the backhoe didn’t have far to go before Ed’s body was found. 

     Mary went to jail, and her sister sold the house to the Corsons, a farm couple from Canova.  They’ve lived there for ten years now, and every year, that asparagus bed comes up thick and lush and mouth-watering.  Not that anybody picks any of it.  I mean, we all know Ed wasn’t under there that long, or that near, but as Mrs. Corson says, you can’t be too careful. 

But I’ll tell you what, Mary knew what she was talking about.  You do your asparagus bed right the first time, double-dug and heavy on the fertilizer, and it’ll last a lifetime.  

THE END

NOTE:  The inspiration for this story was that I dug an asparagus bed in my back yard, by hand.  I have no living resemblance to Rosie the Riverter or Rosanne (yet), but other than that, it's fairly accurate, down to the beloved cat watching me dig the world's largest litter box.  Many, many people came by and watched me dig, because around here most people get their asparagus wild, from ditches.  Many people, beginning with my husband, commented how the bed looked remarkably like a grave.  Many people suggested that my husband watch out.  My husband is still on the right side of the soil, but the asparagus bed did not make it - a winter from hell killed almost everything, including my lush, thick asparagus bed...  It almost broke our hearts.  Back to the ditches...