"Haunted?"
Upon hearing Song Laosan's explanation, I raised an eyebrow and asked, "What exactly happened?"
With the translator's comforting words, Galawa gradually calmed down and told us a story.
Long ago, there was a tribe in Bihar who lived at the foot of the mountains and made their living by hunting for generations.
During World War II, in order to increase the number of troops that Britain could deploy on the battlefield, it forcibly conscripted soldiers in its colony of India.
At that time, India was poor in resources, many parts of the country were suffering from famine, and diseases such as cholera and dysentery broke out on a large scale.
To avoid conscription, the people of the tribe hid in the mountains.
After the villagers went up the mountain, they had no other way to make a living and could only survive by eating wild fruits and hunting.
After living on the mountain for several months, the group was so hungry that they could no longer hunt, and they were also unable to catch any more prey, so they decided to go down the mountain and leave their fate to chance.
Being captured by the British and sent to the battlefield at least offered a chance of survival; if they remained on the mountain, they would truly starve to death.
When they were halfway there, they discovered a temple in the mountains.
The temple is very grand and covers a large area, but the entrance is very small, and people have to bend over to squeeze in.
Everyone found it strange, since their tribe lived by hunting, their ancestors had lived here for generations, and the villagers often went up the mountain. If there was a temple, it was impossible that no one would have noticed it.
Moreover, judging from the scale of this temple, even if the entire tribe were to gather all its resources, they could not have built such an exquisite building.
People at that time were quite ignorant and believed that the temple was a miracle caused by the descent of the gods, so they prepared to go in and worship.
The temple was bustling with worshippers, and the offering table was laden with fruit, creating a magnificent scene. However, the Buddha statue enshrined inside was quite strange.
It is neither the Buddha, Bodhisattva, Dharma Protector, nor Heavenly King in Buddhism.
It is not Brahma, Vishnu, or Shiva of Brahmanism.
Instead, they were statues of gods they had never seen before, some with human faces and animal bodies, others with human bodies and animal faces, and still others like Arhats and Bodhisattvas they had never seen before.
Having wandered the mountain for so long, the villagers were starving and rushed forward to eat the offerings, disregarding everything else.
Just as everyone was scrambling for the food, a group of monks suddenly appeared in the temple. Instead of blaming them, the monks prepared a sumptuous dinner for everyone and distributed a lot of gold and silver treasures.
The villagers were overjoyed and stayed at the temple for several days. After eating and drinking their fill, they returned to their tribe.
The British troops who had conscripted men had left, but the village had been burned to the ground, so the villagers prepared to rebuild the village with the gold and silver given to them by the monks.
But when everyone reached into their pockets, they found no treasure at all, only all sorts of insects.
Upon further headcount, everyone discovered something even more alarming.
There were more than a hundred people in the tribe when we came down the mountain, but now there are more than a dozen missing.
Even stranger things happened. When the villagers chatted among themselves, they discovered that many of them had seen the missing person walking beside them when they went down the mountain, but the person was gone when they returned to the village.
At that time, the village elders called on everyone to find the missing person, so the people of the tribe went back up the mountain.
When they returned to the mountainside, the temple was long gone, and all they found were scattered human bones on the open ground.
These skeletons were unrecognizable, but they were clearly dead not long ago, as there was still flesh and blood on the bones.
Even more bizarrely, these bones were covered with teeth marks.
Human teeth marks!
The villagers mustered their courage and pieced the bones together, which matched the number of people who had gone missing from the tribe.
This terrified the crowd, and everyone scrambled down the mountain. When they returned to the village, they found the missing person perfectly fine.
After questioning, these villagers, like the others before them, also discovered that someone was missing after returning to the village. Comparing the two groups, they found that the events that happened on their way down the mountain and the things they said matched up.
This bizarre incident left even the village elders bewildered. Following tradition, they held a blessing ceremony and ordered that the matter be never mentioned again.
And so, the village was rebuilt, but because of the temple incident, the villagers no longer dared to go hunting in the mountains, and their lives became worse day by day.
From that day on, the tribespeople's health deteriorated, and within just two months, seven or eight people died.
It wasn't until a shaman passed by that he noticed something amiss. He secretly found the village elder and told him that there was a haunted temple in the mountains, and that the evil spirits in the temple had already set their sights on the tribe.
The elder was skeptical of the shaman's words until the shaman revealed the recent spate of deaths in the village. Only then did he realize the seriousness of the situation and ask the shaman for a solution.
At that time, the shaman gave the elder an idea: to gather all the people in the tribe and say that since the tribe stopped hunting, they would not have enough food to last through the winter and needed to find a suitable place to cultivate the land.
The villagers, unsuspecting, followed the elder and left the village. After leaving the tribe, the elder continued to walk in the opposite direction of the mountains.
As they walked, some people started to complain and demanded to return to their tribe.
These people were the dozen or so who had gone missing.
The elder ordered the villagers to tie up those people and continue leading them further away. However, these people were incredibly strong, and even with four or five villagers grabbing one of them, they couldn't hold them down.
Just as these people were about to run back to their tribe, the shaman appeared from behind.
He was carrying a black cat, with a large snake as thick as an arm wrapped around his body, and he was chanting a spell as he walked toward them.
The dozen or so incredibly strong men trembled with fear upon seeing the shaman, and the villagers seized the opportunity to tie them up and carry them away.
These people were quite well-behaved at first, but suddenly started making a fuss when the mountain was about to disappear from sight.
Seeing this, the wizard directed the group to forcibly pull them away. When the mountains disappeared from sight, the group let out a scream and fell silent.
Upon closer inspection, everyone realized that those bound up were not villagers from the tribe, but rather lumps of boneless, rotting flesh.
The villagers were terrified and immediately knelt down before the shaman, begging him to save their lives.
Seeing the villagers' pitiful state, the wizard led them away from their original home and to a new place, saying that it was once the site of a large temple and could ward off the monsters that were harassing them.
That wizard was Galawa's ancestor.
The place we were going to was the mountain where the Ghost Temple was located.
After the tribe moved away, that mountain range became an evil place, and many strange and bizarre things happened there one after another.
After a while, no one dared to go to that land anymore.
After I finished translating Galawa's story, Song Laosan, smoking a cigarette, asked, "What are your thoughts on this?"
“Since ancient times, all large tombs have employed tomb keepers to protect them for generations! In 1928, after Sun Dianying looted the Dingdong Mausoleum of Empress Dowager Cixi, the Republic of China government appointed Liu Renrui to investigate the case. A tomb keeper reported to him that he heard an explosion. If Qu Ruilin’s judgment is correct, and the tomb of the evil monk is really on that mountain, I think that Galawa’s ancestors were probably the guardians of this tomb.”
After I finished explaining my analysis, I added, "According to Galawa, the tribesmen went into the mountains to escape the war. His ancestors were probably afraid that these people would discover the ancient tombs in the mountains, so they pretended to be ghosts, made up stories, or played some tricks to scare the villagers away."
“That makes sense.” Old Song pondered my words for a moment and smiled. “This is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, we are tomb raiding abroad. It would be troublesome if we were discovered! If no one dares to go there, it will make it easier for us to do our work.”
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