Taiwan's Famous Urban Legend - The Taitung Dawu Zombie

In the late autumn of 1974, the deep night in Dawu Township, Taitung, was unsettlingly quiet. The bizarre prelude began at the public cemetery, where a young man was found hanged from a tree, without any rope. He died from being strangled by soft branches. The next day, another man's corpse was discovered in the same cemetery, in a more gruesome state. His neck bones were broken, and his chest and abdomen were completely pierced by a sharp object. Although the police tried to close the case as an accident, villagers were later horrified to find that several graves in the cemetery had been dug up in the dead of night, with the bodies inside mysteriously vanishing. Subsequently, the village dogs began howling collectively in the middle of the night, only to be found dead and drained of blood, with distinct human bite marks on their wounds. Bizarre footprints, as if made by someone moving by jumping with their feet together, were left on the ground. Fear paralyzed the entire village. The government, during the martial law period, even imposed an emergency curfew on the affected area and deployed police for 24-hour patrols. A month later, the villagers, unable to bear it any longer, invited the divine power of 'Ghost King' Zhong Kui. As soon as the shaman, possessed by Zhong Kui, entered the village with a sword, he headed straight for the house of a reclusive old woman. Upon breaking down the door and searching, they found a 'yin shi' (a corpse that has not decomposed and is said to be reanimated) buried deep in a chicken coop under the old woman's bed. It had been dead for over twenty years, yet its feet were covered in fresh, wet mud and its complexion was ruddy. When Zhong Kui ordered it to be cremated on the spot, piercing screams, like those of a wild beast, echoed from the flames. This finally brought an end to the Taitung zombie scare that shocked all of Taiwan.