Resurrection - an unlikely or even seemingly impossible event, in particular, catch and hold our collective imagination. Those events, however, seemed only to exist in horror movies. Despite we have heard about peculiar cases of people being able to recall about their past lives, most of us would rather take it with a pinch of salt. But this case was so compelling that not only it had piqued my interest, it even served as a source of inspiration for the story, The Ghost of Meng, in my Horror Wedding Series. This was the extraordinary case of a Taiwanese woman, Chu Hsiu-hua, who claims her body was resurrected with a different soul after her death.
Chu herself recently died (again!) at age 97 in Taipei. In the 60 years leading up to her death, however, her story has ensnared the public’s imagination and been the subject of numerous news reports and interviews. The legend of Chu Hsiu-hua is well known and widely circulated within Taiwan. Chu is said to have been raised in Kinmen after her birth on the small island in 1941. At 17 years old, Chu and her parents fled Kinmen amid the increasingly violent military conflict between China and Taiwan, now known as the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
During their journey, a bomb blast killed
Chu’s parents. After spending days stranded on a fishing vessel, Chu and a
group of other refugees eventually made their way to the main island of Taiwan.
More passengers died on board before a group of fishermen brought the boat in
to shore. These fishermen were hardly any saviors. Instead, they stripped the corpses of valuables and robbed Chu
of her remaining valuables. According to local witness from the fishing village, the fishermen then drowned Chu in order to remove the evidence of their crime.
Chu’s own account is that after her
drowning her spirit wandered the area, unable to find peace after her murder. Other
spirits of lost drowned souls took action on her behalf. They possessed the fishermen who killed Chu and drove them mad. One by one, the men committed
suicide. The witness to Chu’s drowning had confirmed the horrible
deaths of the murderers.
Now avenged, Chu reports that local deities
then led her spirt to a new home, the body of a 37-year-old woman from Yunlin
province named Lin Won-yao. Lin had managed a store with her husband until bad
health confined her to bed. After years of suffering, Lin died in the presence
of her doctor. The physician had overseen many deaths in his long career. He
sighed and placed a hand on her forehead. Her skin was still warm, but rapidly
cooled. Discretely, the doctor let his hand fall to her wrist to confirm her
pulse had stilled. Her husband was standing by the door of the small room, but he
knew even before the doctor spoke that his wife was gone. His two daughters
clung to his legs, sobbing, but his tears would not come until they were asleep
and could not see them.
When the doctor finally rose, his knees clearly stiff
from his long vigil, the youngest daughter screamed.
For a moment, no one understood, simply stared at the young girl in shock. Then
they saw that her eyes were fixed on the bed. The corpse’s arm was reaching out
from the bed, the fingers curled as though clawing at the living. No one moved
as the body shivered, sat up, and turned its head to look at them. Its skin was
still pasty grey, the lips chapped from the long fever. Yet they could tell it was not the man’s
wife, it was not the children’s mother. Lin’s body was moving, but everyone in
the room knew without being told that someone else had joined them.
Suddenly, time seemed to restart. Everything
devolved into chaos. The children panicked and ran outside, while the man
slowly approached the bed. The woman cocked her head at him, as though curious
what he was doing. He knelt slowly by the bed and reached for her hand, but she
flinched away. He would discover later that her blood was indeed flowing again,
her body warm and functioning. In that moment, however, he had absolutely dumbstruck.
If any evidence were to prove resurrection,
Chu’s story would. The woman’s husband and two daughters could hardly speak for
days as a result of shock. After all, she had returned from the dead. However,
their first impulse had been correct, in that the woman was gone. Her behavior
and personality had changed.
Most immediately obvious was the change in
speech patterns. Lin had been illiterate, with a pronounced local Yunlin
accent. Chu, however, could read and write fluently, spoke with an entirely
different accent, and refused to eat meat, claiming to have been a vegetarian
for her entire life. When Chu shared her name
with the family, the mystery deepened. Lin’s husband at first believed she was
mentally ill. However, over time, he grew fond of Chu and joined her efforts to
help the less fortunate. The most significant change, for Chu, was that she
retained her ability to communicate with deities and spirits like those she had
met after her death.
Before long, word of her resurrection and new supernatural abilities spread. Intrigued, the national government sent psychiatrists to investigate Chu in 1962 (Yang, 2018). The team concluded that Chu showed no signs of mental illness beyond “identity issues” and that she was able to navigate social situations without trouble. She was not sick or deranged. She was simply a different person. Or perhaps - resurrection?
References
Yang, S. (2018, June 8). Return to life: passing away of a Taiwanese woman regains attention for her legend. Taiwan News. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3452300
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