Hu Yanyun
"Mud doll mud doll, a mud doll. There are also that eyebrows, and there are also eyes, and the eyes don't blink. Clay doll mud doll, a mud doll, also has that nose, and there is that mouth, and the mouth doesn't speak..."
Teresa Teng's "Clay Doll", I have not liked to listen to it since I was a child, and every time I listen to it, I feel that the tune to the lyrics are very strange and uncomfortable. Later became a creator of speculative fiction, of course, more or less will contact some suspense or supernatural topics, found that some netizens listed this song as a "horror children's song", and fabricated some creepy stories... Of course, neither the songwriter nor Teresa Teng herself did not have so many poignant or paradoxical "behind-the-scenes stories" when composing and singing this song, but the "mud doll" once appeared in ancient Chinese notes, it was indeed like the opening of a horror movie, heralding some unsettling event about to happen.
First, "tethered dolls" tethered to strange things
"When Yu was two or three years old, he tasted four or five children, dressed in color and gold, and played with Yu, all calling Yu a brother, which seemed to be very much in love. When it is a little longer, it is not seen. ”
Writing this passage was Ji Xiaolan, a famous scholar of the Qing Dynasty, who wrote about an experience of his childhood in the "Notes on Reading Wei Caotang". When he was two or three years old, he often played with some children dressed in colorful clothes and gold, and they treated him as a little brother. But when they got older, the children suddenly disappeared. Ji Xiaolan then went to ask his father where the children had gone, and the answer was: Those are not people, but some mud dolls.
Notes on Reading Wei Caotang
Ji Xiaolan's father, Ji Rongshu, said: Ji Xiaolan's "ex-mother" (that is, the first wife of his father Ji Rongshu, who was not Ji Xiaolan's biological mother) had never had children, so he asked NiMi to "return to the temple mud child with colored silk" and put it in the bedroom, not only giving each of them a milk name, but also "daily feeding fruit bait, no different from nursing.". After the lady's death, Ji Rongshu ordered the clay dolls to be removed from the room and buried in the courtyard behind. Later, afraid that they would be demonized, they originally wanted to dig them up and throw them somewhere else, but the time was too long, and they were "lost in their places."
This custom of "tethering dolls" was very popular in ancient China, especially in the Zhili area, and the mud dolls that "tethered" home may not be able to play a role in continuing the incense, but sometimes they are harmful. The Qing Dynasty scholar Li Qingchen wrote about such a thing in the book "Drunken Tea ZhiWei": "In the custom of Jinzhong, the woman who lacks heirs, hugs a clay doll to the temple, and makes the plastic worker pinch it into a small statue like a baby, which is called a press." "A woman just like that took back a clay doll and fed it every day, just like a real child. One day the woman went back to her mother's house, left the mud doll in the house, did not offer food and drink on time, and "heard a loud cry in the room." The family was terrified when they heard it, and did not dare to enter the house to check it out, but only dared to open the window to peep at it, "Nai Mud Baby also."
Qing Dynasty scholar Zeng Yandong's "Little Bean Shed" tells a story of "anti-tether dolls". A woman surnamed Guo in Yanshen Town, Zibo, Shandong Province, became seriously ill after marrying and "died before long". Her husband was very hurt and crying. "A few days later, when my husband was sleeping alone, he suddenly saw his wife pulling in, dressed in makeup, and yan was overbirth." The husband was surprised and happy, and took her in his arms, "seeing her words and smiles, all of them are very graceful and affectionate", and he couldn't help but have a good stay. After that, the husband told his wife about his longing, which was extremely miserable, and the wife became more and more gentle with him. After that, Guoshi would arrive every night, and in the early morning, she would pack her clothes and leave, and the only strange thing was that her clothes were "folded on paper". After more than a month, the family discovered this situation, thought it was sneaky, tried their best to drive it away, and all of them ended in failure, so they had to let the two of them continue to meet. Fast forward a year, the husband found that his wife's lower abdomen was swollen pregnant, and he didn't know what was going on, and the wife said to him: "I'm going to Taishan, I can't come back, but I'm pregnant with your child, after giving birth, when sent to Ru Yuzhi." "Gone, and from then on there was silence. The next year, the husband woke up one night, felt panicked under him, and touched it, it was a mud doll.
"Little Bean Shed"
Second, the "skeleton baby" becomes a red-haired monster
In addition to the "tethered dolls", there are also clay dolls purchased purely for entertainment, which will also cause strange things. For example, in the "Brahma Heaven Lu Series" written by the Republic of China scholar Chai Xiaofan, it is recorded that at that time, a wealthy family surnamed Bai in the south of the Huapailou in Nanjing was not very large, but the house was hong. One night, Bai's youngest son was sitting in the study study reviewing his homework, when he suddenly saw a young woman pulling a curtain, bright eyes and teeth, plump and charming. The teenager thought that there was no such person in the family, and he was immediately confused, but he was fascinated by her beauty, and stuttered to ask her why, "The woman replied, and made obscene words." The young man's heart was troubled, so he and the woman were tied up in the room... "Since every night will come." "But no one in the family has ever known, only to see the teenager gradually become yellow and thin."
Brahma
Finally, one day, the teenager's mother asked him what was going on, and he did not dare to deceive, according to the truth. His mother said you must be haunted by a monster and taught him how to deal with it. This night, the woman came again, just undressed, and the teenager snatched it, "The servant outside the door sounded the golden firecracker." The woman was horrified and died naked. The family members who had already been ambushed outside the door rushed in, and the teenager showed them the clothes he had taken, which turned out to be a handful of mud. "The crowd was stunned, but Xi Xi did not dare to sleep." The next day, a servant saw a clay doll placed in the hall that had always been dressed in colorful clothes "suddenly naked", and he told everyone, "Everyone realizes, take the clay man out and throw it and smash it"! Since then, I have never seen the banshee come again.
The reason why mud dolls can be funny in this way is that in the eyes of the ancients, there is a reason: "The cover is too small and humanoid, and the feeling of strangeness is enough to be strange, and the workers concentrate on it!" "But sometimes, although the producer is not concentrating, but the material used is inappropriate, the same accident will occur." It is recorded in the "Drunken Tea Monster" that a villager came home from the market, encountered a heavy rain on the road, and there was an ancient tomb next to the road, and he hid under the monument. "See a skeleton in the soil, pick it up, and use wet mud to pinch its face and knead it into five features", and knead it into a clay doll. That's all, this villager is used to pranks on weekdays, stuffing dates and garlic bought from the market in the mouth of the clay doll. When the rain stopped, he left the clay doll in a hole in the wall. A few years later, a ghost suddenly came from the neighboring village, covered with red hair, and flew into the village every night, chasing the villagers while shouting: "Dates are delicious, garlic is too spicy!" "The people it chased after were all seriously ill. Everyone was scared. When the man who made the clay doll with the skeleton heard about it, he was surprised and said, "Is it the clay doll I made?" So he went to the ancient tomb where he had taken shelter from the rain, and "saw that the object was still in the cave, with red hair on its cheeks, and its hair was as unkempt as if it were messy"—exactly the same as the red-haired monster. So the villager destroyed it, and the blame was extinguished.
Third, the "wooden doll" has a knife scar on it
Not only clay dolls, but also the "wooden dolls" in ancient notes can also make people jaw-dropping.
The Qing Dynasty scholar Xuanding recorded in the "Night Rain and Autumn Lantern Record" that there was a young man named Zhu Meizi, twenty-five years old, who did not learn any skills, and the price of drinking all day was gambling, "Increasingly embarrassed, everyone spit on it, and drinking is like the past." One day he joined a gang of robbers, although he did not have the courage to kill people with a horizontal knife, but he had the ability to drill holes through the wall, so he was "hired" by the gang of robbers, and the task given to him was that for each robbery, he was first responsible for entering the target's home to listen to the truth, and if it was safe, he would open the door and let others in.
"Night Rain Autumn Lights"
"Quiet at night, listen to the village's turning three more", this gang of robbers each insisted on the profits, swarming fish through the line, more and more stacks of gangfu, to an isolated village. Finding that the village was completely unlit, and there were mountains and rocks and swamps on the left and right, but there was a large mansion with a scaled roof, so he sent his sisters to investigate. The girls went to the inner bed, found that "all the rooms are dark, only the lights are exposed when the windows of the west wing are exposed", he drilled over and dipped the paper on the wet window with spit, broke it, and peeked inside, only to see several women in the room, one of whom was holding a small doll about a foot long. The doll was "as white as snow, as bright as jade, and crying", and it took a long time to coax him, and the three women also slept together.
The girls saw that they were all women, and went out of the mansion to tell the robbers, and the gang felt that they could rob the money and rob the color tonight, and rushed in with joy, but they were silent. The girls waited until the East general Bai did not see them come out, thinking that they must have benefited one by one, they could not help but be full of jealousy, climbed the tall tree outside the wall to look inside the wall, and were surprised to find that all the robbers were lying in the courtyard, with their heads in a different place! He was so frightened that he couldn't retreat, and when he saw the door of the house open, the women came out, laughing and saying as they walked: "The evil thief came to die for no reason, and he wanted to tire the old woman to bury it by hand." Then they carried the bodies of the robbers out and buried them in Nangangtou. The girls were angry and hateful, thinking that there was only one little doll left in the house, so it was better to kill and avenge their accomplices, "but to go over the wall, pick up the knife on the ground, and run into the embroidery." Seeing that the snow-white doll was still asleep, he swung his knife and cut it in two! Who knows that the sound of cutting up is like cutting wood, "Look at it, cover the wood carved also"!
The girls were horrified and turned to flee, but they were blocked by the women and tied him to a pillar, and some people recognized him as "the rogue sisters of the city", so they took out a knife with a thin blade like paper, took off his pants, "Gongzhi". The girls passed out in pain, and the women laughed and said, "This is like a real girl," and then drove him out of the village. The sisters returned home and told the government what had happened. The government sent out a hunting campaign, together with hundreds of battalions to weigh heavily to the old place, "then the cottage is completely empty, the smoke is scattered", the people only found a wooden carved child in the grass, and there was an old knife mark cut off from the waist on the wood...
Whether it is a mud doll or a wooden doll, the reason why it will be in the ancient notes or the legend of the zhiwei, and even to this day, people will occasionally hear that it is still strange, not because "things are too small and humanoid, and the feeling of strangeness is enough to be strange", but because of the "uncanny valley effect" in psychology, that is, when any anthropomorphic object reaches a critical point when the similarity of the real person reaches a critical point, it will trigger people's nervous and terrifying emotions, especially involving children's toys and other things, children originally gave people an innocent image, so when " When the pseudo-character triggers the uncanny valley effect, it forms a huge contrast with the original image, which often makes people feel particularly vicious and evil... Understanding this, we can know that whether it is a mud doll or a "mud doll", it is not strange, but it only projects a strange feeling for our soul, the ancient saying cloud "its ghost is true, it is a sense of things, its ghost is illusory, it is also a heart creation" - of course, it is also true!
Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming
Proofreader: Ding Xiao