In every corner of the world, there are strange things everywhere. When it is beyond the cognition of ordinary people, people will always habitually give it a mysterious color, even under the guise of ghosts and gods. Trying to cover up the truth of the thing itself and seek a psychological comfort.
More than 60 years ago, more than 80 villagers in Huilong Village, Xingren County, Guizhou Province, often encountered the horror of "ghost shaving their heads" overnight. The sky over the entire village was shrouded in the haze of "lone ghosts" and did not disappear until more than 30 years later.
Sudden "ghost shaving"
Fast forward to one morning in 1961, a young man surnamed Zhou in the village was cleaning the courtyard. Suddenly, a scream broke the early morning silence in the mountain village.
It was the mother's voice. Xiao Zhou did not dare to be idle, and took three steps and made two steps to run in the direction of the house. When Xiao Zhou pushed open his mother's door, the scene in front of him stunned him.
It was just dawn, and the old, dilapidated house was still a little dark. Through a little bit of sunlight, he saw a large patch of blackened things scattered on his mother's pillow. Looking up at my mother again, her mother's original thick hair had all fallen out. The scene in front of him really frightened Xiao Zhou.
He quickly sat down beside his mother and asked her what had happened. The mother sobbed and shook her head, telling Xiao Zhou that she did not know. I only know that when she woke up in the morning, she scratched her head, and as a result, her hair seemed to be shaved off, and it all fell off.
Xiao Zhou was afraid that his mother had some illness. He didn't have time to think about it, and after settling everything in the house, he took his mother to the hospital.
The doctor gave Xiao Zhou's mother a simple examination, and the results did not find anything abnormal in her mother's body. After the doctor's diagnosis, he believed that Xiao Zhou's mother had alopecia areata. So he prescribed some medicine and asked Xiao Zhou's mother to go back and drink it.
After the doctor's examination, Xiao Zhou and his mother's heart also calmed down. But what made them even more terrifying happened. People in the family have experienced hair loss one after another. Six of the eight people lost their hair overnight.
At this time, Xiao Zhou was a little frightened, such a strange thing he had never encountered before. He began to worry about whether the people in his family had some terminal illness or whether someone was trying to harm them.
When he walked out of the house and wanted to discuss with a few friends in the village, he learned that he was not the only one who had lost his hair overnight in Huilong Village. A similar situation has occurred in the neighbors. And it is both men and women who lose their hair, and they do not care about young and old.
From the age of seventy or eighty to the children of five or six years old. They are like randomly chosen by heaven, without any regularity. The first night when I went to bed, my hair was fine, and when I woke up the next day, the top of my head was bare, cleaner than the teacher's shaving, and panic spread throughout the village.
Within a few days, a rumor spread in the village. Some people who believed in ghosts and gods began to speculate that the people in the village had offended the lone ghosts and angered the gods. This was a punishment given to them by heaven, and some people were still suspicious, but many people in the village began to pray to the gods and worship the Buddha, hoping to get the tolerance of the "lonely soul and wild ghost".
The cemetery in the village, not far from Tanabe. As long as you go to the field, everyone in the village will pass through here. For many years, no one has ever felt afraid.
Even in the middle of the night, the villagers who passed by this never panicked. However, when the vision of the "ghost shaving his head" appeared, everyone was frightened. Some people prefer to go around the land for miles more than to pass through, while some people always go to the grave to pray and pray for forgiveness whenever they pass by here.
In a month or two, a large area of "monks" and "nuns" appeared in the whole Village of Huilong. The "ghost shaving of the head" in Huilong Village also spread in the neighboring villages. Outsiders passing through here have to go far around, and they dare not step into Huilong Village, for fear of returning home and being "shaved their heads".
The whole village was filled with an atmosphere of depression and trepidation, and everyone's mood was very heavy. The village is full of honest crofters. Which immortal was offended and the whole village suffered this? The villagers began to ask the gods and immortals to pray for the blessings of the villagers and pay tribute to the ghosts and gods.
However, all this is in vain. More and more people in the village have shaved their heads, and the health of those who have shaved their heads has also been problematic. Not only did he become emaciated and lose his appetite, but his vision became blurred, even to the point of almost blindness. Even in the daytime when the sun is shining high, if a person stands in front of them.
They could only see a vague shadow and could not distinguish the appearance of the facial features.
Who the hell is the "murderer"?
The incident of "ghost shaving" in Huilong Village has attracted the attention of the local government. If the truth is not found, it will not only bring great pressure and burden to the people in Huilong Village, but also produce unstable emotions. So the government sent an investigation team to try to solve the mystery of the "ghost shaving head" in Huilong Village.
This survey team is full of talents, bringing together talents in geology, chemistry, biology and other fields. As soon as they moved into Huilong Village, they immediately launched a detailed investigation into the surrounding situation in the village. Soon, they locked in one of the "suspects."
During the visit, they learned that there was a mine on the edge of Huilong Village that produced heavy metal mercury. Mercury is known to be highly toxic. A small amount of mercury is enough to kill a person. For thousands of years, many people with malicious intentions have used mercury as a weapon to kill people.
However, as soon as this hypothesis was raised, it was questioned within the investigation team. Although mercury is seriously lethal, it does not cause hair loss and does not affect people's visual nerves. The phenomenon of "ghost shaving" in Huilong Village is obviously inconsistent with the performance of mercury poisoning. After another confirmation, this result was indeed proved.
The mercury mine next to Huilong Village has existed since the middle of the Qing Dynasty. By the 1960s, it had lasted for seventy or eighty years. However, this has never happened in Huilong Village. The "ghost shaving head" came suddenly, and it was elusive.
The dozens of people recruited are clearly not an individual event. Everyone began to speculate that this must be inextricably linked to the geographical environment around Huilong Village. They began sampling surveys of ore and drinking water around The entire huilong village. However, during the sample survey, no known toxic chemicals or minerals were found.
Once again, bold hypotheses have been put forward. They began to speculate whether the result was caused by human poisoning. In those days, conflicts between villages were common. Sometimes in order to compete for water or cultivated land, it is common for people from two villages to make a big deal, so there are no longer a few people who cause human lives.
Once again, they visited the people of Huilong Village to understand their relationship with neighboring villages. But the villagers agreed that their relationship with neighboring villages has always been very friendly. There has never been a conflict, no one has been married, and the probability of being poisoned is not very high.
In this way, the entire investigation team was difficult. They knew in their hearts that this had nothing to do with ghosts and gods. The reason why the villagers have this situation must be some kind of toxin. But what this poison is, and how they enter the human body, the people in the investigation team have no way of knowing.
In the end they came up with a decision. That is to do our best to improve the drinking water quality of the people in Huilong Village, in the hope of improving the current situation of Huilong Village. It has to be said that the people on the investigation team are wise. This choice does reduce the occurrence of the phenomenon of "ghost shaving". The villagers' lives have returned to a relatively stable situation.
However, more than 20 years later, the "ghost shaved head" suddenly reappeared, and the number of sick people in the village once again increased.
A stone to unlock the answer
The re-enactment of the phenomenon of "ghost shaving" has attracted the attention of one person. He is an expert at the Guizhou Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In 1997, after several twists and turns, a piece of mercury ore from Huilong Village arrived in Zhang's precious hands. After Zhang Precious got this stone, he couldn't wait to start studying it. When analyzing the minerals contained in this stone, Zhang Found a strange phenomenon.
Although the stone is called "mercury ore", it contains almost no mercury. In contrast, the presence of another substance is much higher than that of mercury. But as for what it is, because the sample is too small, Zhang Precious cannot analyze it for a while.
He began to wonder if this substance was the real murderer behind the "ghost shaving head" in Huilong Village. If this is the case, the masses of Huilong Village will soon be able to get out of the sea of suffering.
Zhang Precious didn't have time to think about it too much, and immediately rushed to Huilong Village. In the mines of Huilong Village, Zhang collected a lot of mercury ore in an attempt to uncover the truth that had been buried for more than 30 years. However, to his surprise, he had not yet begun to study mercury ore, and he himself had encountered a "ghost shaved head".
After more than 30 years, the villagers of Huilong Village have long been accustomed to this situation. They also joked about this big expert consciously or unconsciously, and many villagers said, "Why have you also shaved your head?" Because he had not yet been able to find the answer, Zhang Precious could only cry and laugh and shake his head to talk about self-deprecation.
It didn't take long for Zhang's precious behavior to become abnormal. He stayed by the mercury mine all day long, not letting anyone get close. Sometimes, the villagers' dishes are suddenly thrown aside. The people in the village even began to wonder if the great scientist was "ghostly" or had a demon. Instead of eating a good dish, he poured it out for someone else.
At that time, the most common dish eaten by villagers was cabbage, which was a must for every family. Zhang Precious went around the village to spread the words, "You can eat any dish, but you can't eat cabbage." He even went to the village chief to talk about the radio, forbidding the villagers to eat cabbage.
Zhang Precious's behavior confused the whole village, "who has provoked the cabbage, what to eat without eating the cabbage." Unbeknownst to him, during this time, Zhang Precious had been looking for the culprit hiding in the mountains.
After repeated sampling and analysis, Zhang's valuable research finally came to the results. He found that the cabbage grown in Huilong Village contained seriously excessive thallium, which was highly toxic. It is as toxic as arsenic, just one gram is enough to cause death, and half a gram can cause serious diseases.
Thallium, on the other hand, has the toxicity of causing hair loss and affecting vision, which is very similar to the situation of the villagers. After thallium enters the human body, symptoms appear in about ten hours, which coincides with the phenomenon of villagers losing their hair overnight.
Zhang has found that cabbage contains excessive amounts of thallium, but has not found the true source of thallium. How it is transferred to vegetables and how it enters the human body. If this problem is not fundamentally solved, the villagers will continue to suffer from thallium.
In repeated studies, Zhang Found a Phenomenon. It turns out that the villagers were poisoned seasonally. During the rainy season, poisoning tends to be much higher than usual. Zhang Precious inspected the geographical environment around Huilong Village. He found that the geographical location of Huilong Village was much lower than that of the original mine, and thallium salt was more soluble in water.
A ravine in the mercury mine contains a large amount of thallium salt, which was dug around the 1960s. When the rainy season comes, heavy rain washes away the gully.
Rainwater flows down the gully into nearby streams, which in turn happen to be the villagers' main source of drinking water and irrigation. As a result, the villagers ingested a large amount of thallium salt, which eventually led to poisoning and overnight hair loss.
The truth of "ghost shaving" has finally been revealed. The culprit is "thallium", not the so-called lone ghost. With the complete unveiling of the secret, the living conditions of Huilong Village have also been effectively improved. There was no ghost shaving of the head in the whole village, and everything returned to its former calm.
However, all this is due to the unremitting efforts of scientific and technological personnel for more than 30 years, and in the end, science has overcome people's inner fears and overcome strange forces.