At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Xue Fucheng, a Diplomat of Jiangsu who vigorously promoted the foreign affairs movement, once said such a file, although I don't know if it is true or not, but it is enough to make people feel extremely afraid of careful consideration.
What Xue Fucheng said happened on the fifth day of the third month of the lunar calendar in the ninth year of Tongzhi, in Shengxian County, Zhejiang, which is today's Shengzhou City. That night, Zhixian Yan Sizhong was somehow killed by a powerful madman, which caused a sensation.
Yan Sizhong is a zhenjiang person, born into a soldier, Tongzhi seven years as a seven-pin candidate transferred to Shengxian County, as an official is also considered clean, in the local area has some reputation, suddenly killed by people, naturally let the local people feel regret.
Old photos of the Qing Dynasty
Why didn't that crazy man kill others, but only Yan Sizhong, who was a county parent official? To find out, you need to start with a carpenter named Huge Pedantic.
The word "roundabout" means "tortuous", and in some places it is also said to be "stupid", called "big roundabout", which must not be a smart person.
There is a carpenter shop in the west of the city, the business is so-so, painstakingly operating for many years, or there is no improvement, in order to change the family's embarrassment, had to let his son Pang Gen'er go to Xinchang to follow a goldsmith to learn the craft, hoping that after the son learns, he can shine on the lintel.
Before the Qingming Dynasty in the ninth year of Tongzhi, Pang Gen'er returned home from Xinchang to worship his ancestors, and halfway through, he suddenly went crazy for some reason. Tearing his hair and clothes on the street, rolling on the ground, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, and talking nonsense, so that those who witness this scene are all shocked.
Fortunately, several of his fellow villagers rushed with him, tied him up with a rope, and carried him back home. Huge and pedantic in the face of his son's madness can not do anything, but pedanticly believe that the ancestor blamed their father and son for not visiting the grave in time and reduced the guilt, which made the son suffer from hysteria and go crazy.
In order to make his son recover, He da Tuo bought good applications and rushed to the ancestral graves in the countryside to pray for the ancestors to stop their anger. The huge and pedantic wife has been dead for many years, and there is only one son like Pang Gen'er under his knees, and when he leaves, the son has no care, and he has no choice but to entrust a young man who has learned his craft to help take care of it.
I didn't think that Pang Gen'er was so crazy that he broke free of the rope in the middle of the night, cut the young man who was taking care of himself with a kitchen knife, and then lit a torch to burn the shop. Neighbors saw the fire and rushed to put out the fire, and after the fire was extinguished, they found that Pang Gen'er had disappeared. Everyone was exhausted, so no one had the heart to find another madman.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > Speaking of which, it is time to say that Zhixian Yan Sizhong. </h1>
Those few days happened to coincide with the county office to repair the house, Yan Sizhong liked to be quiet, did not want to be disturbed by the sound of the craftsman's work, so he temporarily lived in a small courtyard where the rich gentry was idle. On the night pang gen'er fled after lighting the fire, Yan Sizhong went to bed early, not having a premonition that something bad was about to happen.
About four days later, Pang Gen'er came to the place where Yan Sizhong lived with a dangling kitchen knife in his hand, climbed up the wall along a small tree, and quietly jumped into the courtyard.
There are seven rooms in the courtyard where Yan Sizhong temporarily lives, he sleeps with a concubine in the East House, and his twenty-year-old only daughter, Yan Yuefang, lives with a maid in the West House. Pang Gen'er was groping along the wall with a kitchen knife, and an elderly servant sleeping in the utility room heard the sound of creaking outside the window, and it seemed that someone was creeping outside the house, so he grabbed a stick and left the house, just in time to fight with the sneaky Pang Gen'er.
Before the old servant could move, Pang Gen'er took the knife in his hand and slashed the old servant to the ground with a knife, and the old servant covered his wound and shouted: "Kill!" Kill! ”
Yan Sizhong was awakened, sat on the bed and asked loudly, "What happened outside?" ”
As a result, his voice drew Pangenne over. Pang Gen'er kicked the door open, and after entering the house, he couldn't help but raise his knife and cut it. Yan Sizhong did not have time to dodge, and was slashed in the neck by Pang Gen'er, "Ah-ah", and fell into a pool of blood. His concubine was not spared, and was stabbed several times in the head, lying on the ground unconscious.
After Pang Gen'er finished killing people, he grabbed a flower skirt placed next to the bed, tied it around his waist, and went out the door with a knife. Just happened to meet Yan Sizhong's daughter Yan Yuefang, and ran over to see what was happening.
Poor Miss Yan, the mad man Pang Gen'er slashed several times in the face, and Hua Rongyue's appearance no longer existed.
Seeing that Miss Yan was lying in a pool of blood and unresponsive, Pang Gen'er smirked and strode away.
In fact, Miss Yan did not die, and after Pang Gen'er left, she struggled to get up and stumbled to the east house. As soon as the front foot entered the house, Pang Gen'er followed on the back foot. Miss Yan shouted for help, Pang Gen'er did not care whether he was dead or alive, he slashed randomly, and slashed more than seventy knives on Miss Yan's body before he stopped. Then he came to the bedside and slashed at Yan Sizhong, who had already lost his breath, until he cut Yan Sizhong so that his flesh and blood were blurred and unrecognizable, so he stopped his hand, and then turned over the box and cabinet, and took away Yan Sizhong's seal and some silver.
At this time, it was already dawn, and an early old man had just opened the door, and he saw a crazy man covered in blood and with a wreath around his waist striding from a distance with a kitchen knife. The old man was so frightened that he quickly closed the door, and pang Gen'er stood outside the door and slashed it a few times with a kitchen knife, and then dropped a crazy sentence of "the skirt and kitchen knife belong to you", and then did not know where to go.
After coming for half a day, the old man dared to open the door with trepidation, only to see a blood-stained flower skirt, a kitchen knife with a curly blade, and a piece of seal in front of the door.
Soon, the bad news of the county order being killed spread throughout the city, and Shaoxing Province sent someone to investigate the matter, and the frightened old man presented what Pang Gen'er had left in front of his door, and said that he recognized the man as Pang Gen'er, the carpenter's huge and pedantic only son. Therefore, the government immediately posted a reward notice and ordered the messenger to arrest the murderer Pang Gen'er, and to see people alive and corpses in death.
Soon, pangerine was found outside the city. When Ya Cha arrived, Pang Gen'er was taking a bath in the river, and in the face of the wolf-like official, he actually asked why he was arrested?
By killing the imperial court officials and innocent family members, Pang Gen'er was useless even if he could invite Fang Tangjing, the most famous lawyer of the late Qing Dynasty, to defend himself. Ask him why he killed Yan Sizhong? Pang Gen'er said that he didn't know why, and he didn't know that he had killed anyone. No matter how badly he beat him, Pang Gen'er always insisted that he didn't know anything. Until the day of the capital punishment, Pang Gen'er still couldn't tell why he wanted to kill people.
A year later, Yan Sizhong's younger brother Yan Siyi told people such a thing, he thought that his brother's death might be related to this matter.
Yan Siyi said that their father had served as a county official in Boshan, Shandong, and the whole family lived with his father in Boshan, when his brother Yan Sizhong was only seventeen or eighteen years old, and he went to Kuixing Pavilion every day to study.
Kuixing Pavilion has a total of three floors, the brother reads on the middle floor, and the steps on the highest floor are blocked by a heavy wooden board, on which are clearly written the two big words of "forbidden step", as to why there is this wooden board, who wrote the words on it, the students who came here to study are not clear.
However, some people said that they had seen a figure appear on it, wearing a gray and white robe, not very tall, hunched over, as if it were a little old man.
The brother thought that these words were pure nonsense, that there were wooden planks blocking the way, that even a wild cat could not enter, and how the little old man had entered, so he did not believe it.
One night, everyone else had left, but my brother was still reading with a candle. Suddenly, I heard a noise overhead, and it seemed that something had jumped down the stairs, and I quickly got up and looked downstairs, and saw a hunchbacked old man in a gray and white robe limping toward the darkness.
The brother realized that what the fellow window said was not a lie, and curiosity drove him to hurry downstairs, following the old man far away, wanting to see the real identity of the old man.
After following for more than three miles, the hunchbacked old man suddenly disappeared. The brother was extremely bold, and instead of feeling frightened because he was alone in the wilderness, he was very excited and tried to find the hunchback old man.
Looking around, his eyes rested on an ancient tomb. Through the moonlight, it can be seen that the tombstones have been mutilated, and several town tombstone beasts have been mottled and unable to see the original appearance. The brother circled the tomb a few times, found that there was a hole, raised his nose to smell, and a fishy smell overflowed from the cave entrance, like the smell of a fox.
The brother did not stay too long, and when he returned home, he told his mother about it, and said that he must try to get rid of the fox in the hole, and see if the hunchbacked old man in the gray and white robe would continue to appear after getting rid of the fox.
Mother warned that all things have spirituality, and that the beasts may not be vain in their human form, and since they do not attract others, others should not provoke their good, so as not to cause trouble because of killing.
The brother ostensibly promised his mother that he would not come here, but in fact he had already made up his mind in his heart. Secretly bought gunpowder, came to the ancient tomb one night, stuffed the gunpowder into the hole and lit it, and even blew up the unknown ancient tomb to collapse completely.
When my brother returned home, he didn't tell his family about it. In fact, as early as a day ago, my mother had an ominous dream and told her family about what she saw in the dream at breakfast. The mother said that she saw an old man with a white beard in a dream and begged her not to let her son come to her, and the old man burst into tears, saying that his children and grandchildren were innocent and had not harmed anyone, and hoped that the people who wanted to harm his children and grandchildren would be merciful.
After the mother said what she saw in her dream, she also deliberately told her brother not to come in a hurry, but she did not expect that her brother would blow up the ancient tomb that night.
The next morning, my brother took someone to the ancient tomb to check and found that more than a dozen foxes had been killed. The dead fox was taken and sold by the townspeople for money, the nameless tomb was completely flooded with a torrential rain, and the brother never saw the hunchbacked old man again, never had any nightmares, or encountered anything unlucky.
Later, after hard study, my brother made the Shengxian County Order, and he had long forgotten what he had done when he was a teenager. One day, the family received a letter from his brother, saying that one morning when he got up, he found that a stone staircase in the county office had inexplicably broken in half, and there was a pool of red things that seemed to be blood stuck to the fracture. The brother did not care what the Xiangshi said, but only told his men to pay more attention. Wan Wan did not expect that the bad omen actually happened to his brother in the end, and even his innocent daughter and concubine died together, perhaps this bad omen was related to the recklessness of his brother at that time.
At this point, the right and stop. This matter came from Xue Fucheng's mouth, and the author only borrowed the words of the ancients and wrote it into a text for the officials to relieve their boredom. As a well-known diplomat in modern history, Xue Fucheng vigorously promoted the foreign affairs movement and advocated Western science. Whether Yan Sizhong's death was related to the fact that he once killed a nest of foxes, there is no way to prove it, perhaps his death is just a coincidence, and has nothing to do with the theory of strange forces and chaotic gods.
Gu vainly said, Gu vainly listened, there is no need for today's people to compare the truth of the ancients with modern thinking, and the right to look at what Xue Fucheng said as a folk story is that is.