A storm watch is over Marion right now as I sit here in the recliner in my living room listening to the chimes ring outside, the wind moving them, their metal poles clinking and singing together in an almost holy sound. A cool ion laced breeze blows through our screen door as my partner in bearness rests in the bed and the fireplace fire crackles lightly, my mind turns to the paranormal as it always does, often finding interesting paths and corridors to go down in my mental library I have constructed over the years.
In my last entry, I discussed weird rains and strange meteorological events, such as rains of fish and blood. I picked up a book, my constant companions, and began to thumb through some of the research I have flagged for blog entries. This afternoons sojourn has taken me far across the world and landing in China, the world’s most populous nation and one that is rife with spirits, benign and malevolent, and all equally mysterious and to be respected.
The ancient Chinese civilization – one of the world’s earliest – flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China’s political system was based on hereditary monarchies, known as dynasties, beginning with the semi-mythological Xia of the Yellow River basin (c. 2000 BC). Since 221 BC, when the Qin Dynasty first conquered several states to form a Chinese empire, the country has expanded, fractured and been reformed numerous times.
The Republic of China overthrew the last dynasty in 1911, and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949. After the defeat of the Empire of Japan in World War II, the Communist Party defeated the nationalist Kuomintang in mainland China and established the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, while the Kuomintang relocated the ROC government to Taipei. The ROC’s jurisdiction is now limited to Taiwan and several outlying islands, including Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu, and it now receives limited diplomatic recognition.
The PRC exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau.) The PRC also claims Taiwan – which is controlled by the Republic of China (ROC), a separate political entity – as its 23rd province, a claim controversial due to the complex political status of Taiwan and the unresolved Chinese Civil War. China, including its provinces, is home to 1.35 billion people.
My trip today through my library has led me to the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, specifically in the area known as Guilin, or more commonly as Kweilin, in a small village named Wha Chee. Wha Chee, once surrounded by mystic mountains and rivers, and the entire area was formally known for its stunning beauty is located about twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) from the city of Kweilin/Guilin. The village, legend has it, has lost several people to a strange and terrifying apparition. The town, the locals say, is haunted by what they have termed “the Devil Tiger.”
The Devil Tiger was first described by American author Ernest Bentley, and he described it as told to him as a “dull cloud-like, amoeba thing.” Bentley claims to have witnessed the phantom himself while he was stationed in China with the United States Army in 1945. Today, the phantom the villagers call the “Devil Tiger” still is said to roam the few remaining forested hills in the area that have now been harvested for their trees.
Whatever this strange apparition is, it appears that it may soon run out of territory to hide in, as the deforestation grows yearly. What could this strange thing be? I have never heard of such a creature in all my years of paranormal research. Could it in fact, be a form of macro-bacterial or macro cellular life on a gigantic scale? Perhaps it is a true living blob that has left the world of the silver screen behind and entered our own.
All I can say is that if you visit this ancient area of China, and you see a giant amoeba like creature coming after you, know that it fully intends to eat you and that you should, with all haste, move out of the area as fast as your feet can carry you…or perhaps the next story they will tell, is of your own disappearance!
— A.G.M. April 24, 2013.
Sources:
Hauck, W.D. (2000). The International Directory of Haunted Places: Ghostly abodes, sacred sites and other supernatural locations: Devil Tiger, page 228. Penguin Books, NY.
China. (April 24, 2013). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China Retrieved April 24, 2013.