October 15, 2025 • 12 mins
If you died away from home but wanted to be buried there, don’t worry – Taoist priests had you covered. They’d just have your animated corpse walk itself back home.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck. It's just us, but Jerry and Dave are
here in spirit. And speaking of spirits, we've got a
pretty spooky, real life Halloween adjacent episode even though it's
a real deal custom over in China.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's right, because Spooky Month continues. It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah, so we're gonna go Chuck today to the Xiangxi region.
There's no way you can't see a region like that.
I know of Hunan Province.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Oh my god, you're doing great.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's in south central China. And if you go there,
local custom will tell you that if somebody dies is
if someone dies away from their home, especially their birthplace,
they have to return back to it to be buried,
because if they don't, they will have a restless spirit
(01:00):
that vexes the living, maybe even possessing them. The thing is,
sometimes people do die away from home, and there's a
remedy for this that the people in Hunan Province have
come up with, and that is to walk the corpse
back home to be buried.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
That's right, And if not, then you're just going to
be cursed to wander the earth. Pretty upset, harassing people,
possessing people. And here's the thing. If you lived in
rural China back then, and you were a rural peasant,
you probably died pretty close to home because you didn't
travel that much, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
(01:38):
But occasionally you might find yourself away from home and
you need to get walked backed. And this is a
tradition that dates back to sixteen sixteen and continued into
the twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, the Qing dynasty apparently is where it finds its roots,
and the idea that they were doing this in the
sixties potentially even pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Apparently it was Mao who stamped it out because it
was superstitious and therefore counter revolutionary. I don't know if
it still goes on in little random pockets, although it's
much easier to get a corpse back home these days.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, traditionally used to be, and you never.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Know, maybe maybe so. But traditionally, speaking of tradition, it
was the Taoist priests who were responsible for walking corpses
back home. And to do this, Chuck, They basically had
two options available. One was much more efficient than the other.
The first one was corpse walking, which is essentially what
(02:39):
it sounds like. The thing is. We should say this here, like,
I don't know if we've emphasized this enough. This was
a magical event, yeah, where a Taoist priest basically reanimated
a corpse enough to have it walk behind him to
(03:00):
be led by the Taois priest back home to be buried.
This dead person would walk back home with the Taoist priest.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
That's corpse walking, Yeah, for days, weeks, months, depending on
how far away they were from home. The priest would
carry a lantern that was a light both day and night,
although they would usually do this at night because as
we'll see, it was very bad luck for residents of
villages that they would go through to see this kind
of thing happening. So eventually they would have people runners
(03:28):
out in front even saying like hey, we got a
corpse coming. I think they were banging a gong to
kind of warn everybody. The corpse is behind the priest,
like we said, very very tall, dressed in a black
robe and just following the directions of the priest saying yoho, yoho.
You know, it's just so the corpse knew which way
to go go right.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
They would be like, yoho, yoho, we got a pothole
coming up on the right, right, and the corpse would
kind of like walk around the pothole right. And there
was one other thing you would see. In addition to
this priest leading this tall corpse dressed in a black
robe back home, you would probably see a black cat
running along with them. Of course, they essentially did not
(04:11):
ever travel without a black cat, because this is how
the corpse was reanimated. Every day, or I should say
every night, when the priest and the corpse took their
journey back up, the black cat would rub itself all
over the corpse several times. And the idea was the
static electricity from the cat's fur was what reanimated the
(04:32):
corpse to move again.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
I'm going to take a quick moment since you mentioned
cat to tell people who have not yet seen that
I have a new kitten that I think we're going
to keep now. And it's all on my Instagram at
Chuck the podcast or the story of Olivia being rescued
from the undercarriage of a car Wow and very sick
with worms and bacterium and seemingly near death and had
(04:59):
her little butttholest it shut and then unstitched. It was
quite a ride. We thought we were gonna lose her,
then we nursed her back to health. We thought there's
no way we can keep her because our dog Gibson
has no chill.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
And it turns out they are in love.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Oh my gosh, Chuck, that is a wonderful story.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
It's wonderful so that the other two cats are gonna
hate this, but as I said on Instagram, they can
get bent because I think Olivia is staying and she's
very cute. And you can go check out the story.
It's been wildly popular on my Instagram.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
That's awesome. Well, welcome to the family, Olivia.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
That's right, But Olivia was not a black cat.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And since I took so much time with that story,
maybe we should take a break and finish up with
corpse walkers.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah, let's do that. So, Chuck, I said that there
(06:06):
were two ways for a Dallas priest to lead a
corpse back home. The first one was corpse walking, which
we just talked about. It was a priest and a corpse.
The much more efficient version is corpse herding, and it's
very much like how today, if somebody's transporting a car
for an owner, they're gonna transport more than one at
(06:26):
a time, and they're gonna group the cars together on
the back of a truck by the region that they're
all going to. This was basically the concept behind corpse herding.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yeah, there were more priests involved because there were more corpses,
so you'd had like, you know, a priest upfront, priest
in the back, maybe a couple of priests.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
On the sides. I think this is when.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
We talk about the runner being out front. I think
this is when they had their runners, yep, that would
warn the townsfolk that they were coming.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
And the way it's described sounds to me like have you.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Ever seen a at a like an NBA game. They'll have
somebody come out at halftime, and it's like a guy
that's dancing like like you know, some popular performer, but
he's got like a curtain rod running through his outfit
on the top and attached them at the bottom, and
(07:19):
there are fake, you know, dummies of people, and every
movement he's making with the rods, they're making an exact
same time, so it appears as if there's like five
people dancing in synchronicity.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
There's essentially nothing more hilarious that you can see than that.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
See you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Yeah, definitely, is that what this is sort of like,
because that's how I pictured it.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Sort of This was instead of them being on either
side of the priest, they would be in a single
file line, all following behind the lead priest. Oh okay,
and then there'd be priests on either side kind of
corralling them in because you didn't want walking corpses kind
of wander off and you know, try to possess somebody
or steel their cheek. And it did bear some similarities
(08:01):
to what you're talking about. We'll see that in a second.
But I want to talk about a Chinese American writer
named Louise Hung who wrote an account, a really interesting
account of her grandfather's experience way back in the day
when he was a young boy. She posted it on
the Order of the Good Death website, which we've talked
about them a million times over the years, but just
(08:23):
to kind of summarize, if I may please, her grandfather
and his brother lived in a town where a corpse
procession walked through and they heard the gong coming and
they were hiding with everybody else in town, just keeping
out of sight, but they were brave enough to kind
of peek out, and they saw, she says, a line
of corpses lurching, hopping, swaying through the streets to the
(08:46):
beat of the gong. They saw white cloths covering the
heads of the dead faces positioned up and forward, supposedly
looking toward their final resting place. Yeah, and so like
this happened, like this is not like this, like there
weren't like legends of corpse walking, right, these happened in
(09:06):
real life. And if you say, I don't really believe
in magic, Daoist or otherwise, I don't really think a
black cat's static electricity could reanimated corpse if this actually happened, guys, guys,
what was going on? Guys?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, a cat would be more likely to eat the
nose off of that person.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yes, yeah, which is probably something you had to watch
out for.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, what really was going on and it was really
going on?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Like you said, is that was a Dallas priest.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
And Louise Hung even said, Hey, I'm not even sure
all these people were Dallas priests. I think they might
have just been doing the job and kind of saying that.
But in the case of the solo corpse walker, it
would be a Dallas priest carrying a corpse on their
back with a bamboo pole stuck up the back to
hold them upright as if they were alive, and a
(09:57):
big black robe draped over both of them, kind of
like the old bits with someone on your shoulders in
a big long trench coat exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
That's why the corpses that were in a single corpse
walking procession always were very tall, that's right, because they
were on the back of another priest who was hiding.
And just to be clear, they didn't like impale the
dead person on the bamboo pole. It was like tied
to them. Yeah. So they The way that they did
(10:25):
this was they could see kind of through the black robe.
They could see the lantern enough to be led. And
remember the priests in front would be like, there's a
pothole coming up on the right, Yoho, yoho. So they
would do this and then obviously they would switch off
night tonight who would carry the corpse and who would
do the processing. That was how corpse walking worked. Corpse
(10:45):
herding also used bamboo poles, but they used them horizontally,
kind of like you were talking about with the basketball
halftime guy.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
Okay, well, I'm glad it didn't spoil that because people
are probably just very confused about what I was talking about.
But yeah, it sounds like they are all tied to
the pole and the pole kind of runs under their arms,
and that's what kind of made me think of the dancer.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I should get one of those systems. I'm sure you
can buy those.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Right, surely they can't. I'll be homemade, yeah, or make one.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
How hard could that be?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
I'm sure there's a halftime basketball dancer being like, yeah,
you'll find out, pal, it's really hard.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
That'd be a fun Yeah, that'd be a fun Halloween
get up. I already have my or I don't have
the outfit, but I have my idea this year. So
I can't do it this year. I'll pri to you
it next year.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Can you reveal your idea on this episode?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
If you saw the Righteous Gemstones, I'm going to be
baby Billy Walton Goggins, brilliant character.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Okay, awesome. Oh so wait, hold on one second. About
the bamboo poles. Yeah, there would be two of them,
one running under each arm of the corpses. So basically
they were hanging the corpses by their arms by bamboo poles.
Then the poles would be the ends of poles would
be carried by a priest in front and back on
their shoulders, and the way that those two priests would
(12:04):
walk it would get telegraphed through the bamboo poles, which
would make the corpses look like they were just kind
of bouncing around. Their feet would probably hit the ground
and touch it here or there, so it looked like
they were walking in line behind the Dallist priests.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
That's that nuts, and they would say, NBA, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
That's right. I don't think there's anything that could top
that chuck. So I say short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck. It's just us, but Jerry and Dave are
here in spirit. And speaking of spirits, we've got a
pretty spooky, real life Halloween adjacent episode even though it's
a real deal custom over in China.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's right, because Spooky Month continues. It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah, so we're gonna go Chuck today to the Xiangxi region.
There's no way you can't see a region like that.
I know of Hunan Province.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Oh my god, you're doing great.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
That's in south central China. And if you go there,
local custom will tell you that if somebody dies is
if someone dies away from their home, especially their birthplace,
they have to return back to it to be buried,
because if they don't, they will have a restless spirit
(01:00):
that vexes the living, maybe even possessing them. The thing is,
sometimes people do die away from home, and there's a
remedy for this that the people in Hunan Province have
come up with, and that is to walk the corpse
back home to be buried.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
That's right, And if not, then you're just going to
be cursed to wander the earth. Pretty upset, harassing people,
possessing people. And here's the thing. If you lived in
rural China back then, and you were a rural peasant,
you probably died pretty close to home because you didn't
travel that much, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
(01:38):
But occasionally you might find yourself away from home and
you need to get walked backed. And this is a
tradition that dates back to sixteen sixteen and continued into
the twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, the Qing dynasty apparently is where it finds its roots,
and the idea that they were doing this in the
sixties potentially even pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Apparently it was Mao who stamped it out because it
was superstitious and therefore counter revolutionary. I don't know if
it still goes on in little random pockets, although it's
much easier to get a corpse back home these days.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, traditionally used to be, and you never.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Know, maybe maybe so. But traditionally, speaking of tradition, it
was the Taoist priests who were responsible for walking corpses
back home. And to do this, Chuck, They basically had
two options available. One was much more efficient than the other.
The first one was corpse walking, which is essentially what
(02:39):
it sounds like. The thing is. We should say this here, like,
I don't know if we've emphasized this enough. This was
a magical event, yeah, where a Taoist priest basically reanimated
a corpse enough to have it walk behind him to
(03:00):
be led by the Taois priest back home to be buried.
This dead person would walk back home with the Taoist priest.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
That's corpse walking, Yeah, for days, weeks, months, depending on
how far away they were from home. The priest would
carry a lantern that was a light both day and night,
although they would usually do this at night because as
we'll see, it was very bad luck for residents of
villages that they would go through to see this kind
of thing happening. So eventually they would have people runners
(03:28):
out in front even saying like hey, we got a
corpse coming. I think they were banging a gong to
kind of warn everybody. The corpse is behind the priest,
like we said, very very tall, dressed in a black
robe and just following the directions of the priest saying yoho, yoho.
You know, it's just so the corpse knew which way
to go go right.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
They would be like, yoho, yoho, we got a pothole
coming up on the right, right, and the corpse would
kind of like walk around the pothole right. And there
was one other thing you would see. In addition to
this priest leading this tall corpse dressed in a black
robe back home, you would probably see a black cat
running along with them. Of course, they essentially did not
(04:11):
ever travel without a black cat, because this is how
the corpse was reanimated. Every day, or I should say
every night, when the priest and the corpse took their
journey back up, the black cat would rub itself all
over the corpse several times. And the idea was the
static electricity from the cat's fur was what reanimated the
(04:32):
corpse to move again.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
I'm going to take a quick moment since you mentioned
cat to tell people who have not yet seen that
I have a new kitten that I think we're going
to keep now. And it's all on my Instagram at
Chuck the podcast or the story of Olivia being rescued
from the undercarriage of a car Wow and very sick
with worms and bacterium and seemingly near death and had
(04:59):
her little butttholest it shut and then unstitched. It was
quite a ride. We thought we were gonna lose her,
then we nursed her back to health. We thought there's
no way we can keep her because our dog Gibson
has no chill.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
And it turns out they are in love.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Oh my gosh, Chuck, that is a wonderful story.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
It's wonderful so that the other two cats are gonna
hate this, but as I said on Instagram, they can
get bent because I think Olivia is staying and she's
very cute. And you can go check out the story.
It's been wildly popular on my Instagram.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
That's awesome. Well, welcome to the family, Olivia.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
That's right, But Olivia was not a black cat.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And since I took so much time with that story,
maybe we should take a break and finish up with
corpse walkers.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah, let's do that. So, Chuck, I said that there
(06:06):
were two ways for a Dallas priest to lead a
corpse back home. The first one was corpse walking, which
we just talked about. It was a priest and a corpse.
The much more efficient version is corpse herding, and it's
very much like how today, if somebody's transporting a car
for an owner, they're gonna transport more than one at
(06:26):
a time, and they're gonna group the cars together on
the back of a truck by the region that they're
all going to. This was basically the concept behind corpse herding.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yeah, there were more priests involved because there were more corpses,
so you'd had like, you know, a priest upfront, priest
in the back, maybe a couple of priests.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
On the sides. I think this is when.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
We talk about the runner being out front. I think
this is when they had their runners, yep, that would
warn the townsfolk that they were coming.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
And the way it's described sounds to me like have you.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Ever seen a at a like an NBA game. They'll have
somebody come out at halftime, and it's like a guy
that's dancing like like you know, some popular performer, but
he's got like a curtain rod running through his outfit
on the top and attached them at the bottom, and
(07:19):
there are fake, you know, dummies of people, and every
movement he's making with the rods, they're making an exact
same time, so it appears as if there's like five
people dancing in synchronicity.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
There's essentially nothing more hilarious that you can see than that.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
See you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Yeah, definitely, is that what this is sort of like,
because that's how I pictured it.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Sort of This was instead of them being on either
side of the priest, they would be in a single
file line, all following behind the lead priest. Oh okay,
and then there'd be priests on either side kind of
corralling them in because you didn't want walking corpses kind
of wander off and you know, try to possess somebody
or steel their cheek. And it did bear some similarities
(08:01):
to what you're talking about. We'll see that in a second.
But I want to talk about a Chinese American writer
named Louise Hung who wrote an account, a really interesting
account of her grandfather's experience way back in the day
when he was a young boy. She posted it on
the Order of the Good Death website, which we've talked
about them a million times over the years, but just
(08:23):
to kind of summarize, if I may please, her grandfather
and his brother lived in a town where a corpse
procession walked through and they heard the gong coming and
they were hiding with everybody else in town, just keeping
out of sight, but they were brave enough to kind
of peek out, and they saw, she says, a line
of corpses lurching, hopping, swaying through the streets to the
(08:46):
beat of the gong. They saw white cloths covering the
heads of the dead faces positioned up and forward, supposedly
looking toward their final resting place. Yeah, and so like
this happened, like this is not like this, like there
weren't like legends of corpse walking, right, these happened in
(09:06):
real life. And if you say, I don't really believe
in magic, Daoist or otherwise, I don't really think a
black cat's static electricity could reanimated corpse if this actually happened, guys, guys,
what was going on? Guys?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, a cat would be more likely to eat the
nose off of that person.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Yes, yeah, which is probably something you had to watch
out for.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, what really was going on and it was really
going on?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Like you said, is that was a Dallas priest.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
And Louise Hung even said, Hey, I'm not even sure
all these people were Dallas priests. I think they might
have just been doing the job and kind of saying that.
But in the case of the solo corpse walker, it
would be a Dallas priest carrying a corpse on their
back with a bamboo pole stuck up the back to
hold them upright as if they were alive, and a
(09:57):
big black robe draped over both of them, kind of
like the old bits with someone on your shoulders in
a big long trench coat exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
That's why the corpses that were in a single corpse
walking procession always were very tall, that's right, because they
were on the back of another priest who was hiding.
And just to be clear, they didn't like impale the
dead person on the bamboo pole. It was like tied
to them. Yeah. So they The way that they did
(10:25):
this was they could see kind of through the black robe.
They could see the lantern enough to be led. And
remember the priests in front would be like, there's a
pothole coming up on the right, Yoho, yoho. So they
would do this and then obviously they would switch off
night tonight who would carry the corpse and who would
do the processing. That was how corpse walking worked. Corpse
(10:45):
herding also used bamboo poles, but they used them horizontally,
kind of like you were talking about with the basketball
halftime guy.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
Okay, well, I'm glad it didn't spoil that because people
are probably just very confused about what I was talking about.
But yeah, it sounds like they are all tied to
the pole and the pole kind of runs under their arms,
and that's what kind of made me think of the dancer.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I should get one of those systems. I'm sure you
can buy those.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Right, surely they can't. I'll be homemade, yeah, or make one.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
How hard could that be?
Speaker 1 (11:18):
I'm sure there's a halftime basketball dancer being like, yeah,
you'll find out, pal, it's really hard.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
That'd be a fun Yeah, that'd be a fun Halloween
get up. I already have my or I don't have
the outfit, but I have my idea this year. So
I can't do it this year. I'll pri to you
it next year.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Can you reveal your idea on this episode?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
If you saw the Righteous Gemstones, I'm going to be
baby Billy Walton Goggins, brilliant character.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Okay, awesome. Oh so wait, hold on one second. About
the bamboo poles. Yeah, there would be two of them,
one running under each arm of the corpses. So basically
they were hanging the corpses by their arms by bamboo poles.
Then the poles would be the ends of poles would
be carried by a priest in front and back on
their shoulders, and the way that those two priests would
(12:04):
walk it would get telegraphed through the bamboo poles, which
would make the corpses look like they were just kind
of bouncing around. Their feet would probably hit the ground
and touch it here or there, so it looked like
they were walking in line behind the Dallist priests.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
That's that nuts, and they would say, NBA, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
That's right. I don't think there's anything that could top
that chuck. So I say short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.