In November 2009, in the middle of the night in a rural province in China, Mrs. Denghi is having a disturbing dream. In her dream,

she sees a tall, thin man wearing a suit. He's walking through the old village where she and her

family used to live and where they still owned an abandoned house. He is carrying a bag of some kind,

and she watches as he approaches their old house she

cannot see his face as he wears a hat like a trilby but as he approaches the door to

their house he stops and she catches a glimpse of his mouth it forms a wide smile

there is something very sinister about this man. He's carrying a package of some kind.

Mrs. Dengi's dream disturbed her so much that she told her husband the next morning and explained

what she'd seen. She urged her husband to go to their old house to see if anything had happened

there. Her husband brushed it off, telling her it was just a dream.

Meanwhile, their 13-year-old son, Xionkwang, is away at boarding school.

When he's not in lessons, he's happy reading his favourite book, Strange Tales from a Lonely Studio.

It's a famous Chinese book of ghost stories written way back in 1740.

The following day, Mrs Dengi continued to tell her husband, Mr. Jilu, a 54-year-old migrant farm worker,

that he must go to their old home.

And so finally he gave in, and he told her he would go and take a look,

just to placate her. They lived in downtown Chingong, where they worked, and so after work

had ended that day, Mr. Jilu headed off to the old family home in the village of Shuan King in the

Banyan district. As he arrived in the small village, he met an elderly woman who was their old neighbour there.

She stopped him and told him that she had seen a tall stranger in the village wearing a suit

and a hat and carrying a bag.

She said he'd wandered through the village until he came to Mr. Jilu's old house, upon which he walked around to the

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