Diao Si Gui

Also Known As: 吊死鬼, “hanged ghost”; literary 縊鬼 yi gui; on the Shaoxing stage 女吊 nü diao, “the female hanged one”, honoured as 吊神, “the hanging god”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: It is fastened to the place and the manner of its own death, and can work on a grieving or furious person until they put their head into a noose in its place.
Role in Mythos: It is the reason a house where one person hanged themselves is expected to produce another, and the figure the exorcists were called in to shift.
Relation to Humans: It approaches only those already close to the edge, which is why the folklore treats grief and rage as the doorway rather than the ghost. Ordinary households did not fight it with weapons but with small refusals, scattering the hearth soot so it could not be wound into a noose.

A candle was burning low in a roadside inn, and Scholar Fan, drowsy after his supper, watched a maidservant come in and lay a bundle of clothes across a chair. She set a mirror-case and a comb-box on the table, arranged them, and went out. A young woman then came from the inner room, opened the boxes, combed her hair, put it up, pinned it, and stood a long time turning her face in the glass. The maid came back with a basin and poured for her to wash, passed her a cloth, carried the water away. The woman unwrapped the bundle, shook out a skirt and a cape so new they had a shine on them, and dressed with tremendous care, smoothing the lapel, drawing the collar straight. Fan kept quiet. He had decided she was running off with somebody and wanted to arrive looking her best. Then she took out a long sash, threw it over the beam, and tied it.

She rose on her toes, unhurried, and stretched her neck into the loop. The moment the silk touched her throat, her eyes closed, her brows shot up, her tongue came out past her lips by a good two inches, and the colour went out of her face. Fan ran for the innkeeper. There was nothing in the room. The innkeeper thought about it and said that a daughter-in-law of the house had hanged herself there once, and perhaps that was her.

Pu Songling wrote that down in the 1680s, and what he found worth saying afterwards was not that the dead walk. It was that of everything the woman had suffered, the only part she still carried was the hour spent dressing and the tying of the knot. She had forgotten the rest.

The Chinese hanged ghost is nearly always a woman, and the language settled that early. The everyday word is diao si gui, the hanged ghost; the bookish word is yi gui. Nobody bothered to coin a masculine form. An old gloss in the *Erya* names a certain spider, the kind that lowers itself into the air on a single line, the hanged woman, which suggests the association was already fixed when the dictionary was compiled. Where the ghost appears, it appears as it died. A young scholar named Feng, lying down by daylight in rented rooms, saw a shape on the wall like a faint painting that would not fade, went closer, and found a girl with her face drawn tight, her tongue out and a cord around her throat. She had a request. Below ground her bones had gone dry, the tongue would not draw back in and the cord would not come off, and she wanted the roof beam cut down and burned. He paid for the work himself.

Red is the other constant, and the reason for it is unnervingly practical. Ji Yun, writing in the 1790s, reported an evening in Yangzhou when a woman in red pushed open his host’s door, knelt on the floor as though she had something to explain, and drifted out again. A woman had hanged herself in that room. He then set down what the village shamans said: if you hang yourself in red, your ghost can come and go through the doors of a house and the household god of the roof cannot stop it, because women are not dressed in red for burial, and red is a yang colour, so the thing still passes for a living soul. Ji Yun added, in the tone of a man who has checked, that he had no idea what this doctrine was founded on. He also recorded that women believed it completely, and that those who died with a grievance often put on red before they went to the beam, so as to be certain of coming back.

Two hundred years later Lu Xun, remembering the Mulian plays of his Shaoxing childhood, watched the same figure walk out of the stage curtain to a mournful horn: a bright red jacket, a long black waistcoat, hair loose and wild, two strings of paper money hung at the throat, head down and hands down, drifting a slow crooked path around the whole stage that the old hands said traced the character for heart. She threw her hair back and the face was a round one, lime white, with heavy black brows, blackened sockets and scarlet lips. Shaoxing called her the hanging god. Lu Xun could not think of a second violently dead ghost anywhere that had been promoted to a god, and took the title as a measure of how much the audience liked her. Her song began with a line about being a daughter of the Yang family, and the story behind it was that she had been sold as a child bride, worn down by years of it, and had finally gone to the rope.

What she does next is the part the villages actually feared. From offstage comes the sound of another woman weeping, working herself toward the same end, and the hanging god is delighted, because she can now go and demand a substitute. The bargain is fixed and ungenerous: the ghost of a suicide stays where it is until it can persuade a living person to die the same way, and only then does the road to rebirth open. Lu Xun thought this the most purely selfish habit his country’s ghosts had, and noted that even the hanging god, who at least had revenge as an excuse, sometimes forgot the revenge and simply took the substitute.

She needs a noose to do it, and this is where the belief came down into the kitchen. Shaoxing cooked over wood and straw in iron pots, and the soot had to be scraped off or the heat would not come through. It would have been quicker to turn the pot face down and scrape it round in one circle. No village woman ever did. A ring of soot on the floor is the stuff the hanging god’s noose is made from, so the soot was always scattered loose, a small deliberate refusal repeated in every kitchen in the district.

Where nobody scattered anything, the results were remembered. At a market town in Sichuan a hired labourer hanged himself and came back with a great deal of energy, showing himself at sunset and following people. His old workmates began to go, one from a beam, one from a tree, three of them inside a month. A neighbour’s boy walking up to the house with a lantern heard feet behind him and felt something stroking his neck, and when he swung the light round the thing was standing there with its body drawn in and its face tilted up, mouth open, tongue moving, smiling at him and holding out a rope. The exorcist hired for the night had already capped his bottle and announced the ghost was inside it.

Against it, people had a short list of things that worked. Blood breaks it: in another Sichuan account a thief lying on a roof lifted a tile, saw a woman standing in a noose at midnight with the ghost kneeling under her knocking its head on the floor, cut the rope with his belt knife and nicked her neck doing it, and the blood that dripped down destroyed the ghost’s hold on its own shape, so that it dropped into a heap of slick blue-green matter like the weed that grows in standing water, still faintly squeaking. They burned it with an oil flame and the stink filled the house. Cutting the beam and burning it releases the ghost that is tied to it. Recited scripture succeeded in the market town where iron talismans and hired exorcists had failed. And the substitute must consent, in the end, which is the whole shape of the thing: the ghost has no hands. It cannot get out on its own. It can only stand in the corner of the room where the rope is, and wait for grief to do the work.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Diao Si Gui?

A Diao Si Gui is the ghost of a person who died by hanging in Chinese folklore, usually a woman. It is held in place by the manner of its death and is said to be freed only when it can persuade a living person to hang themselves in its place.

Why is the Diao Si Gui always dressed in red?

Because red was believed to give a hanged ghost the power to move freely through a house. Village shamans held that women were never shrouded in red, and that red was a yang colour, so a corpse in red still passed for a living soul and the household gods could not shut it out. Ji Yun recorded in the 1790s that women who died with a grievance often put on red deliberately before hanging themselves.

What does a Diao Si Gui look like?

It appears exactly as it died, with the cord still around its neck and its tongue pushed out past the lips, because neither can be taken off. On the Shaoxing stage the figure wore a red jacket and a long black waistcoat, with loose hair, paper money strung at the throat, a face painted lime white, black brows and scarlet lips.

How do you protect yourself from a Diao Si Gui?

The traditional defences were practical rather than heroic. Households in Shaoxing scattered the soot scraped from their cooking pots instead of leaving it in a ring, because a ring of soot was thought to be the material of the ghost’s noose, and stories credit cutting the rope in time, spilling blood on the ghost, burning the beam it was tied to, and recited scripture with breaking a haunting.

Is the Diao Si Gui the same as the nü diao?

They are the same being under a regional name. Nü diao is the Shaoxing word for the female hanged ghost, and audiences at the local Mulian plays also called her the hanging god, an honorific no other violently dead ghost seems to have been given.