Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: China's Corpse Walkers

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Klepper.

Listen to season four of Snafoo with Ed Helm. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. That's right. As spooky month continues, it's stuff you should know. Yeah. So we're going to go, Chuck, today to the Zengji region.

There's no way you can't say a region like that. I know. Of Hunan province. Oh, my God. You're doing great. That's in south central, Chinna. And if you go, their local custom will tell you that if somebody dies, 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 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. 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 but occasionally you might find yourself away from home and you need to get

walked back and this is a tradition that dates back to like 1616 and continued into the 20th century yeah the Qing dynasty apparently is where it finds its roots And the idea that they were doing this in the 60s, potentially even, is pretty interesting. But 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. Yeah. Traditionalists might do it. You never know. Maybe, maybe so. But traditionally, speaking of tradition, it was the Taoist priest. 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 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 where a Taoist priest basically reanimated a course. corpse enough to have it walk behind him to be led by the Taoist priest back home to be buried. This dead person would walk back home with the Taoist priest. 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 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, yo ho, yo ho, you know, it's just so the corpse knew which way to go, go. Right. They would be like, yoho, yoho, we got a pot hole coming up on the 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 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 in 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 corpse to move again. Yeah, that's right. 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 her little butthole stitch shut. And then unstitched, it was quite a ride. We thought we were going to 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.

And it turns out they are in love. Oh, my gosh, Chuck. That is a wonderful story. It's wonderful. So the other two cats are going to 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. That's awesome. Well, welcome to the family, Olivia. That's right. But Olivia was not a black cat. And since I took so much time with that story, maybe we should take a break and finish up with corpsewalkers. Yeah, let's do that. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafoo, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll.

I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to Season 4 of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos.

And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of their search was. I think we're in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, just a picture of Michael Jordan. But cops are still using it to make arrests. Police, they are trusting this software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works. This is not Minority Report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer.

I'm Dexter Thomas, host a Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now. now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill Switch in the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, I said that there were two ways for a Taoist 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 going to transport more than one at a time, and they're going to 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.

Yeah. There were more priests involved because there were more corpses. So you had like, you know, a priest up front, a priest in the back, maybe a couple of priests on the sides. I think this is when we talk about the runner being out front. I think this is when they had their runners that would warn the townsfolk that they were coming. And the way it's described sounds to me like, have you ever seen at an NBA game, they'll have somebody come out at halftime? And it's like a guy that's dancing like some popular performer. but he's got like a curtain rod running through his outfit on the top and attached him at the bottom.

And 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. There's essentially nothing more hilarious that you can see than that. So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, definitely. Is that what this is sort of like? Because that's how I pictured it.

Sort of. This was, instead of them being on either side of the priests, 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 corraling them in because you didn't want walking corpses to kind of wander off and, you know, try to possess somebody or steal their chi. And it did bear some similarities 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 of really interesting. 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 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 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 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 a, this, like there weren't like legends of corpse walking. Right. These happened in real life. And if you say, I don't really believe in magic, Taoist, or otherwise, I don't really think a black cat's static electricity could reanimate a corpse. If this actually happened, guys, guys, what was going on, guys? Yeah, the cat would be more likely to eat the nose off of that person. Yes.

Yeah, which is probably something you had to watch out for. Yeah. What really was going on, and it was really going on, like you said, is there was a Taoist priest. and Louise Hung even said, hey, I don't know, I'm not even sure all these people were Taoist 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 Taoist priest carrying a corpse on their back with a bamboo pole stuck up the back to hold them upright as if they are alive and a big black robe draped over both of them, kind of like the old bit with someone on your shoulders and a big long trench coat.

Exactly. That's why the corpse 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 impale the dead person on the bamboo pole. It was, like, tied to them. Yeah. So the way that they did this was they could see kind of through the black robe.

They could see the lantern enough to be led. And remember, the priest in front would be like there's a pothole coming up on the right. Yo-ho, yo-ho. So they would do this, and then obviously they would switch off night to night who would carry the corpse and who would do the processing. That was how corpse walking worked. Corpse herding also used bamboo poles, but they used them horizontally, kind of like you were talking about with the basketball halftime guy. Okay, well, I'm glad I didn't spoil that because people were 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. I should get one of those systems. I'm sure you can buy those, right? Surely. They can't all be homemade. Yeah, or make one. How hard could that be? I'm sure there's a half-time basketball dancer being like, yeah, you'll find out, pal.

It's really hard. That'd be a fun. Yeah, that'd be a fun Halloween get up. I already have my outfit, or I don't have the outfit, but I have my idea this year, so I can't do it this year, but I'll probably do it next year. Can you reveal your idea? idea on this episode? Yeah, if you saw The Righteous Jimstones, I'm going to be Baby Billy, Walton Goggins, brilliant character.

Okay, awesome. Oh, so wait, hold on, one second, about the bamboo poles. 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 ends of the poles would be carried by a priest in front and back on their shoulders. And the way that those two priests would 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 Taoist priests. Isn't that nuts? And they would say MBA, it's fantastic. That's right. I don't think there's anything that could top that, Chuck. So I say Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.