Sometimes large sums of money are paid to have a ghost taken out of the house, but twenty or thirty taels is quite a common price. If the person who let loose the ghost is invited to remove it, he will demand much more than another, but another can do it. When he does find the wooden idol it is burned and it is popularly believed that the person who let the ghost go will suffer, because the spirit will go and harass him. Most Chinese have a great dread of certain objects and houses which are supposed to be haunted, and it is with the greatest difficulty that they can cut clear of this superstition; it should always be borne in mind that such things are very real to them, however silly they may appear to us.
The "Planchette."
To seek the counsel of the spirits by the aid of the stylus, k‘ung chung hsüan pi (空中懸筆). Various forms of this cult have been in use for many centuries. The present mode is to make a string of silk thread or human hair and suspend it from the roof, with a pen made of peach or willow twig. Directly under this pen is placed a table covered with fine dry river-sand. Incense and paper are burned before the tablet of the stylus house god, the attention of the spirits called and their help besought.
When the spirits come the pencil moves and writes characters on the sand. If nonsense is written, the manager, chi shou (乩手), further invokes the spirits by the k‘o t‘ou (kotow) and more incense and paper burning, and when the pencil writes real characters one man reads aloud and another makes a record. Enquiring from a converted chi shou as to the possibility of falsifying these pencil motions, he declares that with this kind of stylus there is no trickery, but the pencil does not move without being invited and not always then, and seldom moves to advantage, but he has known it to write wonderfully true things.
The tablets written in the stylus house are of two different sorts, one to the celestials, the other to lü tsu (呂祖). They are as follows:
