Ghost-Wall Experience, Night-Travel Folklore, and Vernacular Religion in Rural China: A Jiepai Oral Tradition Record from Jiangsu

This record is a primary source archival item about ghost-wall folklore, night-travel fear, spirit obstruction, local ritual gesture, rural path memory, and family oral transmission in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese ghost folklore, vernacular religion, oral tradition, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, local lexicon, and emic documentation. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “Ghost-Wall,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a Jiepai family oral tradition concerning an older female family member who, while returning home late at night from her natal home near the former Dragon King Temple, encountered what was understood locally as “ghost-wall” or Gui Da Qiang. The narrative describes a pond, a bamboo thicket, darkness, a tactile sense of an invisible wall, temporary obstruction, and the eventual reopening of the path after minor ritualized actions. The record’s value lies in ghost-wall folklore, Chinese ghost folklore, night-travel folklore, spirit obstruction, vernacular religion, rural road memory, Jiangnan folklore, oral tradition, and local lexicon. The text is not presented as evidence for the supernatural reality of ghost-wall experience. It is preserved as an emic record of local fear narrative, landscape memory, family oral transmission, and vernacular explanation of spatial obstruction. Methodologically, this item combines the Archive Author’s childhood memory of repeated family narration, the father’s oral account, a privately retained 2025 oral video, author annotations, and provenance notes. The annotations distinguish father-based narration, childhood reception, anonymized location reference, local terms, supernatural non-endorsement, and provenance boundaries. A key feature of the record is the local concept of “鬼打墙,” a vernacular category for an experience in which a person feels blocked, disoriented, or unable to proceed in a familiar landscape. The narrative preserves how such an experience is linked to night travel, ponds, bamboo thickets, darkness, fear, and embodied response. The record also preserves local lexical and cultural terms, including “岛塘,” meaning a relatively wild pond and its surrounding environment; “竹叶窠,” meaning a bamboo grove or bamboo thicket with an unregulated or primitive spatial feel; and “关目,” referring to small actions or ritualized gestures believed in local folk practice to produce a possible effect. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20967598. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include the father’s oral video, precise route information, pond locations, location maps, private videos, raw spatial materials, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.