Yunnan's "Pipa Ghost": Families Pointed At Are Avoided by the Whole Village

Yunnan has some ethnic minority villages where they speak of something called a "Pipa Ghost."

It is said that some families keep a ghost, usually passed down through generations. This ghost burrows into someone else's belly and eats their liver and lungs; the person then suffers abdominal pain, grows thin, and slowly dies.

Once someone falls ill, the family invites a shaman to look. The shaman points and says which family's Pipa Ghost it is. That family is then driven out of the village or isolated by the whole village: they cannot eat together, cannot intermarry, cannot visit each other's homes, and their children cannot find spouses. Some investigations mention that the pointed-at families had to move to live together and intermarry among themselves, but in the eyes of outsiders, this label cannot be washed away for generations.

This used to be very serious, but later, after research by ethnologists and government work, this belief gradually diminished.

According to research, the pointed-at families were often those who had conflicts with neighbors, or had more money than others, or held little power in the village. For others, this ghost was just an explanation: it could explain why someone in that family fell ill, and also explain why the neighbor's family lived better than their own.

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