Xu Shilin, governor of Jiangsu, was a strictly upright man. When he was prefect of Anqing he was holding court one evening as the moon came up, and he saw a woman kneeling outside the gate of the yamen with a black cloth over her head, so that above the shoulders her face could not be made out, in the posture of one presenting a complaint.
Xu knew she was a ghost. He had his clerk hold up the writ and call out:
“Whoever has a grievance — let the soul come in.”
The woman drifted in and knelt below the steps, and her voice was thin as a child’s. The clerks could see nothing; they only heard it.
She said her name was Tian. She had been widowed young and had kept her chastity, and her husband’s elder brother, Fang De, had tried to force her into another marriage in order to take her property, and had driven her to hang herself.
Xu had the brother arrested and confronted him with the ghost.
At the first hearing he denied everything, stubbornly. Then he turned his head, saw the woman, went white with terror, and confessed the whole thing.
Xu put him to death according to law. The whole province talked of it as a miracle, and Xu wrote an inscription for the Martial Widow Tian to honour her.
At the time Zhao Guolin, the Grand Secretary from Tai’an, was governor, and he took Xu to task for it: a routine enquiry would have been enough — why drag in ghosts and gods to make yourself look remarkable?
Xu was deeply ashamed. But the thing had really happened, and could not be hushed up.
Before Xu came to office he was travelling to the capital with a companion who suddenly cried out that his back hurt, knelt on the ground, and knocked his head.
“I am a highwayman. I meant to take your money and kill you with my own hand. But a god in golden armour struck me with a mace and felled me. You, sir, are no ordinary man.”
Having said which, he died.