Xiangxi walking corpses

Corpse driving is the western Hunan tradition of walking the dead home. Because a soul whose body lies in foreign soil was believed to be lost, families of labourers who died far away paid specialists to return the remains, and legend said the specialists made the corpses travel on their own feet. Travellers who met such a procession at night saw a line of figures in tall hats hopping behind a priest with a bell. The practice is widely cited as the origin of the jiangshi's hop and is the closest Chinese parallel to the Haitian idea of a corpse that walks at a sorcerer's command.12