The Literary Home for the Ji Yun Center for the Weird and the Speculative
In progressive circles, working for a defense contractor marks you as complicit. My father clocked in there for over thirty years. No one in my family really ever took a stance on my father working for them. Although, there have been more than a handful over the years happy to tell me I was raised on blood money. My dad doesn’t engineer the jets. He does paint them. He got good at it the way he got good at everything. …
Back in the eighth grade, I had this really vivid dream that my cousin Amber was pregnant. However, in the dream, she didn’t know that she was pregnant until she was about 4 months due to the fact she was still having her monthly (sorry for the TMI). Until one day when she went to the ER after bleeding excessively. She was then told there that she was expecting. That’s all I could remember from the dream. I should add …
When I was three and a half, my yeye drank pesticide and killed himself. To understand why, you first have to know this: from the day I was born, Yeye loved me dearly. He fell in love with me, he said, as soon as he saw my tiny face. And on that very day, he asked my parents to move in so that he could watch me while they worked. In China, it is common for one grandparent or …
Last semester, I moved to my new apartment with two other roommates. So, we all three have separate rooms, washrooms, and closets. It was quite a big apartment; my room (which was empty for three years) was in the corner of the apartment, which I could say was a little far from the other two rooms. So, every night I tried to sleep in that room, in the middle of the sleep, my whole body got shaken suddenly as if …
Growing up in a deeply religious household instilled in me a belief in the existence of a world beyond our visible one. This belief was further reinforced by my education at a religious private school and regular attendance of church every Saturday. Unlike many in my community, my fascination with the paranormal bordered upon obsession. I was intrigued by stories of ghosts, spirits, and otherworldly phenomena, often burying my head in fantasy books, always eager to learn more about the …
My aunt lives down south in the same town that her parents (my grandparents) lived in. They spent a lot of time together and were really close. My grandfather passed away quite a few years ago from pancreatic cancer and 4/16 was the anniversary of his death. My aunt got a notification on her phone a few days before 4/16 that she had a new message in Messenger. When she opened it, it was an old message she had saved …
Over the summer, my brother and I had our own “glitch in the matrix” experience when we decided to test reality with the app “Randonautica”, a game based on quantum energy and our manifestations. We were very skeptical of the stories other people have had from the game and didn’t believe that an app could actually read our thoughts and take us to a location matching them. The first set of coordinates we received was based on my thought of …
*a nonfiction account as recorded by Ji Yun (1724-1805), Imperial Librarian and Investigator of the Strange, and translated by John Yu Branscum and Yi Izzy Yu; notes on Chinese alien abduction and fairy lore are at the bottom of the piece: One day I received a letter that was written in my language but seemed to be written in a foreign one. The thoughts it expressed were odd, confused, and almost impossible to decipher. The letter’s poor quality especially surprised …
Excerpt: “I’m probably like six, seven years old, [and] we’d [just] come from Australia. [My] nanny, Renata, is in the bedroom, my sister is asleep [and] I’m hanging out. There was a doorway and all of a sudden this jacket comes waving through the doorway, this empty jacket — there’s no body, there’s no legs, it’s just there…” Reeves’ narration of the ghostly encounter begins at the 1:06 mark:
Now I come to the oddest thing that ever happened to me. Two or three years ago I was lying in bed, idly musing, one morning – it was the 2d of March – when suddenly a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp, and exploded with such comprehensive effectiveness as to sweep the vicinity clean of rubbishy reflections and fill the air with their dust and flying fragments. This idea, stated in simple phrase, was that …