Dali noticed that we were both looking in the same direction at the same time, so he turned around immediately before I could stop him. When he saw the sitting corpse, he screamed and screamed in fright.

“Dude! Dude! That corpse is alive!”

“Calm down, Dali!” I told him. “It’s just a normal post-mortem spasm.”

Having said that, seeing a corpse slowly sitting up in a dark funeral home was an experience that would petrify anyone. I noticed that even Xiaotao looked really pale.

I explained to them that about six hours after death, the muscles would stiffen and that would bend the spine. At least that was the basic theory behind this phenomenon anyway. In truth, post-mortem spasms like that were relatively rare, and would only occur when the deceased was young and had relatively strong muscle fibers. In this case, the ‘waking corpse’ we saw just now met the criteria perfectly.

In his panic, Dali accidentally pulled off the...