This story was told to me by my father when I was young.
The main character was his sworn brother—someone I grew up calling Third Uncle.
When he was a young man, Third Uncle served as a soldier in the Yimeng Mountains. In the early 1970s, his unit was transferred back to Qingdao and stationed near Cuobuling. The army assigned him a small, newly built single-story house. He tidied it up and moved in without much thought.
For the first few days, everything was peaceful.
Then the strange things began.
One night, after dark, he heard a dull thump… thump… thump, like someone knocking on the floorboards. At first, he assumed it was noise from a neighboring house. But the sound kept coming, steady and deliberate. When he listened more closely, his stomach tightened—the sound was coming from inside his own room.
He got up and looked around.
In the corner of the room, he saw it.
A small wooden stool was jumping.
It lifted itself slightly off the ground and came down again and again, striking the floor with a hollow thud. Even stranger, the moment he pulled the light cord and the bulb flickered on, the sound stopped. The stool sat quietly in the corner, perfectly still, as if nothing had happened at all.
Third Uncle was terrified. He didn't dare turn the light off for the rest of the night and lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling.
The next morning, he went straight to report it to his company commander.
The commander was an old Red Army veteran, a man who had clawed his way out of battlefields piled with the dead. He had no patience for ghost stories. He scolded Third Uncle on the spot.
"You coward," he barked. "You're a soldier, and you're afraid of nonsense like this? You're imagining things!"
But Third Uncle insisted. He swore he hadn't made it up, describing every detail over and over. Eventually, worn down by his persistence, the commander relented. He patted the pistol at his waist and said,
"Fine. Tonight, I'll go with you. I'll bring my gun. Let's see what kind of ghost dares to pull tricks under my watch."
That evening, the two of them shared a bit of liquor, ate dinner, and lay down on the bed. Neither of them really slept.
Sometime after midnight, the sound returned.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
By the pale moonlight spilling through the window, they both saw it clearly—the small stool in the corner was hopping, over and over again.
The commander's face went white. For a long moment, he said nothing.
The next morning, without offering any explanation, the commander summoned an engineering unit. Soldiers surrounded the house and began digging along the base of the wall. When they reached about two meters down, a shovel struck something hard.
They cleared away the dirt.
It was a coffin—old, nearly rotten through.
And directly above it, inside the house, was the exact spot where the stool had been jumping.
When they pried the coffin open, they found a dried corpse inside, still dressed in Qing-dynasty clothing.
The consensus was simple: the house—and the stool—had been built directly over someone's body. Whoever lay there was displeased and had made his resentment known.
In those days, no one spoke of cultural relics or preservation. They carried the coffin and remains to an open area and burned them together.
From that day on, nothing strange ever happened in that house again.
Third Uncle lived there for several more years. Later, when he retired and transferred out of the army, he finally moved away.
And the little stool never jumped again.