The bizarre tale of a Chinese peasant who apparently teleported some 500 miles has been called “proof” the paranormal exists.
Huang Yanqiu lived in a remote village called Dongbeigao in China’s Hebei province. Without access to a car – and living 30 miles from the nearest railway station – he somehow managed to travel over 480 miles in the dead of night without his clothes.
Huang’s disappearance was first noticed when he failed to turn up for his job at a rice farm on the morning of July 28, 1977. He had always been a reliable employee, so someone contacted his family to make sure he was okay.
His clothes for the day were still neatly laid out in his room, and his bicycle – his only means of transport – was still leaning up against the side of the house. A search of the surrounding area provided no clues and the villagers soon ran out of places to look.
Podcaster Mr Ballen explains: “Dongbeigao was incredibly isolated at the time. Most of the people who live there don’t have phones, they don’t have cars they ride their bikes everywhere and there were no roads that connected Dongbeigao to any other place.”
Several days passed, with no news. Then a telegram arrived at the home of the village mayor. Huang had been found, apparently asleep, on the streets of Nanjing the capital city of Jiangsu Province – about 485 miles away from his home village.
But the most mysterious part of the story was the time at which the telegram had been sent – it was was dated at 9am on July 28. Somehow Huang had travelled hundreds of miles without any means of transport and without any money.
Even if he’d managed to get on a train, the service at the time was notoriously unreliable, and the journey would have taken more or less a whole day. Huang had been seen in Dongbeigao about nine hours before he was reported missing.
An extra layer of mystery was added because Typhoon Babe was raging at the time – making any attempt to get to the local station in the early hours of the morning dangerous if not downright impossible.
The village mayor replied to the telegram. Mr Ballen says that at first, there was real doubt that it was really Huang that had been found in Nanjing. He explained: “They said ‘If this really is Huang he should have a very specific birth mark on his wrist,’ and when they sent this telegram off they fully expected to get one back that said ‘Oh our mistake – it wasn’t him.’”
However, to their surprise, they received confirmation that the missing man had been found. Mr Ballen continued: “They got a reply relatively quickly and it said ‘Oh yeah he’s got that exact birth mark, it’s definitely Huang. But he’s very confused, he doesn’t really know what’s going on and so somebody from your village has to come and get him’.”
Huang arrived back home in the middle of August – about two weeks after he had gone missing. The 21-year-old farm worker was unable to explain how he had made it so far from home in such a short time, and the mystery has never been adequately explained.
Even more puzzling, Huang apparently performed the same trick twice more of the following couple of years. Despite numerous medical and psychological test the source of Huang’s extraordinary feat remains unknown.
Source: Daily Star
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