The Three Who Never Reached the Lodge on Yushan

Below the main peak of Yushan in Taiwan, at about 3,400 metres, stands a mountain hut called Paiyun Lodge. It is eight or nine kilometres on foot from the trailhead, and it is the last place to rest before the highest summit in Taiwan. Hikers spend one night there and set off through its front door early the next morning for the summit.

On the trail from the lodge to the main peak there is a fork where a side path breaks off towards South Peak. People on the mountain say that when the fog comes in, or the rain, three figures appear ahead of you at that fork. They wear wide bamboo hats and long yellow hooded rain capes, and from behind they look like any other hikers. They just walk fast, as if they know the trail well. Hikers call them the Little Flying Heroes, after the cape-style raincoats of the same name.

Some of the people who follow them get lost. Others stop and find a cliff right in front of their feet. Some older hikers tell newcomers not to follow those yellow raincoats they see walking ahead. The mountain has one more warning, too: never ask them to take your photograph.

And people on the mountain say the three were not first seen at the fork. They were first seen at the door of Paiyun Lodge.

The Three Who Booked In and Never Arrived

In the winter of 1975 a severe cold wave swept in, and overnight snow fell across the Yushan range until the whole mountain was white. Paiyun Lodge had a keeper who had worked there for more than ten years. That day word reached him that a party of three hikers had booked in for the night.

He waited. He waited until late into the night, and the three never came. In the end he turned off the light and got ready for bed.

That was when the knocking started. It was urgent.

He pulled on his coat, got up and went to the door. Three young men stood outside, wearing bamboo hats and yellow Little Flying Hero capes. He invited them in and went back to his room for the register, so they could sign in and pay for their beds.

When he came back into the hall with the register, all three were gone.

He took a torch and searched every room in the lodge, inside and out. There was nobody there. He went back to check the front door. The lock was still firmly fastened. It had not been opened. So the three men had not gone out through the door.

His hair stood on end and he went cold all over. He shut himself in the keeper’s office, locked the door and lay under the covers through a very long night. At first light he locked up without a word and ran down the mountain without looking back.

Only after a search party went out did he learn that the three young men who had taken their chances on the mountain had come to grief that same night. They had been caught in heavy snow below the Great Cliff, on the way up to Yushan, and died there. On the night he pulled on his coat and opened the door, the three of them may already have been unable to make it to the lodge.

The Floor Was Still Wet

He told the lodge’s other keeper what had happened. The other man laughed and called it ghost talk.

Then came a night of wind and driving rain. The keeper who had laughed was sitting by the radio listening to Peking opera when somebody started banging urgently on the door.

He opened it. Outside stood twenty or thirty men and women in yellow capes, soaked and bedraggled from the rain. He threw the door wide to let them in. One after another they filed into the hall, their faces blank, and sat down along the benches on both sides.

He went into the staff room to fetch towels so they could dry off. When he came back to the hall with the towels, the whole crowd had vanished.

The floor was still wet, and the bolt was still across the door. So the twenty or thirty people had really come in, and yet in the blink of an eye every one of them had vanished into thin air.

After that, the lodge asked a religious group in the south of Taiwan for help and installed a statue of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, to watch over it. They also brought a mongrel dog up from the lowlands for company. None of it made the strange things stop.

Voices in the Fog

In the past there were no signposts at the South Peak fork, and thick fog rolled in often. Even experienced hikers easily lost their way there.

A husband and wife once climbed Yushan together. When they reached the fork, the husband heard men talking somewhere ahead in the fog, and he followed the voices. After a while he could just make out three men in front of him, wearing yellow raincoats. At that moment his wife, walking behind him, grabbed him and yanked him hard. He took a few steps backwards, and only then did he see that one more step forward would have taken him over a cliff.

That time, there was someone behind him to pull him back.

The Man Who Offered to Take Her Picture

A hiking club from central Taiwan once organised a big trip up Yushan. The whole group reached the main peak, took a photo by the bronze statue of Yu Youren on the summit, and then started drifting back down to Paiyun Lodge in ones and twos. The line of hikers stretched out a long way. One woman was a fast walker, and before long there was no one behind her.

When she reached the South Peak fork, three men suddenly appeared ahead of her, in yellow hooded raincoats and wide bamboo hats. She assumed they were also heading back to Paiyun Lodge, so she followed them. They walked very fast, and she had to half run to keep up, so she never had a chance to speak to them, and she never got a clear look at their faces.

Eventually she was too tired to go on, and she sat down to catch her breath.

The last of the three men turned round. Her eyes lit up as she tried to get a look at his face, but he was holding a single-lens reflex camera in both hands, pressed right up under the brim of his hat, so that it covered his whole face. He walked slowly towards her and made it clear he wanted to take her picture.

She was delighted. She struck a pose and let him take a few shots, and she kept nodding her thanks.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

When the Camera Came Down

Slowly, the camera came down.

Between the hat and the collar of the raincoat, there was nothing at all.

She screamed, turned and ran, stumbling and lurching forward. Night was falling and fog was settling over the mountain, and she could no longer find Paiyun Lodge. The path seemed to go on forever. By the weak beam of her headlamp she kept dragging herself onward, swaying on her feet.

An hour later she fell into a thicket of Yushan juniper. She tried to climb back up to the path, but she had no strength left. All she could do was curl up and try to conserve her strength. In the middle of the night the temperature dropped fast. She could feel her body losing heat, little by little, and she was close to passing out.

At that same moment, at exactly one in the morning, a harsh, piercing buzzing filled the whole of Paiyun Lodge, and it woke everyone inside. People sat up and asked one another what was going on. The keeper came running out of the office, his face stricken, shouting:

“There’s trouble! There’s trouble! Count heads, quick, and see if anyone hasn’t made it back to the lodge.”

The group leader did a head count at once. One woman was missing.

They went back up the mountain in the dark and searched for three hours. At last they found her in a stand of Yushan juniper less than a hundred metres below the fork, on the South Peak side. She was hurt all over, crouched beside a juniper bush, shaking and unable to stop, already half dazed. They helped her back to the lodge, and once she had calmed down, she told them, bit by bit, what had happened.

After she was taken home she never climbed a mountain again, and she never again said the word Yushan.

The Man Cutting Grass in a Bamboo Hat

There was a weather observer who had lived on Yushan for nearly thirty years, and he said that he, too, had run into things he could not explain.

In the seventh month of the lunar calendar in 1984, he was heading back up the mountain alone. In the afternoon, banks of cloud came rolling in one after another, and on a path he knew as well as his own back yard, he got lost. As he walked, he saw a man in a bamboo hat cutting grass at the side of the path, and he went over to ask the way.

He went where the man had pointed, but he could not find the fork the man had described anywhere. He turned back to ask again. No more than five minutes had passed, and the man cutting grass was gone. Half an hour later he came across a government vehicle and was able to get out of there.

A month later he went back to the same spot and found the fork straight away, the same fork he had searched for so hard that day and never found.

Who the Lost Hikers Saw

On the trail from Paiyun Lodge to the main peak, many hiking groups have mysteriously lost people at the South Peak fork. The main party would be heading for the main peak, yet one or two hikers would inexplicably turn onto the South Peak path and simply disappear.

Those who were found and brought back all told the same story. When they climbed up to the fork, they saw three men in bamboo hats and yellow Little Flying Hero raincoats, who led them towards South Peak. Somewhere along the way they lost sight of the three, and that was how they got lost.

As for who those three men really are, the mountain has more than one answer.

One story that hikers pass along by word of mouth is that three friends set off together to climb Yushan and were killed in a snowstorm, and the place where they died was the three-way fork at South Peak. Ever since, they have stood at the fork “showing the way” to other hikers. People who follow them come to their senses all of a sudden and find a cliff in front of them.

Others say they are mountain demons, ghosts of the hills and spirits of the high country, much like the mo-sin-a of Taiwanese folklore, who like to play tricks on people who go up into the mountains.

But some people think it is not that simple. Pointing lost hikers the wrong way and leading them all the way to the edge of a cliff is no longer a trick. It is a hunt for a substitute. Among hikers who have walked past that fork, there is a blunter way of putting it: the yellow-raincoat figures are hikers who died on the mountain, come back to take someone in their place.

They Never Reached the Top

There is one more story, and it is about the three young men who booked their beds and never made it to Paiyun Lodge. People on the mountain say that those three never reached the summit of Yushan, and so they do not know the way. Whenever thick fog comes down, or heavy rain, or the weather turns truly foul, they appear on the stretch of trail between the Great Cliff and the Round Peak fork, in their bamboo hats and yellow raincoats, walking ahead of whoever has lost their way.

Anyone who follows them takes them for hikers who know the trail.

Perhaps they are only looking for the path to the summit, the one they never reached that night, and they still have not found it.