Taoist Perspective: Ghosts, Danger, and the Illusion of Help

Are Ghosts Always Evil?

This is a true story from someone named Alean.

When she was a child, she used to sleep with her father while her mother — a schoolteacher — stayed up late grading homework in a separate room.

One night, Alean was feeling feverish but didn’t want to wake her father.
She tried to sleep.

Half-asleep, she suddenly saw a woman standing at the foot of the bed.
The woman didn’t speak.
She just pointed — toward her mother’s room.

Alean rubbed her eyes. The woman was still there.
She nodded once, still pointing.

Alean struggled to move. Her body was heavy.
Somehow, she crawled out of bed and stumbled to her mother’s door, collapsing after knocking into it with her head.

She woke up the next day in the hospital.

Her mother told her:

“You had a dangerously high fever.
If you hadn’t come to my door, you might not have survived.”

The strange part?

Doctors said she should have been unconscious.
But she made it all the way across the house.

Her mother also said she hadn’t gone to sleep yet that night — because she kept hearing dripping water in the bathroom.

If she had fallen asleep earlier…
She might not have heard Alean at all.

Alean never saw that woman again.

But she has always believed:

“That ghost saved my life.”

She once asked me if I believed in good ghosts.

I told her the truth:

“I don’t know.”

In Taoism, we believe that people and spirits belong to different dimensions — yang and yin, light and shadow.

It’s best that the two don’t mix.

Even if a ghost seems kind, once something goes wrong…

It’s not something we can undo.

—Wuyu