SAF Stories The Chinese Dish Spirit ( 纸碟仙)

By the SAF Regular

I was in the army 30 years ago and being an Officer, I stayed in the army camp with a room of my own. As the camp was pretty far from the city, the evenings can be quite boring with nothing to do but watch TV or do some readings. My camp did not have many recreational facilities for the soldiers.

One evening, being bored, I decided to take a look into my platoon’s sleeping bunk to find out what my men were doing. As I stepped into their large bunk where 30 men or more shared the place, I saw a group of them were surrounding a table. There were three seated and looked like playing ‘a game’. Being curious, I walked towards the table to find out what was the fun.



One of my men who was standing next to the table told me that the three of them were communicating with a spirit via a dish. As this was my first encounter with such a ‘ridiculous’ claim, I naturally disbelieved it. What I saw was the three of them had to place one of their fingers onto a small dish that was overturned. The dish has a small black arrow on it. The dish was placed onto a large sheet of paper that was printed with many small Chinese characters. The dish was placed onto the center of the paper and one of them has to invite a spirit to enter into their realm. Questions can then be asked and the dish will start gliding until it stops. The character where the arrow points to is the answer.



What I thought was the three of them must be ‘pushing’ the dish or else how could the dish be moving along on the sheet of paper? When I showed my disbelief to the men, they invited me to experience it for myself. I was eager to prove them wrong and so I sat down and the ‘test’ began. In order to ensure that no one in the ‘game’ knew the answer, I decided to ask the spirit what was my surname in Chinese character. The dish started to move. As my finger was on the dish, I could sense that no one was pushing it. It just glided with a feel of floating as it moved. I began to feel uneasy with this sense of dish movement.