Elders always say you should hold the mountain spirits in awe—whether hiking or just passing through, never speak carelessly. After all, there are many legends about “mountain ghosts” in the wild. For example, Taiwan’s famously eerie red-clothed girl is said to be one of these mountain spirits. Similarly, on Mount Bilu in Taroko, there was once such a strange tale, and photos were even taken back then.
On October 21, 1990, a bizarre disappearance occurred on Mount Bilu in Taroko. That year, a 30-year-old bank deputy manager named Li Shou, along with friends, attempted to summit Mount Bilu. However, he went missing on the way down. The descent route was the only path available, and his companions couldn’t understand how Li Shou could have disappeared. Days passed with no sign of him, and searches launched after filing a police report yielded no results.
It wasn’t until February of the following year that four university students discovered a body on a cliff upstream of the Hualu River. At the scene was a hat embroidered with the title “Deputy Manager of a Certain Bank.” Rescue personnel brought the body down the mountain, and after family identification, it was confirmed to be the missing Li Shou. Police believed he had gotten lost, wandered into the valley, and eventually starved to death. Later, when the companions developed the photos taken that day, they noticed an extra woman in one of the shots taken by Li Shou in the mountains—but at the time, “they were the only ones” on the hike, and it was impossible that a woman had been hiking alone. They found the entire disappearance case deeply strange.
Li Shou’s older brother mentioned that after his brother went missing, he once dreamed of a woman who claimed to be his mother, asking for permission for her daughter to marry Li Shou. He subsequently visited a temple to have the dream interpreted. The monk, after hearing the story, thought it was an ominous sign, suggesting that something unfortunate might have happened to Li Shou. Putting the two incidents together, people suspected it might have been a supernatural matchmaking event from the underworld, which horrified both the family and police.