Strange noises that kept haunting a five-story house in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region at midnight had scared away at least four homeowners in the past decade before two brothers recently located the "ghosts" in the cesspit.Out of the stinking sewage, the Chen brothers netted a pair of catfishes, known to the locals as "pond angle fishes", each weighing five to six kilograms, and eight smaller ones about half a kilo each.
The discovery has put an end to a decade-long ghost story in Cenxi, a small city known for its granite, and turned the two brothers from paupers to millionaires.
The "ghost" house, wanted by no one before the Chen brothers bought it for 50,000 yuan (6,410 U.S. dollars) in February, is nowvalued at one million yuan. But the brothers said they would not sell it.
When the brothers, both migrant workers from the countryside of Guangxi, bought the house, it had been devalued from 250,000 yuan in 1996 because its previous owners had been scared away by the strange splashes that seemed to echo from every floor right after midnight.
One of them was so scared that he fell ill for many days, the local South China Morning Post reported.
The Chen brothers spent many nights listening to the splashes, which stopped the moment they started to pace the floor.
They finally located the noise in the sewage conduit of the first floor bathroom, which linked to the cesspit at the back of the building. The mystery was unraveled when they removed the lid of the cesspit and saw the dark catfishes.
The brothers then talked to the previous house owners to investigate where the fishes had come. One of them, Chen Dongcheng, remembered buying a dozen of the fish back in 1995. "When I brought them to the kitchen, I found there were only 10 left."
The two that went missing must have found their way down the flush toilet and into the cesspit, he said.
The house became "haunted" after that, forcing Chen Dongcheng to move out and sell the house at a very low price.
Experts say catfishes, a species of siluroid, can survive even in seriously contaminated water because its gill and skin both perform the respiratory function.
Catfishes Haunt Home
Catfishes Haunt Home
