For instance, one man who was too fond of the bottle placed some liquor alongside his bed, to be drunk during the night.

On stretching out his hand to reach the flask, he was seized by a demon, and dragged gradually into the earth.

In response to his shrieks, his relatives and neighbours only arrived in time to see the ground close over his head, just as though he had fallen into water.
From this story it will be rightly gathered that the Chinese mostly sleep on the ground floor.

In Peking, houses of more than one storey are absolutely barred; the reason being that each house is built round a courtyard, which usually has trees in it, and in which the ladies of the establishment delight to sit and sew, and take the air and all the exercise they can manage to get.
Another blood-curdling story is that of four travellers who arrived by night at an inn, but could obtain no other accommodation than a room in which was lying the corpse of the landlord's daughter-in-law.

Three of the four were soon snoring; the fourth, however, remained awake, and very soon heard a creaking of the trestles on which was the dead body dressed out in paper robes, ready for burial.