Late Imperial China article on female suicide

Late Imperial China
Volume 26, Number 1, June 2005, pp. 1-40.
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"Ghosts Seeking Substitutes: Female Suicide and Repetition"
by Rania Huntington

Excerpt:
In late imperial Chinese ghost tales, the victims of certain kinds of untimely
death, including some methods of suicide, become ghosts who seek out mortals to
take their places. If such a ghost can incite another to die by the same means
that she died, then she will be freed from suffering as a ghost and can be
reborn. They and their replacements are often, but are not exclusively, female.
Responsibility for the suicides in which the ghosts are involved varies from
story to story, and may be ambiguous: the ghosts may be portrayed as essential
causes of suicide, or as taking advantage of deaths that would have happened in
any case. The seeking of substitutes may be portrayed as primarily the
independent action of the ghost, or as sanctioned by other sources of
authority. Commonly there is more than one cause for a particular death, with
human despair and ghostly influence compounding one another....

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