This story was told to me by an older woman called Auntie Zhang.
In the mid-1990s, in an unremarkable northern Chinese town, there stood an old state-owned factory. The compound was built against a low hill. Behind it were barren slopes and a strip of windbreak trees. Locals sometimes whispered that weasels lived in those woods, that they liked to perch on the factory walls at night and watch people pass by. No one ever wrote such things into official records.
The woman at the center of this story—everyone called her Sister Wang—worked in the quality inspection workshop.
She wasn't especially noticeable. She was simply there. Warm-hearted, talkative, always carrying her enamel lunch bowl while chatting with coworkers on the way to the canteen. That was how she had always been—until one summer, when something about her quietly began to change.
The first person to notice was Auntie Zhang, who worked in the same workshop.
One morning, as usual, Auntie Zhang greeted Sister Wang. There was no response. Sister Wang walked straight past her, eyes unfocused, as if she hadn't seen anyone at all.
A few days later, Sister Wang began talking to herself. Her voice was low. No one could make out the words. When someone finally asked if she was feeling unwell, she answered flatly, with an unfamiliar sharpness:
"Mind your own business."
Soon after that, she stopped coming to work altogether.
Rumors spread quickly through the factory.
Some said her husband was having an affair and she'd cracked under the strain.
Others said she'd developed a mental illness.
A few lowered their voices and said something from the hill behind the factory had followed her home.
A little over twenty days later, the factory received news: Sister Wang was dead.
Coworkers went to pay their respects. Her body lay in the living room of her home, her face covered with a white cloth. What stood out was the scarf around her neck—a bright, garish floral scarf. It wasn't how people were usually dressed for death.
No one asked questions.
For a while, the matter seemed finished.
Then, about two months later, Sister Wang's husband appeared at the factory.
What happened next was later recounted by the office director, after a few drinks.
That day, the husband stormed into the management office, crying, insisting that his wife's death had not been an accident.
"There's something unclean in your factory," he said. "That's what killed her."
Behind closed doors, he told them something he had never said publicly before.
Two weeks before the accident, Sister Wang began screaming every morning while looking into the mirror.
"My head is gone!"
At first, she would just stare at her reflection, frozen. Then she would suddenly stumble backward, as if confronted with a blank space where something should have been. She tried another mirror. Then another.
Each time, the same verdict.
"There's no head in the mirror."
Terrified, the family covered every mirror in the house with blankets. But she continued to cry, repeating only one thing:
"My head is gone."
On the afternoon of the accident, she rode her electric bike to the market.
Nearby, a construction site had stretched two thin steel rods across the road as temporary measuring lines. Their height aligned perfectly with a person's neck.
She didn't slow down.
When the steel rods cut across her throat, there was no sound.
Her head hit the ground and rolled a long distance.
The mortician tried for hours, but the damage couldn't be concealed. In the end, her husband tied that floral scarf around her neck.
When he finished telling the story, the office fell completely silent.
Later, people argued quietly among themselves.
Some said she had seen a warning of her death.
Others said she had been mentally unwell, and coincidence had done the rest.
A few wondered whether what she saw in the mirror wasn't a premonition at all—but something that had already happened, ahead of time.
The office director, who was known for having a loud mouth, eventually told the whole factory everything.
After that, no one mentioned the weasels from the hill again.
But some people became careful around mirrors, especially in the early morning.
They say mirrors don't create things that aren't there.
They only reveal what you are already destined to lose.