In Spring 1993, a Vietnamese farmer was on his way to work his rice paddy when he passed his wife and children in the road. The wife sat on a rock and greeted him "scornfully," as his children cowered behind their mother.

The meeting shocked the farmer, as his wife and his three children were killed when their village was attacked in 1968 and his house was burned to the ground.

Stories like these are common in Vietnam, where rural communities attach deep meaning to spiritual encounters. In this case, the man understood his wife's grave had been disturbed in the village's recent developments.

He immediately set out to give them a proper reburial. But there are many, many more ghost stories throughout Vietnam, relevant to the war fought there. Many of those persist to this day.

Marines in Vietnam would often try to recruit locals to help guide them in their area of operations. In some areas, however, the locals were fearful of going into the densest, darkest parts of the jungle. The reason, they found, was the local superstition that phantoms, called ma, occupied the trees there.

Montagnards warned the U.S. troops that reanimated corpses awaited them in the trees. The Marines, of course, shrugged the stories off as folklore.

Starting in 1965, it became very real. American troops in the jungles of Vietnam began reporting ghostly figures moving supernaturally through the trees. Others reported fanged creatures with black eyes that would try to kidnap and consume unsuspecting troops. In one encounter, the beasts were found to be bulletproof.

It didn't matter what time of day it was, the corpses lived by both day and night. Since the triple canopy jungle kept the sunlight from hitting them, the military's top brass decided to get rid of it.