Chin Wei considers for a brief moment a blockbuster American ghost movie and scoffs. "I saw 'Ghostbusters,' but that's not how it's done," says the author of several ghost books and the host of various radio and television paranormal programs. "You can't get rid of ghosts that easily, especially with those funny, weird machines. That's just comedy." In Taiwan, ghosts are rarely a laughing matter. On TV, in daily conversation, at temples and in the deepest recesses of the unconscious, they maintain a firm grip on island society. Taiwanese are ghost-crazy — or rather, crazy to avoid them. A recent survey of Taipei college students found that 87% were believers, and some say that could be on the low side. "I'd say the other 13% would probably hedge their bets if you questioned them closer," says Marc Moskowitz, an anthropologist at Lake Forest College in Illinois who has studied Taiwan's spirit beliefs. "Many Taiwanese feel it's best not to anger the ghosts, just in case they do exist." Ghosts have been an integral part of Chinese culture dating to at least the Shang Dynasty, with 3,500-year-old oracle bones from the period depicting a big-headed, bent-kneed phantom.But China has seen much of its otherworldly belief system erode under the Communist Party's assault on religion and superstition.

That has left Taiwan, which split from China in 1949 after civil war, a rich repository of this living tradition, one that draws scholars eager to study Chinese ghost practices in their purest form. "On the mainland, we're more cut off from our culture by socialist education and propaganda, and I don't believe in ghosts," says Wang Shen, 28, a Beijing-based website designer. "That's not necessarily a good thing, though. People here aren't as nice as they were before, when they feared retribution." Up four dirty flights of stairs in a north-central neighborhood of Taipei, past grungy walls with peeling paint and landings with missing lightbulbs, is the Tian Yu Tang spiritual center. It's a rainy weekday, but several people wait in the anteroom for their consultation. An oversized TV blares beside a large Buddhist altar bedecked with five candles, a porcelain tiger and a revolving prayer wheel. Nearby sits a Tweety Bird coffee cup and the Chinese version of Elle magazine.

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