Ghosts of Terror
St Margaret’s Co-Educational English Secondary And Primary School: Secondary Section
Secondary, Tommy Lau, Fiction: Group 3
I
n 13th century Central Asia, there lived a great tribe called the Ulhans. They lived in
southern Mongolia and were said to be descendants of Gothic people, the very race that
overran the mighty Roman Empire.
The Ulhans were said to have raided trade routes along the Silk Road in their territory
in the Gobi desert, and wreaked havoc among merchants. They would rob the merchants of their
valuables and food, and then they would leave none alive.
The Ulhans waged wars with other tribes across Mongolia. After annihilating tribes in
Mongolia, the Ulhans grew stronger and became one of the dominant Eastern tribes.
However, prolonged wars had the Ulhans slowly deteriorate, as the tribesmen died one by one
fighting with other tribes. With a lack of manpower, the Ulhans had to hire mercenaries to fight
for them. This caused a major deficit in the tribe’s wealth. Since merchants now hired personal
armed convoys when trading through Ulhan territory, the main supply of the Ulhans’ wealth is no
longer available.
A civil war which broke out in 1335 AD was a result to a feud between the chieftain and his
council, the elder advisors which ended with a three-year bloodshed which severely divided the
tribe into the pro-chieftain party and the pro-elders party. These two parties often attempt to
eradicate each other, and political unrest against one party incited by an opposition party was
almost daily. Assassinations of advisors and officers happened every now and then. All these
events slowly tore the tribe apart piece by piece.
Finally, fate decided to wipe out the Ulhans, the expanding empire of the great Genghis Khan
was determined to unify the whole of Mongolia, and declared war on the Ulhans. The much-
divided and weak tribe was no match for the fledging Mongolian empire. After some hegemonic
wars lost, The lands of the Ulhans were sacked and razed, and their people enslaved.
Even though they fought to the last man, the Ulhans never recovered, their nobles and
generals were either slain in battle or assassinated in political struggles, and their chieftain had
fallen valiantly in battle.
However, some say that the ghosts of the fallen Ulhans still haunt their former domain and kill
whoever dares to trespass into their former lands. However, there are a few who manage to escape
from the yoke of the ghosts of the Ulhans. But they all were already driven insane by the ghosts.
In the mid 1930s, David Christopher, a British archaeologist, led an expedition to the Gobi
desert to investigate the legend of the Ulhans and their ghosts. However, his expedition team
ran out of supplies in the middle of the expedition, and was stuck in an ancient monument
which vaguely resembled a tomb of the Ulhans. All of David’s expedition team went missing for
3 months before being found in Sakhalin, a British colony ceded from Russia, all of them were
found to be mentally impaled, and their memories were all wiped out. They only spoke a sentence,
“Ulhans…..kill…..everyone…!”.
The mystery continued for half a century, as the world had no idea what caused this. Their
best guess was that the team ran out of supplies and went insane due to starvation. They had no
idea that the expedition team encountered ghosts of Ulhans and were spooked and driven insane.
Then, in 1973, Daniel Christopher, David’s son and another archaeologist, led a two-man
