A Man Grows A Tail 人生尾

This comes from Xu Yijian Zhi 續夷堅志 (Supplement to the Records of Yijian)
A collection of strange stories collected by the writer Yuan Haowen during the Jin dynasty (1115-1234).

清河王博，以裁縫為業，年三十七。一日，詣聊城何道士，言：「丁酉初春，醉臥一桃園中，忽夢一神人，被金甲執戟，至其旁，蹴之使起。王問何為，神曰：『吾為汝送尾來。』自後覺尻骨痛癢，數日，生一尾指許大，如羊退毛尾骨然。欲勒去，痛貫心髓，灸之亦然。因自言不孝於母，使至飢餓，故受此報。每人觀看，則痛癢少止，否則不可耐也。」因問何求療，何無所措手，乃去。今在新店住。
何道士云。

Bo Wang of Qinghe worked as a tailor, and was thirty-seven years old. One day, a Daoist priest named He was leaving for Liaocheng narrated to me, “In early spring of the dingyou year, lying drunk in a peach garden, Wang suddenly saw in his dream an immortal dressed in the gold armour of a palace guard, who came to his side and stood to attention at his service. Wang asked him why, and the immortal said, “I have come to bring you a tail.” After this he began to feel an itching pain in his coccyx, and sprouted a finger-sized tail, bony but covered in soft hair like a sheep’s. He wanted to cut it off – the string of marrow through the middle hurt, and moxibustion treatment made no difference. He himself said the cause was a lack of filial piety towards his mother, and his flesh and skin had paid him back in this way. Everyone went to look at it, and the pain and itching died away, otherwise it would have been unbearable.” Because of all this he called He to cure it, but He was unable to manage it, and so left. Today he lives in Xindian.
Told by He the Daoist.

Yuan Haowen 元好問, ‘Xu Yijian Zhi 續夷堅志 (Supplement to the Records of Yijian)’, ed. by Chang Zhenguo 常振國 in Xu Yijian Zhi / Hu Hai Xinwen Yijian Xu Zhi 續夷堅志 / 湖海新聞夷堅續志 (Selections from Supplement to the Records of Yijian and News of the Lakes and Seas Supplement to Records of Yijian), ed. by Chang Zhenguo 常振國 and Jin Xindian 金心點 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1986), juan 1, p. 20.