From 2000-2001 Eric Mortensen lived in Lijiang in the Yunnan Province of China. Mortensen sought the skills of Hezhiben, one of the last people who could read the Naxi language. Studying around the hearth one day, several Naxi men entered and asked Hezhiben to exorcise a ghost from a house in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

The men, profoundly upset, said “she was a completely terrifying spirit.” Mortensen was horrified as Hezhiben turned to him and said: “Ok, you are to go down there and read this book out loud.”

Mortensen walked four days in the rain to a ramshackle house in a treacherous gorge to sit on a floor alone with a ghost, river roaring below, with nothing to defend himself but a book.

The tale seemed implausible amidst the scents of cinnamon and clover hinting at the homemade cider freshly brewed in Mortensen’s cozy house on campus. Books shrouded the walls like academic drapery. A bookshelf covered the fireplace with a sword across its top, ironically below the Buddha statue on his mantle.

Mortensen explained the sword. “It’s a prop from a play.” From his childhood in Winchester, Mass. to Carleton College in Minnesota, theatre was significant. That changed in 1990 when he and his roommate smuggled rifles into Tibet.

After studying abroad in Beijing, China, they rode a bus into Tibet. Before crossing the border, people passed guns through the windows to the nomads on board. One gun was given to Mortensen, and a nomad plopped a hat on his head to feebly disguise him.

Border guards entered and paced the aisle – “so frightening.” Guns tucked under their legs, the guards saw nothing. Once in Tibet, the nomads invited the two boys to join them, warning that they would be arrested if they continued into town. They lived with the nomads for several weeks.

“That is what changed my life.” Mortensen returned to Carelton and studied religion and Tibet. With a BA in philosophy in 1993, Mortensen cast his next step to fate. “I flipped a coin after college to decide if I was going to go to grad school in Tibetan studies or do professional theatre, and it came down tails – so here I am. I literally flipped a coin.”

He then attended Harvard, graduating in 2003 with a dissertation on raven divination.

Mortensen studied Sanskrit for two years at Harvard, but switched departments when he applied for his doctorate. “The Sanskrit department is a department of philology. Philology really just means reading really slowly.” He would spend a two-hour class looking at five sentences. “I realized I would go progressively insane unless I got out of that.”

Mortensen joined the committee on inner Asian and Altaic studies, allowing him to take classes across multiple departments like anthropology, folklore, and comparative religion.

He spent four years of graduate study in Asia. The inspiration to go abroad started in high school when he spent a semester in Malaysia with a PeaceCorp-like group called the American Field Service. “It’s what made going abroad desirous rather than frightening.”

Besides studying raven divination and Naxi pictographs, Mortensen has trekked across Tibet looking for long-forgotten shamanic oracle lakes – and has even found some. He has met the Dalai Lama on several occasions.

However, “I would say that one third of all my time in Asia has been absolutely just (messing) around,” Mortensen said. “You don’t even need any money. All you need is a bit of guts and a small pack.”

But his travels were not always so delightful. In 2000-2001, “I got mugged by a bunch of drunk guys,” Mortensen said. “That was a bad time in my life. I got beat up really badly in Tuva (near Mongolia) and got hospitalized for several weeks.” From there he went to Lijiang and had to exorcise the ghost.

Alone in a house with a ghost, “it took forever.” He exhaustively repeated each frame for accuracy, “and nothing happened.” He immediately began the journey home to Hezhiben, and “it was as if he had forgotten where I had gone,” Mortensen said. “What, are you kidding? I just walked eight days because you told me to go exorcise the ghost of this woman!”

Years later he went back and asked a man if that house had any ghosts. “Oh it did but it doesn’t anymore.”

“Yes! Yes! That was me!” Mortensen did a full-on victory dance while his fianc Dasha, a Chinese and Japanese linguist he met at Harvard, laughed at the delayed happy ending.

This excitement translates into Mortensen’s new role as professor.

“He’s so into what he’s talking about,” said Senior Ivy Leichtman. “When he gets his class into it he gets even more excited, and it’s like watching a little child prance around the room.”

Religion professor John Stoneburner admits a bias against Ivy-leaguers, but was impressed by Mortensen. “He convinced us that he had a genuine desire to be a good, serious teacher.”

He is an unconventional professor. Students will notice one of his four small dragon tattoos beneath the Buddhist rosary tool on his left wrist. “There is no meaning behind them at all, except that I like dragons because they’re cool.”

Eric Mortensen has an intense desire to teach and be taught by his students. In his classes you may learn about Buddhist monks or the house he bought in Tibet, but you will always be fascinated.