“Hell Money” is episode nineteen of season three of The X-Files.
The episode opens in Chinatown in San Francisco. A worried-looking man is pushing through crowds at night and he reacts badly to firecrackers. He ascends some stairs to find a door with some characters written on it in fresh paint. He enters and another man shines a torch in the first’s face. He slashes the man holding the torch with a knife, then sees three people wearing masks.
At the Bayside Funeral Home, a security guard is playing on a device when he hears a noise. He goes looking and sees light coming from under a door. Inside the room are the three masked people, who quickly vanish. The furnace is on and there’s a noise coming from inside it. The guard looks through a peephole in the door and sees a man in flames inside.
Mulder and Scully are with the body and a Detective Neary. Scully asks Neary if he’s seen anything like this before; yes, it’s the third this year. Eleventh, according to Mulder; there have been victims in other places, all Chinese men aged 20-40 and recent immigrants. The detective says they haven’t been able to determine that until recently; the other bodies were too badly burned. They were lucky this time. Well, the victim wasn’t. Scully notices he has a glass eye. The city has had many recent immigrants from Hong Kong, leaving before the handover in 1997.
Inside the furnace, Mulder notices a symbol painted on the ceiling. He asks if they have anyone who can read Chinese. Yes; Detective Glen Chao. He says it means ‘Ghost.’ Mulder thinks that’s a strange thing for a man being burned alive to write. There’s also a fragment of a banknote; Chao says it’s ‘hell money,’ an offering used in the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. It’s not money but a symbolic offering. Not many places in Chinatown sell it.
The dead man was a Johnny Lo from Canton. Scully, as they climb the stairs to his place, things it was some sort of horrific gang killing. Mulder asks about the three figures who vanished without a trace. According to Chao, none of the neighbours saw or heard a thing. Naturally. Chao doesn’t recognise the symbols on the door; it may be idiomatic or code. The place has been cleaned out and Mulder asks what the smell is. New carpet. Which is odd. Scully finds something that Chao identifies as herbal medicine and a dried frog, apparently sometimes used in charms for good health and prosperity. Mulder has pulled back the carpet and discovered blood underneath.
A man wearing a Bay Area Carpeters uniform arrives home and prepares food and drink for a young woman, his daughter, who looks very sick. She wants him to stay but he says he has to head out and make money to pay for doctors. Where he heads is a place with many Chinese men and two jars are brought out, one big, one small, along with a case of money. Each man puts a counter in the large jar and one is drawn out. It belongs to a man who has problems with an eye. A counter is put into the small jar, and the one-eyed man draws a counter out. Not a good one it looks like, and not the one that was put in.
Chao takes Mulder and Scully to a Chinese medicine shop and the assistant identifies the medicines they found as painkillers. She remembers Johnny Lo but didn’t know he was dead. She recognises the characters painted on his door; they marked the house as haunted. Chao explains more about the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. As he is doing so, the one-eyed man is drinking a liquid and sees some ghosts in front of him, one of which extracts his heart. Then a ghost turns into a surgeon.
At the Highland Park Cemetery, a man in a pickup pulls up and sees the three masked people. They disappear before he can turn around. Mulder, Scully and Chao are there with the police later; the masked men were by a freshly-dug grave. Which Mulder jumps into, and finds a body under the soil at the bottom.
At the coroner’s office, Scully has found multiple surgical incisions on the corpse of the one-eyed man, all within the last year. But there was nothing wrong with him. She asks Mulder how much he thinks the human body is worth. A few bucks? No; a fortune. The man may have been selling bits of his body he could live without, then literally left his heart in San Francisco. She mentions Johnny Lo’s glass eye. Scully removes the stiches holding the chest cavity shut and a frog climbs out.
Mulder and Scully are concerned that Chao is not being as helpful as he could be. And he launches a tirade in return about how the Chinese community sees the badge, not the Chinese man. The man with the sick daughter returns to the place again, which appears to be where men are gambling body parts in the hopes of winning a large amount of money.
Overall, this seems an episode with no real influence from the supernatural, merely greed and black-market organ selling. Except, that is, for the three masked men, who have a curious ability to disappear without a trace.