At the top of the Beaufort scale, fierce winds sculpt surreal forms in the stone of Ghost City, Erik Nilsson reports in Karamay, Xinjiang.

It's a land where the banshees' shrieks eat the earth. Ancient people believed the hellish sound of the wind gnawing the Gobi landscape in the Ghost City of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region's Karamay carried the screams of the underworld's denizens.

The local ethnic Mongolians call this badland Sulumuhak, and Kazakhs call it Shayitankerxi, both of which mean "where demons appear". This is how its names, sometimes translated as Devil City or Mysterious World, came to be.

These screeches devour rocks. Wind erosion is the primary force that wrinkles Mother Earth's exposed face across this 121-square-kilometer expanse.

The Ghost City's yardangs — ridges and outcrops formed by the wind — are not so much wrought by the sands of time as they are sandblasted for eons. The hurricane-force winds that assault their surfaces can reach Level 12 — the Beaufort scale's fiercest extreme.

This chorus of phantoms' howls strips these stones' skin, leaving only the land's bare skeleton.

The headstones of this geological graveyard arose 130 million years ago, after clouds carried away the last drop of a vast lake. Evaporation left the sedimentary deposits of the parched lakebed exposed to the explosive airstreams that slice through this desert terrain.

The other stone bones that sleep here belong to Jurassic and Cretaceous creatures. Their discovery early last century led to petrochemical development in Karamay, whose name translates from Uygur as Black Oil.

This prehistoric legacy lingers in the Dinosaur Valley.

Replicas of prehistoric beasts, eggs and skeletons animate the land above, while their actual remains slumber below-ground. Videos about these long-lost creatures are projected on the canyon's walls at night, when light shows cast technicolor on all of Ghost City's yardangs.

But at any hour of any era, the most vivid projection on this topography is the human quest for meaning. These formations evoke pareidolia, our predilection to detect familiar shapes in accidental patterns.

The yardangs function like an inkblot test on sandstone, compelling us to project our psychology onto geology. The winds gave them shape. Our minds gave their shapes identity.

This matrix of erosion and cognition has deciphered a roaring lion, a strutting peacock, a soaring eagle, a leaping warhorse, a lazing pig, and a scurrying raccoon. A whole zoo's worth of creatures rendered in rock is displayed in these badlands.

The same imaginations that hear specters in the wind see a pair of sea lions gazing at the moon, a Mongolian general, a dinosaur claw scratching the sky, and the RMS Titanic — some even claim they can hear the ill-fated ship's foghorn blowing in the wind.

Legend has it that the Granary of the World hoards enough cereal to feed the whole planet. The nearby Bell of the Century is said to chime with a timeless and soundless toll that reminds us to cherish and save food.

The way culture shapes perceptions can be seen in the Sphinx, which looks like the Egyptian chimera to outsiders, but ethnic Mongolians liken it to a figure from their folk epic, Jangar. Pandora's Box resembles the chest from which arose all the evils and misery on Earth. But ancient nomads who'd never heard of this Greek myth envisioned it as a dungeon for the yowling devils or as the palace of their malevolent king.

The Ghost Couple presents perhaps the most magical morphology. One angle reveals the crisp silhouette of a man's face. Walk several steps, and his visage dissolves into random rock, until the clear profile of a woman's countenance suddenly emerges on the other side.

This image, along with an unblinking, all-seeing eye, serves as the destination's official symbol. The giant man-made metal eye floats 30 meters in the air, hovering between two towers, its gaze fixed on the peculiar horizon.

Within its purview, a smaller arched gate opens to a sweeping expanse where visitors hunt for golden-silk jade. While this rosy crystal isn't jade in the strict geological sense — it's a blushing quartz rather than nephrite or jadeite — it fits the broader classification within Chinese gemology.

For generations, locals considered these pebbles little more than ordinary gravel. The "jade gold rush" began in the early 2000s, when wealthy collectors from prosperous coastal cities came to covet their luster.

Since then, treasure hunters have continued to arrive with backpacks, combing the desert for these luminous stones that swirl with tangled veins of glittering yellow. A superb specimen can sell for over 10,000 yuan ($1,400).

Yet the most precious rocks remain the looming yardangs, whose haunting geology not only inspired tall tales but also served as a filming site for martial arts movies. Scenes were filmed here for Ang Lee's Oscar-winning 2000 martial arts blockbuster, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Tsui Hark's 2005 film, Seven Swords.

Some scholars believe these outlandish landforms were landmarks for nomads and traders trekking the northern Silk Road's less-trodden Steppe Route.

Yardang translates from Uygur as "steep hill". But they're distinguished less by their gradients than by their idiosyncratic ribbed, fluted, and crinkled texture.

They're striped red by iron, tinged blue by manganese, and dyed beige by sandstone. These muted mineral rainbows stand beneath the pastel streaks that daub clouds at sunset. This paints a horizon of mirrored dualities, tracing the line that delineates Earth and heaven, the terrestrial and celestial, the divine and the devilish.

So, the Ghost City stands as a monumental meeting point of elemental forces and human imagination.

For millions of years, the hissing wind has been its eternal sculptor, carving the land into surreal contours.

For centuries, humanity has been the interpreter, imbuing these forms with demons, beasts and myths. Across time, this built a fantastical and phantasmal realm, where "ghosts" lament loudly and the living silently celebrate meaning, story and beauty.