Candle 020 is a YOKAI special.
Ten of the strangest yokai in Japanese folklore, from a goblin that licks your bathtub clean at night to a human-faced calf whose prophecies have never once been wrong. This is a special episode of Hyakumonogatari, the hundred-candle series of Japanese ghost stories and true horror.
No case file this time. Just the weird ones.
There’s the akaname, who creeps into old bathhouses after dark. The pillow-flipper, and the old belief that made waking up with your pillow moved a very bad sign. A man on a lonely road to Kyoto with an eye where no eye should be. An invisible wall you can only beat from the bottom. A strip of white cotton that flies at dusk and bleeds when you cut it. A ball of fluff that Japanese families kept in wooden boxes, fed face powder and only dared look at once a year.
Then the stories stop being stories. A hair cutter that real people were arrested for. A lump of living flesh that walked into the garden of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1609. Amabie, the sea creature who promised that sharing its picture would protect you from plague, and who came back in 2020 when Japan did exactly that. And the Kudan, born to speak a single prophecy before it dies.
Some of these Japanese monsters will make you laugh. A couple of them won’t.
Light a candle. Turn off the bathroom light. Don’t look at your pillow.
Every episode, and every way to support the show, is at storiesfablesghostlytales.com
Sources
• Toriyama Sekien, Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776)
• Yanagita Kunio, Yōkai Meii (1938)
• Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yōkai (University of California Press, 2015)
• Matthew Meyer, The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (2015)
• Komatsu Sakyō, Kudan no Haha (1968)
• yokai.jp and the Princeton University Library yōkai collection