Yokai of Chūgoku

The beast that rides the lightning down — in some tellings tearing apart the tree it lands in.

A short, thick snake shaped like a wooden mallet. Japanese towns have offered reward money for one since 1989.

A small wooden box from a 2005 forum story, said to be a curse. Researchers find no such tradition in Shimane.

A possessing spirit neighbours blame when a household grows rich fast — and fear once that household's luck turns.

Someone beats a mat somewhere nearby, over and over. Nobody is there, and there is no mat.

A kappa covered in hair like a monkey, which pulls swimmers under and takes the liver.

Seven dead who travel together, mostly by the sea and rivers. They take one living person, and the one they take joins them.

A small snake kept in a jar by a household, which brings wealth and cannot be got rid of.

A fox that takes the shape of a beautiful woman and goes after men who are already spoken for.

A weasel-shaped thing that goes for cattle and horses, listed among the beasts in an Edo encyclopedia.

A human shape standing on a road. It grows taller each time you look up at it, and shrinks when you look down.

Two fires that rise side by side off the Mitsugi coast on summer and autumn nights.

The rival demon king of the same wager, who is named in the story but barely appears in it.

A demon king who spent thirty nights trying to frighten one sixteen-year-old, and lost the wager.

A tanuki enshrined as a guardian of cattle and horses—worshipped, not hunted.

The red-bearded giant of Kibi whose defeat by Kibitsuhiko is often called the root of Momotaro.

A demon chief who held Mount Yuga above the Inland Sea until the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro brought him down.

Something else moves into a body already dead, and the corpse sits up.

A fox that served Tottori castle as a courier, and ran the road faster than any man.

The sea beast the hare of Inaba tricked—read as crocodile by some scholars and as shark by others.

Not a fox that haunts a house but one a household is said to keep, passed down the family line.

A great serpent on the sea floor that demanded a girl every year.

A woman whose body or neck runs out to seven fathoms—about 12.6 metres—before she looks down at you.

A sea woman who comes ashore for the night's catch, close kin to the iso-onna of the western coasts.

A one-eyed yokai that appears without warning before someone walking alone on a night road, attacks them and eats them.

A one-eyed man-eater from the Izumo gazetteer, often called the oldest oni in any surviving Japanese text.

A toad about 2.4 meters long in the Suō hills that does not chase its prey — it simply breathes it in.

Something small and dog-shaped that winds between your shins as you walk a wet Okayama road at night.

An eight-headed serpent that took a daughter a year from one family until a god got it drunk on eight vats of sake.

A whale of bare bones surfacing off Shimane in the rain, followed by fish and birds nobody can put a name to.

The cauldron at Kibitsu Shrine whose hum answers yes or no—and whose silence is the worst answer.

A horse's head that dangles from an old hackberry tree, neighing to frighten passersby.

A human-faced calf that is born, speaks a true prophecy of coming disaster, then dies.

A savage ox-headed monster that haunts coasts and preys on humans.

A serpent-bodied woman by the water who lures victims to their doom.

A gourd-headed old yokai who slips into homes and acts like the master.