Category: Folklore

Tales of the Kyoto Ghost Story Priest

Tales of the Kyoto Ghost Story Priest
by Daiun Miki, Adapted by Tatsuya Morino
Originally published 2021
English translation published 2025 (translator not credited)

It’s been a while since my last post! Apologies for that, there’s been a lot going on. But I’ve still been making time for reading and puzzles and watching classic television and film. Today, I think I’ve got a goodie for you.

Tales of the Kyoto Ghost Story Priest is a manga, illustrating some allegedly true ghost stories from the real-life “Ghost Monk” (Kaidan Osho), Daiun Miki. Miki is the Chief Monk of the Renkyu-ji Temple in Kyoto, and is known for his use of “scary stories” to teach Buddhist precepts. Sorta like the Jatakas, or (for Christianity) the parables of Jesus, only spookier.

The manga includes eleven stories, all of which are either tales that Miki heard from people who consulted him, or were his personal experiences. As you might expect, they have a told-round-the-campfire, urban legendary feel: sometimes gruesome, sometimes sentimental, sometimes both. And yet, they are distinct from the types of urban legends that I typically hear.

Though Miki tells these stories in order to teach about Buddhism, you needn’t worry about being preached to. In fact, not all the stories have a moral or a lesson explicitly attached to them. When they do, they generally treat the theme of karma (no surprise), or illustrate the persistence of consciousness/soul after death.

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Some Legends of Pelorus Jack

Recently (while working on my Occult Detectives of Victor Rousseau project), I came upon the interesting story of the dolphin named Pelorus Jack.

Pelorus Jack, the dolphin
Pelorus Jack, photo by A. Pitt, (circa 1909). Source: Wikipedia

Pelorus Jack was a Risso’s dolphin who became famous in New Zealand (and around the world) for his habit of meeting and escorting ships around Admiralty Bay. For twenty-four years, beginning in 1888, he guided ships in the bay to the narrow and dangerous channel known as French Pass. He was so well-known and beloved that New Zealand passed a special law to protect him from whalers and other attackers. He was last seen in 1912.

While researching more about this interesting animal, I came upon a series of legends that were told by a Maori kaumātua (tribal elder) named Kipa Hemi Whiro, who believed that Pelorus Jack was Kaikai-a-waro, the guardian spirit-deity of his people. The legends tell of how Kaikai-a-waro guided Hemi Whiro’s people from New Zealand’s North Island, to their current home on the South Island, near Pelorus Sound. Once there, the dolphin-god protected his people, and two of the legends tell of Kaikai-a-waro saving the lives of tribal leaders.

These stories, as told by Kipa Hemi Whiro, appeared in Mid-Pacific Magazine, June 1913. I’ve shared them over at Ephemera.

You can read Legends of Pelorus Jack here.

Do enjoy! And yes, Pelorus Jack will feature (quite briefly) in a future Victor Rousseau occult detective story.

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Tales of an Antiquary, Volume Three

Over at Dark Tales Sleuth, I’ve collected three stories from Volume Three of Richard Thomson’s Tales of an Antiquary for you to enjoy!

Illustration of Cock Lane, London, showing the building where the Cock Lane ghost allegedly haunted.
Illustration of Cock Lane by Charles Mackay (1852). The building on the right is where the Cock Land Ghost allegedly haunted. Source: Wikimedia.

Volume Three covers the period from 1716-1769. The conceit in this volume is that the narrator of Tales, Sylvanus Beauclerk, has discovered the notes and memoirs of an astrologer of the period, named Ptolemy Horoscope. The tales told in Volume Three come from Horoscope’s notes, and Horoscope himself is a character in two of the stories I’m sharing today.

These are the best stories from the entire collection, in my opinion. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

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Mr. Cadaverous and the Devil of Danbury

Mr. Cadaverous has left me legacy. The good man is dead, but he has left me his note-books. This morning I opened one of them, and found it full of ghost stories. There was a note, written in Greek and Latin, on the last page, which, being interpreted, says: “Of all that comes before this page I believe not one single word.” I was angered as I read, for why should any man collect a mass of narratives which he looks upon not as mere fiction but as mere lies? This arid scepticism makes me hate my generation.

— Augustus Jessopp, “The Dying Out of the Marvelous“

The rest of Rev. Jessopp’s rant is enjoyable, but I do think he exaggerates a bit. For one thing, it’s my opinion that Mr. Cadaverous protesteth too much: why write down all these ancient ghost stories if you don’t enjoy them? And to enjoy them, you have to suspend your disbelief, at least for the duration of the telling, or in this case, the writing. Loudly proclaming your scepticism after the fact doesn’t fool anyone.

St John the Baptist, Danbury, June 2021 01.
St. John the Baptist Church, Danbury. Photo by Tony Grist, on Wikimedia

For another thing, I doubt that Rev. Jessopp believed them either. I think he just wished, at least sometimes, they could be true. In other words, he enjoyed them.

Most of “The Dying out of the Marvellous” is a sampler of tales from Mr. Cadaverous’s notebook. But at the end, Jessopp teases us with stories he won’t tell us:

You must not expect that I should tell you all my chronicler’s stories. No! I must leave out the story of the devil of Danbury…

…and the hobgoblins of Biggleswade, and the dragon of Sudbury. Foo!! You know I have try to hunt down at least some of these. The Devil of Danbury first.

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Reading Strangers

Strangers
by Taichi Yamada, translated by Wayne P. Lammers
Originally published 1987, English translation published 2003
Image Source: Open Library

Hideo Harada is a recently divorced, 47 year old screenwriter. He lives in his office/apartment above a noisy, busy Tokyo thoroughfare. He’s estranged from his college-aged son, and he’s just learned that his colleague Mamiya is about to start dating his ex-wife. The whole situation has him feeling lonely, alienated, and depressed.

On an impulse, he visits Asakusa, where he lived as a child. While there he encounters a young couple who look eerily like his parents—or to be precise, exactly how his parents looked when they died, thirty-five years ago. And even though they’re now apparently much younger than him, they treat him with the love and affection that parents have towards their child. It’s exactly the emotional comfort he needs in this moment.

So he begins to visit them regularly. But soon his colleagues, including Mamiya, and his new lover Kei, who lives in his apartment building, become concerned. Because—though he doesn’t see it himself—Harada is wasting away. Are his “parents” really his parents? Or are they soul-vampires, sucking his vitality away? Or both?

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Hunting for Haunted Stumps

While trawling the HathiTrust archive the other day, I stumbled on a delighful, privately-published little booklet called The Haunted Stump; or The Story of The Amputated Hand, by Erasmus Foster Darby. The book gives two versions of an Ohio ghost story about phantom hands that clutch out at the people who pass a spooky old tree stump. Good, campfire tale stuff!

An old stump in epping forest.jpg!Portrait.

Both versions of the tale are local to Pike County, Ohio; but as Darby says in the book’s foreword:

The story of the haunted stump is an old and threadworn story insofar as the basic theme is concerned. Its counterpart can be found in the folk literature of nearly every country in the world.

Can it, though? I wondered. I believe that, but I’d never heard any other versions. So I went on a little hunting expedition.

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Ghosts of UC Berkeley Engineering

While reading the paper “California Ghosts” (1942) for my Vanishing Hitchhiker post, I noticed that author Rosalie Hankey included some legends about a couple of engineering buildings on the UC Berkeley campus. My alma mater! I was an Electrical Engineering undergraduate, so I spent most of my time on the north side of campus, where Engineering, Math, and Statistics are all located.

I never heard the stories that Hankey collected when I was at Cal. With one exception, I don’t recall any ghost stories at all; but I wasn’t particularly interested in such things at the time. But now I am, so I thought I’d share them, along with a little campus history. Read on….

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Revisiting the Vanishing Hitchhiker

The Vanishing Hitchhiker is an enormously popular urban legend, and likely one that’s been heard, in some form or another, by almost everyone across the world. In some recent reading, I came across a few variations I hadn’t heard before, and got inspired to revisit this classic modern ghost story.

Silhouette of Woman in Smoke, facing Right
Photo by Татьяна Доломан

Some of the earliest, and still most comprehensive, studies of The Vanishing Hitchhiker were published in the early 1940s by anthropologists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey in California Folklore Quarterly. For this post, I decided to share some fun versions of the tale (many from Beardsley and Hankey), categorized roughly according to their classification. This isn’t meant to be scientific or comprehensive by any means—it’s just a little collection to inspire you, if you ever want some “scary”stories to tell over a campfire.

I’ll mark the stories with their sources; you’ll find the bibliography at the end of the post. Rather than directly quoting all the tales, I’ll retell them in my own way, because that’s part of the fun, after all!

Enjoy.

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The Origin of Stories: A Seneca Tale

Second in a series of myths about myths, inspired by Rosalind Kerven’s article “The Mythical Origins of Myths” in FLS News, the newsletter of the Folklore Society, Issue 102, February 2024.

The Origin of Stories
(O-non-dowa-gah (Seneca) people, Great Lakes region, North America)

Fringed pouch and knife sheath. Buckskin embroidered with porcupine quills.

Once there was an orphan named Gaqka (Crow) who had no family to take care of him. He made his home in a tree and hunted birds and squirrels to feed himself. Because he was dirty and ragged, the people of the village called him Filth-Covered-One (Ciá’dōdǎ)1. They would jeer and hold their nose whenever they walked past him. This made Gaqka so unhappy, he resolved to go away.

After a long journey south, Gaqka came to a river. On the other side, he saw a cliff with a face like a man. He decided to make his home on the top of that cliff, so he climbed to the top, and built a bark cabin there to live in.

One evening, Gaqka sat himself down on a stone near the edge of the cliff, to prepare his arrows for the next day’s hunting. Suddenly, he heard a voice.

“Shall I tell you stories?”

Looking around, Gaqka saw no one. He shrugged his shoulders and went back to what he had been doing.

“Do you want to hear stories?”

This time, the voice seemed to come from the stone he was sitting on, or maybe from beyond the edge of the cliff.

“Who are you? And what are stories?” Gaqka asked into the air.

“Stories tell what happened long ago. If you give me some tobacco, I will tell you stories.”

So Gaqka threw a bit of tobacco over the cliff, and the voice began.

“Once, in the world before this….”

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How Anansi Bought the World’s Stories

First in a series of myths about myths, inspired by Rosalind Kerven’s article “The Mythical Origins of Myths” in FLS News, the newsletter of the Folklore Society, Issue 102, February 2024.

How Anansi Bought the World’s Stories
(Asante people, Ghana, West Africa)

We do not really mean, we do not really mean, (that what we are going to say is true).

In the beginning, all the world’s stories belonged to Nyame, the Sky god. But Kawaku Anansi, the Spider, wanted to buy them. So he went to the Sky god and asked, “Will you sell me the world’s stories?”

Anansi, the Spider Trickster
Anansi the Spider Trickster, Illustration by Pamela Colman Smith (1899). Source: Wikipedia

The Sky god said, “Many have tried to buy my stories, but they couldn’t pay the price. Can you pay the price?”

“What is the price?” Anansi asked.

The Sky god answered, “The price is: Onini the Python, Mmoboro the Hornets, Osebo the Leopard, and Mmoatia the Fairy. If you can bring me these things, I will sell you the world’s stories.”

Anansi said, “I’ll see what I can do.” And he went home, and consulted his wife, Aso.

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