"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

#Spooktober 2: Jikininki

The Jikininki is a human-eating Japanese ghost who features in Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of spooky stuff called Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

For those of you who follow the blog, I have written about him here and particularly I talked about three of his tales:
  • Oshidori, a tragic tale of love and loss featuring two ducks;
  • The Story of Hōichi the Earless, a spooky tale of a musician who’s enchanted into performing for a ghostly court (I will feature it here as a #ThrowbackThursday next week);
  • The Yuki-Onna as a winter tale: a snow ghost interacts with two woodcutters, with jarring consequences.

Today on my Patreon we feature one of two tales of the Jikininki, a corpse-eating ghost.

Happy #Spooktober!

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S.S. Van Dine’s The Scarab Murder

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