Ghosts Around the World: Yūrei, Banshees, La Llorona and More

In Japanese tradition a yūrei, a word built from characters meaning "faint" and "soul", is the spirit of someone who cannot rest. The usual reasons are a violent or sudden death, a powerful unfinished emotion such as love or a need for revenge, or funeral rites that were never properly carried out. The figure most people now picture took shape in the Edo period (1603 to 1868): a woman in a white burial kimono, long black hair hanging loose, hands drooping from the wrists, and no legs or feet at all, her body simply fading out below the waist.

The painting usually credited with fixing that image is The Ghost of Oyuki, an 18th-century ink-on-silk scroll attributed to Maruyama Ōkyo (1733 to 1795), founder of the Maruyama school. A note kept with the scroll says it shows a woman named Oyuki who appeared to the artist in a dream. Ōkyo was not the first to draw a footless ghost, since earlier examples survive, including one in a picture book for a puppet play printed in 1673, but his pale, dissolving figure became the model that later artists followed. Historians also point to the stage: kabuki actors playing ghosts developed a fixed costume of white kimono and wild hair, and theaters used long robes, dim light and smoke to make spirits seem to glide.

Some yūrei are onryō, vengeful ghosts. The most famous is Oiwa, from the kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, first staged in Edo in 1825, in which a betrayed and poisoned wife returns to destroy her husband. Another is Okiku, the servant thrown into a well who is heard at night counting plates, always one short. Summer, the season of the Obon festival honoring ancestors, is still the traditional time for ghost stories in Japan.

In Chinese tradition, and in Chinese communities across East and Southeast Asia, the seventh month of the lunar calendar is Ghost Month, when the gates of the underworld are said to open and the dead wander among the living. Its high point is the festival on the fifteenth night of the month (the fourteenth in parts of southern China), which Taoists call Zhongyuan and Buddhists call Yulan or Ullambana. The hungry ghosts of the festival's popular name are the restless dead: people with no descendants left to make offerings for them, people who died far from home or badly, and souls suffering for their own misdeeds. Buddhist art often shows them with swollen bellies and tiny mouths, always starving and never able to eat their fill.

The response is hospitality more than fear. Families set out food on altars, burn incense and joss paper, the paper money and goods meant for the dead, and in many places stage street operas and concerts, sometimes leaving the front row of seats empty for invisible guests. Lanterns are floated on water to guide the spirits home. Popular cautions vary from place to place, such as avoiding swimming or staying out late at night, and reflect a sense that the month is a risky time to be careless.

The Buddhist story behind Ullambana tells of the monk Maudgalyāyana, known in China as Mulian, who found that his mother had been reborn as a hungry ghost and that food he offered her turned to flame. The Buddha told him to make offerings to the monastic community on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, and the merit of that gift freed her. The tale ties the festival to a duty that runs through the whole tradition: the living owe the dead remembrance.

Banshee is an English spelling of the Irish bean sí, "woman of the sí", the fairy mounds, many of them ancient burial places, that dot the Irish countryside. She is not a ghost in the usual sense, and she does not cause death. She announces it. Her cry, heard at night near the house of someone about to die, is a keen: the same wailing lament that, in real Irish mourning custom, women known as keeners performed over the dead. Tradition attaches her to particular families, usually old Gaelic ones, and some families said their banshee was heard even when a member died far away.

Accounts of what she looks like vary a great deal from region to region. She may be young or old, dressed in white or grey, and is often seen combing long hair; a well-known tale warns against picking up a comb found lying on the ground. Scottish Gaelic tradition has a related figure, the bean nighe, a washer at the ford seen rinsing the clothes of those who are about to die. The folklorist Patricia Lysaght's study The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (1986), built on accounts gathered across Ireland, mapped how the banshee's name, appearance and behavior change from one part of the country to another.

People who look for natural sources of the cry usually point to night animals, especially the shriek of a barn owl and the scream of a vixen, both startling sounds to hear in the dark. But for the families who told of her, the banshee was less a monster than part of the household's history, a sign that the family was old and that its dead were mourned properly.

Across Mexico, Central America, the American Southwest and well beyond, people tell of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, a figure in white heard wailing beside rivers, canals and lakes at night as she searches for her children. In the best-known version a young woman is abandoned by the man she loves, often a richer man who leaves her for someone of his own class. In grief or rage she drowns their children, then realizes what she has done, dies, and is condemned to walk the waterside forever. Details change from town to town and family to family, and generations of parents have used her to keep children away from the water after dark.

Where the story began is not settled. Some scholars connect it to the Florentine Codex, the 16th-century encyclopedia of Nahua life compiled by the friar Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua collaborators, which lists among the omens before the Spanish conquest a woman heard weeping at night for her children. The codex also describes the goddess Cihuacōātl walking at night, weeping and wailing. Others link La Llorona to La Malinche, the Nahua woman who interpreted for Hernán Cortés, or to weeping-woman tales the Spanish brought from Europe. The legend most likely blends several strands.

La Llorona is a living tradition, not a museum piece. A much-recorded Mexican folk song shares her name, and filmmakers keep returning to her: the Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante's 2019 film La Llorona reimagined her as a force of justice in a story about a former dictator tried for genocide against the Maya. She is also distinct from Mexico's Day of the Dead, which is not a ghost story at all but a celebration in which families welcome their dead home as honored guests.

Set side by side, these ghosts have a great deal in common. Most are the spirits of people who died badly: violently, too young, in childbirth, far from home, or without the rites their community owed them. The pontianak of Malay folklore, called the kuntilanak in Indonesia, whose approach is said to be announced by the sweet scent of frangipani, is in many tellings linked to a woman who died in pregnancy or childbirth, though traditions differ. Europe's many white ladies haunt castles, bridges and roads where a woman is said to have died wronged. Folklorists and anthropologists have long read such figures as a community's way of talking about grief, injustice and its duties to the dead.

The traditions also differ in telling ways. A yūrei usually wants something specific, often revenge or resolution. A hungry ghost wants food and remembrance, and is answered with ritual hospitality. A banshee wants nothing at all; she simply announces. La Llorona is a warning wrapped in a tragedy. In each case the ghost carries a lesson about how the living should behave.

This matters for anyone weighing a modern report. When someone describes a ghost today, the details, such as a woman in white, a figure without feet or a cry before a death, tend to follow shapes their culture has already taught them. That does not settle whether anything was there. It is a reason to ask, gently, how much of an account comes from the experience itself and how much from the stories the witness already knew, a question taken up in our article on memory and eyewitnesses.