Beautiful Yokai

Yuki-onna is an apparition that takes the form of a woman on snowy nights, mountain roads in blizzards, and villages buried in white. The familiar image is of a young beauty in white who freezes people with her cold breath, but that is not the whole of Yuki-onna. In Tateshina, Nagano Prefecture, she is told of as a “spirit woman of the snow” who harms no one and carries felled trees across ravines by night to make bridges. A record from Niigata describes a woman who leaves blood-speckled footprints in the midnight snow and kills those she meets. In Akita she is a woman with a smooth, featureless face; in Shōwa Village, Gunma Prefecture, a threat mothers recited on snowy nights to children who cried or would not sleep; and in Wakasa Town, Tottori Prefecture, a white woman who arrives riding a heavy snowfall. Under the same name stand a harmless snow spirit, a deadly encounter, a child-minding phrase, and even a figure glimpsed only for an instant. The name’s history begins in haikai poetry before it appears in ghost-story collections. An early printed example with a confirmed publication date is a verse in the 1642 anthology *Takatsukuba*, compiled by Yamamoto Saibu; “Yuki-onna” was then repeatedly used in works such as *Kebukigusa*, *Yama no I*, *Konzan-shū*, and *Masuyama-i*. The word first invited the wit of imagining the whiteness and form of snowy scenery as a woman, then gradually acquired clearer contours as the name of a supernatural being. Volume five of *Sōgi Shokoku Monogatari*, published in 1685, describes a young white woman about one jō—roughly three meters—tall, standing beside bamboo in Echigo. Her face, hair, skin, and even her unlined white robe are translucently white; a companion explains that she is a snow spirit taking human form. Although the title bears the name of Sōgi, this is not the travel journal of a fifteenth-century renga poet. It is a kana-zōshi of 1685 that borrows Sōgi’s persona as a traveler to tell tales of curiosities from around the country. Sawaki Sūshi’s *Hyakkai Zukan* (1737) and Toriyama Sekien’s *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō* (1776) place Yuki-onna in an image as a named yōkai in her own right. Sekien’s page gives only the name “Yuki-onna”; it does not say that she freezes people with her breath, seduces men, or fears fire. Yōkai pictures made a form easier to share, but did not supply every later story at once. The best-known story today is “Yuki-Onna,” which Lafcadio Hearn included in *Kwaidan* in 1904. In a ferry hut during a blizzard, Yuki-onna freezes the old woodcutter Mosaku to death with her white breath, then spares the young Minokichi and orders him to keep the night secret. The following winter she appears as Oyuki, a traveling woman, becomes his wife, and raises ten children. When her husband tells the forbidden memory, she reveals herself; for the children’s sake she does not take his life, but leaves as white mist. This marriage, secrecy, maternal attachment, broken promise, and separation made Hearn’s Oyuki especially memorable, but they are not traits shared by every local Yuki-onna. The appeal of the name Yuki-onna is that it does not close around a single setting. Snow erases roads, absorbs sound, and transforms distance and shape. In different places and periods, people who looked at snow found a young woman, a mother, a giant face, or a wavering shadow within it. Yuki-onna is the whole accumulation of those images.

Tamamo-no-Mae is a beauty of unrivaled grace who, in the late Heian period, is said to have served the retired Emperor Toba. Her true form is held to be a nine-tailed fox, yet as a human, Tamamo-no-Mae has above all been remembered as a court lady of rare beauty and deep learning. Poetry and music were a given, but from Buddhist scripture to the old tales of India and China, she answered any question without hesitation, astonishing all at court. The name “Tamamo-no-Mae” carries a story of its own. One night, amid a banquet of poetry and music at the Seiryōden, a gust of wind snuffed out the lamps; in the darkness a dazzling light streamed from her body and lit the hall as bright as day. From this she came to be called “Tamamo-no-Mae,” meaning the lady of the jewel-like, glowing waterweed . Before that, it is said, she had been called Mikuzume. In time she drew all the emperor’s affection to herself, but when he fell ill from an unknown cause, her true nature began to be doubted.

The Nine-Tailed Fox is a spirit-fox said to have lived so long and gathered so much power that its tail divided into nine. Yet the name does not simply mean a fox with many tails. In Japanese yokai imagery, the Nine-Tailed Fox is the largest and most complicated fox figure of all: it joins fox worship, Inari belief, fox possession, tales of beauties who unsettle royal power, and the narrative line that runs from Tamamo-no-Mae to the Sesshoseki killing stone. Its source lies in Chinese antiquity. In the Nanshan jing section of the Shan Hai Jing, Mount Qingqiu is home to a beast shaped like a fox, with nine tails, a cry like an infant, and a taste for human flesh. This fox is monstrous; yet in ancient China the nine-tailed fox could also be a propitious beast, an omen of peace. Later Chinese and Japanese texts layered the auspicious fox and the bewitching fox onto one another, turning the nine-tailed fox into both a sacred beast and a nation-ruining spirit. In Japan, fox lore spread in two directions. On one side stood the white fox, messenger of the Inari deity, guardian of fields, business, and household prosperity. According to Fushimi Inari Taisha, Inari descended on Mount Inari in 711, and the faith now extends to roughly thirty thousand shrines across Japan. On the other side stood the wild foxes and possessing spirits that deceive people, cling to households, or take hold of a region: yako, kuda-gitsune, osaki, izuna, and others. The Nine-Tailed Fox stands between these poles. It has the noble aura of a near-divine white fox, but also the danger of entering human society from within and shaking power itself. In Japan, the figure was fixed above all by the stories of Tamamo-no-Mae and the Sesshoseki. Tamamo-no-Mae is told as a peerless beauty loved by the retired Emperor Toba; exposed as a fox, she flees to Nasu, is slain, and becomes a poisonous stone. The three names are related, but they are not interchangeable. The Nine-Tailed Fox is the true form; Tamamo-no-Mae is the courtly incarnation; the Sesshoseki is what remains after death. Once those stages are joined, the fox is no longer just an animal that tricks humans. It becomes a great spirit-fox carrying beauty, intellect, politics, death, and pacification.

Kuzunoha is a shape-shifting fox living in the Shinoda Forest who becomes a human wife and is later spoken of as the mother of the onmyoji Abe no Seimei. While the core of the story is a tale of a fox's transformation, it places gratitude, the bond between husband and wife, and the parting of mother and child at the forefront, rather than the terror of shapeshifting to deceive humans. The plot—a fox saved in the Shinoda Forest transforms into a woman named Kuzunoha, marries Abe no Yasuna, and gives birth to Dojimaru—was largely solidified as "The Kuzunoha Fox" in early modern joruri and kabuki theater. In the bibliography of the National Diet Library, one can find the Ashiya Doman Ouchi Kagami lineage, which includes the title Shinoda-zuma Urami Kuzunoha (The Wife of Shinoda: The Sorrowful Kuzunoha). Kuzunoha has become more than just a fox wife; she is an entity that illuminates the Seimei legends from the perspective of a mother's story. A characteristic of Kuzunoha is that her fox spiritual power is manifested inside the home. While the Nine-Tailed Fox or Tamamo-no-Mae often wear outward-facing demonic power that shakes royal authority, Kuzunoha's power dwells in domestic scenes: sliding doors (shoji), the delivery room, the child's name, and the waka poem left at her departure. When her true identity is revealed, the fox has no choice but to leave her child and return to the forest. The poem she leaves behind—"If you long for me, come seeking me in the forest of Shinoda in Izumi, the sorrowful Kuzunoha"—causes Kuzunoha to be remembered not as a terrifying monster, but as a mother who crossed boundaries. The Ashiya Doman Ouchi Kagami: Abe Yasuna, Kuzunoha, and Yokanpei in the Izumi City Digital Archive also conveys the scene of parting with her child, showing that the image of Kuzunoha was cultivated both on stage and in iconography. Therefore, among fox yokai, Kuzunoha is an entity who makes us question "what she tried to protect even by shapeshifting" rather than her "ability to shapeshift." The land of Shinoda Forest, the name Abe no Seimei, the folktale of the fox wife, and the programs of kabuki and bunraku overlap, and she stands as a legendary figure who, despite being a yokai, bears the sorrow of motherhood and an inter-species marriage.

The jorōgumo is a Japanese yokai whose popular image coalesced from several distinct traditions: the name of a living spider species, early modern ghost stories of spiders transforming into women, Toriyama Sekien’s woodblock illustrations, and regional legends of spider pools (*kumobuchi*). Rather than a single beautiful woman dwelling at a specific waterfall, its appearance and behavior vary widely across historical eras and literary records. The written title 絡新婦 was not coined as a literal description meaning "a bride who entangles people." The *Wakan Sansai Zue* glosses the characters 絡新婦 with the reading *chorōkumo* and notes that it is "commonly called *jorōgumo*". The written name represents an intersection between a spider name found in classical Chinese materia medica and the spoken Japanese word *jorōgumo*. Tales of spiders appearing in female form predate Sekien’s art. In the 1677 collection *Tonoigusa*, a samurai grows suspicious of a young woman carrying a child and strikes her with his sword; the following day, he finds a slashed, dead *jorōgumo* alongside numerous human skeletons in the ceiling crawl space. In the 1732 collection *Taihei Hyaku Monogatari*, a man named Magoroku from Sakushū Takada is invited by an older woman into an illusory mansion where a young maiden urges him to marry her; when he flees, he returns to his own veranda, only to discover a tiny *jorōgumo* and an enormous cluster of webs beneath the eaves. Magoroku is not devoured; the narrative centers instead on the hazy boundary between dreams and illusions. In his 1776 work *Gazu Hyakki Yagyō*, Toriyama Sekien gave the title "Jorōgumo" (絡新婦) to an illustration depicting a long-haired woman in flowing robes overlaid with spider legs, surrounded by a swarm of tiny spiders. Wavy lines extending from the spiderlings suggest silk threads, smoke, or fire, but the print includes no explanatory text, nor does it depict a musician seducing a man. A bibliographic investigation conducted by the National Diet Library likewise found no classical literary source that matches the popular modern story of a beautiful woman playing a biwa lute to lure men and ultimately devour them. Waterside traditions of the jorōgumo reflect an entirely separate layer of folklore. Tales of "spider pools" (*kumobuchi*)—in which a spider attaches a thread to a person's foot, only for the individual to shift the silk onto a tree that is then dragged into the water—are distributed throughout Japan. At Jōren Falls, this thread-shifting motif merged with a taboo legend about a woodcutter who retrieves his dropped hatchet from a beautiful woman and dies after breaking his promise of silence, creating the famous Jorōgumo lore known today. Recognizing the differences among these sources reveals the jorōgumo not as a simple seductress, but as a yokai that mirrors human carelessness toward tiny creatures, the boundary between dreams and reality, the hazards of waterside terrain, and the cultural process by which names and images weave disparate legends together.

A yokai said to haunt the mountains of the Kii Peninsula. It assumes the form of a young woman, approaches travelers, and drains flesh and vital essence. At night it comes up to people walking mountain paths with lanterns, asking to “borrow a light,” then seizes the lantern and attacks under cover of darkness. Tales from Kumano and the Hatenashi range are especially well known, often warning travelers to carry tinder or slow match. Some records include methods of driving it off, turning these encounters into practical lessons for the mountains.

Kiyohime is the serpent woman from the legend of Anchin and Kiyohime, passed down at Dojoji Temple in Kii Province. She fell in love with Anchin, a monk on a pilgrimage to Kumano. Believing he broke his promise, she chased him across the Hidaka River, transformed into a giant serpent, and burned Anchin to death as he hid inside the temple bell at Dojoji. Dojoji Temple claims this story took place in the year 928 (Encho 6) and it was recorded in the 11th-century *Hokke Genki*, later expanding into the "Dojojimono" plays of Noh, Ningyo Joruri, and Kabuki . In older tales, the woman's name was not fixed; she became established as "Kiyohime" through later temple legends, picture storytelling (etoki), and performing arts. As a yokai, Kiyohime is not a serpent deity in her own right, but a liminal being whose human love was burned by jealousy and obsession into a serpentine form. Much like Hannya and Hashihime, she is a representative demoness (kijo) whose grudge gained a face, a body, and fire.

Hashihime is a figure born from ancient water and land deities fused with beliefs in bridge guardians. Revered at old great bridges, she is known as a goddess or ogress. A shrine to her stands at Uji Bridge on the Uji River, with traditions also tied to Nagara Bridge and Karahashi at Seta. Taboos warn against praising other bridges while standing on a bridge, or singing songs of jealousy there. She appears in the Kokin Wakashū, and later lore recasts her as a woman transformed into a demon by jealousy.

Suzuka Gozen is a boundary female spirit dwelling on Mount Suzuka and the Suzuka Pass, the border between Ise and Omi Provinces. She is variously depicted as a goddess, a heavenly maiden (tennyo), a female bandit, or an oni woman (kijo). Also known as Suzuka Hime, Suzuka Daimyojin, Suzuka Gongen, and Suzuka Shinjo, she was later conflated with Tate-eboshi of Mount Suzuka. In the Tamura narratives from the Muromachi period onwards, she becomes the partner of Tamuramaru (modeled on Sakanoue no Tamuramaro) and aids him in slaying demon gods like Otakemaru. However, she is no mere damsel in distress waiting for a hero. Embodying the guardian deity of the pass, the memory of bandits who threatened travelers, and the divine authority of a goddess descending from heaven, she provides Tamuramaru with the strategies necessary to defeat the mountain's demon gods. Suzuka Gozen is the very personification of the Suzuka Pass, standing at the crossroads between the capital and the eastern provinces, gods and demons, and protection and rebellion.

Takiyasha-hime is a legendary sorceress whose lineage is linked to Taira no Masakado and who took vivid shape in late Edo-period yomihon, kabuki, and ukiyo-e. Neither her familiar name nor her familiar story appears unchanged in records from the Heian period. The *Konjaku Monogatari-shū* tells of Nyozō, the third daughter of Taira no Masayuki, who became a nun and devoted herself to Jizō. The medieval *Genkō Shakusho* recast her as the third daughter of Taira no Masakado, but its Nyozō was not yet a sorceress leading a rebellion. The decisive turn came with Santō Kyōden’s *Uto Yasukata Chūgiden*, published in 1806. Kyōden wove Masakado’s surviving son Taira no Yoshikado, Nun Kisaragi, Nikushisen, toad magic, and the ruined Sōma Palace into a single supernatural tale. In this yomihon, Nun Kisaragi becomes “Takiyasha-hime,” written 滝夜刃姫, and joins Yoshikado and his allies in a story of restoring Masakado’s cause. A woman from a quiet religious tale had become a rebel princess carrying the memory of the defeated. The stage created another distinct incarnation. In *Shinobu Yoru Koi wa Kusemono*, first performed in 1836, Takiyasha-hime disguises herself as the courtesan Kisaragi and approaches Ōya Tarō Mitsukuni before revealing her identity and fighting him with magic. Transformation, seduction, a giant toad, and a spectacular collapsing set gave the sorceress princess both glamour and terror in a form uniquely suited to kabuki. The image that made her famous around the world was Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s triptych *Princess Takiyasha Calling up a Monstrous Skeleton Specter at the Old Palace in Soma*, created around 1845–46. Kuniyoshi condensed the swarm of skeletons in the source story into one colossal figure bursting through the blinds. The skeleton was Kuniyoshi’s bold visual invention, not a contemporary depiction of the postwar yokai later named Gashadokuro. When the later association between the two images is included, Takiyasha-hime emerges not as one fixed figure but as a sorceress continually reshaped by religious tale, yomihon, stage, and woodblock print.

Ryūjo, the Dragon Maiden, is a dragon connected with water who assumes the form of a woman. She is said to appear beside rivers, lakes, springs, and the sea, often as a beautiful stranger. Some encounters bring a gift or rescue; others inspire fear. Because she is associated with weather and the amount of water in a river or reservoir, she may also receive prayers for rain or for prolonged rain to stop. Ryūjo moves between human and dragon forms. A patch of scales, the trace of a claw, an unusual fragrance, or clothing that never quite dries may reveal what she is.

Nure-onna is a waterside apparition with a woman's head and the body of a serpent. Below the waist, an immense scaled body replaces human legs; above it hangs the perpetually wet black hair that gives her the name 'Wet Woman.' In the wind volume of Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, she appears as a female face on a serpent's body, her long hair trailing in the water. Serpentine women also appear in earlier Edo picture scrolls such as Sawaki Sūshi's Hyakkai Zukan, showing how artists passed the image from one work to another. Stories from western Japan give Nure-onna a different but equally memorable role. She presses the baby in her arms upon a passerby; the moment it is accepted, it becomes as heavy as stone and leaves the victim unable to move. In some versions, Ushi-oni then attacks. Nure-onna is often discussed alongside Kyūshū's Iso-onna and regional traditions of Nure-onago, and has also been interpreted as a sea serpent transformed. Yet the serpent body is supported chiefly by paintings, and primary evidence directly linking every local tale to that image is scarce. Wet hair, the water's edge, and a child that binds the recipient are the more stable features shared across western Japan's female water apparitions.

A celestial-maiden-type apparition from Amami Ōshima. Also linked to feathered-robe legends, she descends from the heavens seeking men. She appears carrying a white furoshiki cloth on her back and is accompanied by a light drizzle even under clear skies. She seduces men with bewitching allure; those who yield lose their lives. Some tales say she makes victims drink water from a ladle and carries their souls to the heavens.

Iso-onna is a female sea apparition found along the northwestern coast of Kyūshū, including Amakusa, Shimabara, Tsushima, and Kakarashima. She approaches beaches, rocky shores, and moored boats, entangling people in her long hair and drinking their blood. Her upper body resembles a beautiful woman, while her lower half is said either to fade from view or to be serpentine; from behind, she may look like nothing more than a wet rock. Names vary by region, including Iso-joshi, Nure-joshi, Ama, and Umi-hime. She appears when the sea is calm and is sometimes linked with the resentful dead of maritime disasters. Some traditions also pair her with Ushi-oni, another dangerous being of the shore.

Bone Woman is a skeletal female yokai depicted by Toriyama Sekien in Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki. In his notes, Sekien cites otogizōshi-style ghost tales in which a woman bearing a peony-patterned lantern visits her lover, drawing on the female specter from Asai Ryōi’s Otogibōko story “Botan Dōrō.” The image embodies a beauty who approaches a man but is in truth bare bones—a visualization of the uncanny where desire and death intersect.

Yao-bikuni is the legend of a Buddhist nun who lived for an astonishing span of time, told in Wakasa and throughout Japan. The best-known story tells of a girl who eats mermaid flesh, grows old only very slowly, enters religious life, and travels the provinces. The surviving records, however, do not contain one single story: her appearance, age, and reason for longevity all vary. The most important early records place her in Kyoto in 1449. The entry for the twenty-sixth day of the fifth month of Bun’an 6 in *Yasuyoshi-ki* describes a “Shiro-bikuni” from Wakasa as more than two hundred years old and says that many people came to see her. In the entry for the twenty-sixth day of the seventh month of the same year, *Gaun Nikkenroku* calls a nun from Wakasa an “eight-hundred-year-old nun” and says that people in Kyoto paid to see her. Neither account mentions mermaid flesh; both foreground a long-lived nun who had become a sensation in the capital. The explanation of longevity through mermaid flesh becomes a clear story in the early modern period. In Hayashi Razan’s *Honchō Jinja Kō*, a father receives a mermaid from a stranger in the mountains, brings it home, and his daughter eats its flesh, becoming more than four hundred years old. The sequence of father, otherworld, mermaid, and daughter became a defining form of later Yao-bikuni stories, though even here the lifespan is not fixed at eight hundred years. Yao-bikuni’s name also became attached to old trees, temples, and caves. Before Kūin-ji in Obama, Wakasa, lies a sacred cave associated with her entering meditation; at Jigen-ji in Musashi, a great Chinese hackberry was said to have been planted by Yao-bikuni. The long-lived nun is both a traveler and a name through which distant places tell the age of their own landscapes. In the major medieval and early-modern sources, Yao-bikuni is not a ghost but a legendary person in whom wonder at longevity, fear of otherworldly food, and memories of itinerant female religious practitioners overlap.

A strongly imaginative yokai depicted in Toriyama Sekien’s Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki and Edo-period kibyōshi. As the name suggests, it appears as a courtesan whose entire body is shrouded in long hair; her face is hidden by hair, or in some readings, absent altogether. Considered a satirical presence in the pleasure quarters, the wordplay links the painted “makeup” of a courtesan with “apparition.” It lacks stable local folklore and is known mainly from printed sources.

A lady-in-waiting–type yokai seen in Edo-period monster paintings. In Toriyama Sekien’s Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki, she appears as a youthful court woman with ohaguro (toothed blackening), said to haunt a ruined old palace. The term originally referred to low-ranking young attendants serving at court or in aristocratic households, and was not a fixed monster name. Similar court-attendant figures appear across various Hyakki Yagyo picture scrolls; Sekien likely labeled that iconography as “Ao-nyōbō.” Her nature and origins are unknown.

A yokai depicted in Toriyama Sekien’s Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro. Named after the document cart (fuguruma) used to carry letters, it is understood as the embodiment of attachment and passions accumulated in old love letters. Shown as a woman holding a scroll, it is a creative yokai inspired by Tsurezuregusa section 72 (“The Letters on the Cart”), widely interpreted as a tsukumogami in which the spirit of love letters fuses with that of an object.

Suzuhiko-hime was named and pictured by Toriyama Sekien in the final volume of Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, published in 1784. In the 1805 reprint held by the National Diet Library, she leans over a railing and offers an opened fan. Her head is layered with forms resembling small bells and their long cords, blurring the boundary between face and ritual implement. Despite the “hime” in her name, no record identifies her as the ghost of a particular princess, a deity enshrined at a shrine, or a female apparition known in local tradition. She is a yokai introduced in a single illustration by Sekien. Sekien’s caption recalls Ame-no-Uzume performing kagura before the rock cave in an effort to draw out the hidden deity. It is a brief, dreamlike allusion, not an origin tale for Suzuhiko-hime. In the rock-cave episode of the *Kojiki*, Ame-no-Uzume uses bamboo leaves and an overturned tub; kagura bells do not occur in the text. Suzuhiko-hime therefore cannot be identified as Ame-no-Uzume herself, her transformation, or a bell from the myth. Bell-carrying creatures also appear in earlier copies of Hyakki Yagyō Emaki. A mid-Edo manuscript in the National Diet Library depicts a birdlike figure holding a cluster of bells. Hidekazu Imai describes a related image as “a crane in miko dress holding bells”. The figure is not named Suzuhiko-hime, and it cannot be proved to be the same being as Sekien’s; the connection is a shared visual idea joining a miko, a bird, and bells. No primary source gives Suzuhiko-hime a fixed place of appearance, harmful act, benefit, personality, weakness, or method of defeat. Calling her broadly an implement yokai or tsukumogami does not license a personal tale in which a century-old bell changes from resentment. What can be firmly traced is a female figure incorporating the form of bells, an open fan, a caption longing for Ame-no-Uzume’s ancient performance, and an image later quoted by artists.

A spirit said to dwell in the leaves of the banana plant (basho), or the vital essence of an aged plant taking human form. Illustrated by Toriyama Sekien in Konjaku Hyakki Shui, whose notes cite Chinese anecdotes and the Noh chant-play Basho. Tales across Japan describe it appearing as a beautiful woman to test monks or startling travelers on night roads; many accounts say it rarely causes direct harm.

A yokai named in the Edo-period collection Ehon Hyaku Monogatari. Framed as a Buddhist admonition, it serves as a metaphor for the folly of being ensnared by a woman’s allure. Her outward beauty is likened to a bodhisattva, while her inner nature is as fearsome as a yaksha. Men whose hearts are unsettled by her are warned to lose their homes and ruin themselves. The name can be read as “calamity flying in on karmic ties,” and it has been linked to folk beliefs about women born in the year of Hinoe-uma (the fiery Horse).

A female yokai and castle deity said to dwell in the main keep of Himeji Castle. Early Edo怪談 depict it as a gender-shifting castle specter; later tradition fixed the image as a “princess.” Revered and feared as both guardian and avenger of the castle, bringing fortune or calamity according to the lord’s conduct. Its true nature varies by tale—an ancient fox, a castle god, a sacrificed woman, or the spirit of a long-departed noble lady. Also called Osakabe.

The Shadow Woman is a feminine apparition drawn by Toriyama Sekien in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi. In houses haunted by spirits, only the silhouette of a woman appears on the shoji under moonlight. She manifests as a shadow, with no clear physical body. Sightings occur at night—especially in strong moonlight—and are described less as attacks and more as an ominous sign. Explanations vary: a restless ghost, a house-bound entity, or a spirit of moonlight; her true nature remains unknown.