Giant skeleton walking the night fields
Gashadokuro
Bones left in the field remember that no one gathered them. On a moonless night they stand together, clattering, and a vast palm overtakes the sound of running feet.
Overview
Gashadokuro is a giant skeleton said to be formed from the bones and resentment of people who died unburied, such as war dead or those who collapsed by the roadside. It is now regarded as a relatively modern yokai, not an old folk tradition.
Encounter
In a deserted field at night, the sound of clattering bones approaches from the dark. The giant body towers over a person and is said to grab passing humans with enormous hands.
Lore
Gashadokuro does not appear in Edo-period picture scrolls by Sekien and others. Saito Morihiro introduced it in a 1966 yokai feature, reportedly inspired by the British ghost story of the Black Knight of Glamis.
Traits
Countless unburied dead gather into one enormous skeleton. Later accounts say it seizes, crushes, bites, and eats living people. Its visual ancestry also draws on Utagawa Kuniyoshi's giant skeleton in Soma no Furu-dairi.
