A Gallery of Wailing Women

Like many other ghostly-women on this list, Indonesia's Sundel Bolong is also said to wander the afterlife dressed all in white, however this white isn't related to the purity of bridal costumes, such as the one seen in Korea's Virgin Ghosts. The ghosts called Sundel Bolong are far from being considered virginal figures. The literal translation of their name means "Whore" from Sundel and "Hole" from Bolong. The "hole" part of their name stems from the wound in the ghosts back. These ghosts are women who got pregnant without having been married, and then died during childbirth. In their graves the babies are said to burst out of their back, thus making the hole.  Some of the legends around Sundel Bolong's include beautiful women who were forced into prostitution, and as a result, later died. Some the Sundel Bolong is sexually assaulted outright, and as a result, she is impregnated. Sometimes, rather than die in childbirth, it's told

Witch hauntings and legends run rampant in America thanks to the early Puritan influence and the Witch Trials of the late 1600s. Salem Massachusetts where the famous 1692 and 1693 Trials took place is especially associated with ghostly hauntings associated with the victims, 5 of whom were male and 14 of whom were female. Now, it's a popular tourist spot where almost every building has a corresponding ghost legend to go along with it.    In the video above, Bridget Bishop, the first of the Salem Witch Trail's victims, is attached to a local business, Turner’s Seafood, as previously being her property. It was, as the video claims, her apple orchard. Bishop's attachment to the restaurant and her rumored, occasional haunting, is one of the many draws of the establishment in a town that thrives off of dark tourism.  Bishop is one of the most well known ghostly figures and victims of the Witch Trials. She is portrayed often as an outsider of the Salem community and the

When it comes to urban legends from around the world, many of the things that go “bump” in the night end to be male.   As Bess Lomax Hawes   writes in her essay “La Llorona in Juvenile Hall”: “The female ghost is certainly not unknown in ghost lore. But contrary to what seems to be the general impression, most ghost figures are men” (155). In her study of the folklore of the young girls at Las Palmas School, a detention center for young women, the primary figures haunting the girls were women; only a few men, and the shape the female ghosts took revealed much about their anxieties around being abandoned by their mother, and about growing old. Themes of motherhood, of infanticide, and of sexuality were rampant among the La Llorona stories and other female centered ghost stories within the walls of Las Palmas, themes that tied the horror directly to the gender of the ghost. Male ghostly figures have a much looser association to their gender than female ghosts do. The stories that circu

Here is a woman so notorious she not only spawned her own ghost story, but in tandem with Vlad the Impaler, provided inspiration for Dracula and Vampires as we know it. This16th century noblewoman has one of--if not the--highest body count of female killers to date, with her number of victims cited as 650 during her trial, though the true number is unknown. Supposedly her reign of torture began when she was wed at the age of 15 and moved to Čachtice Castle to live with her lower-born husband. Apparently, her new husband, himself called the "Black Knight" for his viciousness, supported her dark inclinations, and outfitted torture chambers for her. There where she would lure in young peasant girls perform acts of cruelty such as removing their fingernails and piercing their lips with nails until they died. After her husband's death in 1604, her reign of terror only worsened, and she was rumored to have begun bathing in and drinking the blood of her victims because she

There is a popular motif among European countries and the Northern American Region of a ghostly figure typically referred to as "The White Lady." The White Lady anywhere the European Influence is found; Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands, though there are also instances of White Ladies in Thailand, and the Philippines. Many of these women are associated with young, violent deaths, with failures in love, or motherhood, or in some cases, buried treasure. They appear as warnings, or they appear to do harm, or they appear searching for something, such as their child; it varies from culture to culture. All of them appear in some kind of white garment, like the Korean Virgin Ghosts, that earns them their name. Some of the ladies-in-white are based on once-living people, such as the most famous White Lady of the Czech Republic. Her legend stems from the life of Perchta of Rozmberk, a girl born to a noble family and unhappily married off at the age of 20 to Jan of Lichtenstein. Let

This ghost is often confused or combined with La Llorona, likely due to the common motif of a mother killing their own child, and the eternal unrest that follows.  There are several versions of the La Sayona origin tale that give her different names and differ slightly in the amount of guilt (or complete lack thereof) in terms of her husband, as there are differences in how she enacts her vengeance.  Among the tales there are several elements that do not change; La Sayona is made to suspect that her husband is sleeping with her mother, La Sayona kills her mother as a result, and with her dying breath, La Sayona's mother curses her to be an executioner; to go out and kill unfaithful men who lust after women who are not their own.  In many of the tales, La Sayona is a beautiful girl who many chased after, even after she was married and had a son of her own. In the most common tale, it is a jealous man who is caught spying on her as she bathes in a river that starts La Sayona dow