A Gallery of Wailing Women

Similar to the Sundel Bolong of Indonesia, the Langsuyar, which is found in both Malaysian and Indonesian cultures, is a woman who died as a result of childbirth. The legend tells of a beautiful woman who was so shocked at having delivered a stillborn baby that she died instantly upon hearing the news. After this death she turns into an evil spirit. She becomes in her afterlife a nocturnal figure much like a vampire in some cases. She is said to roost in the trees and attack children, sucking their blood using a special hole in her neck. In some legends, it's said that she turns into an owl, and she will haunt and attack pregnant women, disemboweling them out of spite and jealousy since she lost her own life and child. Some telling actually say the Langsuyar can go on living and often pass as a normal woman, getting married and having "elfin" children after she turns in to a Langsuyar, but that she will go on afterwards regardless sucking the blood of other people...

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 ...

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 t...