A Gallery of Wailing Women

Another popular female ghost from the East Asian area is the Cheonyeo Gwisin, or the Virgin Ghost, who originates from Korean folklore. When it comes to contemporary, global culture, they would likely be confused with the Japanese yurei made popular by movies such as The Grudge  and The Ring; both wear white, both have long black hair, off-colored skin and deep-set eyes typically depicted by heavily encircling them in black liner. However for the Cheonyeo Gwisin, there's a cultural importance to the long black hair hanging down her back and face. Cheonyeo Gwisin never married, and therefore, according to old Korean traditions, lacked the right to tie up their hair up until marriage, and so these ghosts are caught forever in a state of having to wear their hair down--supposedly embittered by their inability to fulfill their life's role of getting married and serving their husband. These ghosts of girls unfulfilled are said to haunt bathrooms, forests, schools, and abandon...

The Kuchisake-onna  口裂け女 The Slit-Mouthed Woman Japan is rife with stories of yokai; loosely what Westerners may refer to as demons, goblins, ghosts, and ghouls, that have persisted from the Edo period until the modern day in part thanks to anime, manga, and toys turning folklore figures into consumable, often cutesy, pop-culture darlings that are market friendly. One of the most modern additions to the yokai "family" is the Kuchisake-onna, or The Split Mouth Woman. Here she is seen reimagined in a popular anime as a demon-figure that needs to be battled, far away from her usual, urban haunt, and extremely different from her usually human form. Some folklorist claim that her origins date back to the Heian period of Japan, while others place it in the Edo period, and some say it didn't emerge until the 1970s. In most Japanese versions of the tale, she is a woman who had been murdered--some tales say that she was disfigured by her Samurai husband for infidelit...