Scarcely had I finished my last column examining the way our weather may shape ghost beliefs when an even more dramatic instance arrived from Japan. This was the news that a famous boulder situated on the slopes of Mount Naru at Tochigi, north of Tokyo, which was said to imprison a demonic entity, had split asunder owing to the effects of rainwater. Japanese social media users sounded the alarm when the landmark rock – known as the Sessho-seki or ‘the Killing Stone’ – was found cracked open on Monday 7 March 2022. Proving the Virgilian maxim from the Aeneid of rumour being the swiftest of all pests, word swiftly spread around the world, which seemed rather eager to receive it; the implication being that an evil spirit, trapped for 1,000 years, was now at liberty.
In legend, the trapping of the spirit dates to the reign of Emperor Toba (1107-1123). The Sessho-seki was said to contain the transformed corpse of Tamamo-no-Mae – who appeared as a beautiful woman, but was in fact an evil nine-tailed fox demon being employed by a feudal warlord to assassinate the Emperor. She attempted to seduce Emperor Toba, who fell terribly ill from her attentions. No one could explain his sickness until an astrologer named Abe no Yasuchika divined the answer and exposed the plot. With her true identity revealed, Tamamo-no-Mae was slain by the famous samurai warrior Miura-no-suke, who was loyal to the Emperor. Her body was then entombed in the Sessho-seki. Folklore averred the stone kills anyone who approaches it, ensuring its popularity as a tourist attraction. Despite one version claiming the rock was actually destroyed
