Funayūrei (船幽霊)

Those who perished by drowning are said to wait at the ocean floor, gathering companions. On storm-wracked nights, or in the hours before dawn on the sixteenth day of Bon, a silhouette without sails or helmsman drifts in from beyond a horizon dissolved in fog. That is the first sign of the funayūrei.

They appear clutching ladles, meaning to scoop up seawater and pour it into the hull below. Ancient wisdom holds that one should prepare in advance a ladle with its bottom knocked out — for however much water is drawn, it all spills away before it can be poured. Throwing rice balls into the sea is likewise passed down as a means of appeasing those famished spirits, if only for a time.

Their forms are not fixed. They may manifest as ghost ships, entire vessels turned to apparition; or as an invisible weight closing around a crewman's throat; or as the illusion of a bonfire burning far out at sea. The tale of the helmsman lured by such a flame, who found himself atop a reef before he understood what had happened, is still whispered among fishermen across the coast.

A cliff face or the shadow of a tall-masted ship materializing without warning through the fog — wrench the helm aside and you run aground, capsize. Hold your course straight ahead, and it dissolves without a sound. What the funayūrei are testing, it seems, is whether you are ruled by terror or by resignation.

In Yamaguchi and Saga they are called Ayakashi; in other regions, Mōja-bune or Bōko. Records survive of their haunting rivers and marshes in landlocked places far from any sea. The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari described the funayūrei appearing in the western seas as the vengeful dead of the Taira clan, sunk at Dan-no-ura — as though the very depth of their resentment had become the depth of the water itself. Even now, it seems, they reach upward from the bottom.