Hours later, he emerged bleary-eyed from a fitful sleep to find every member of the family all neatly decapitated without even a blood splatter. Realising the truth, he submerged their headless bodies in a nearby ravine, then hid himself away. Once the sun started to come up, the disembodied heads returned to find their bodies missing. They whirled around in a rage until the first few rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon, turning them to ash.
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, also known by his Japanese pen name Koizumi Yakumo, was a 19th century novelist who wrote about Japanese folklore. In Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, he wrote: