No One Has Ever Seen Sunakake Baba: The Sand That Falls in the Shrine Forest

The strangest thing about the sunakake baba is that her name calls her an old woman, yet no one is said to have ever seen her. All the old tales tell us is this: someone walked through a lonely forest, and sand came falling from somewhere. The sunakake baba is not a yokai you see with your eyes. She's one you feel on your skin and hear with your ears.

Unseen, yet called an old woman

The folklorist Kunio Yanagita wrote down the sunakake baba, as a tale from Nara Prefecture, among the yokai names he gathered from around Japan. It was talked about in many parts of Nara: when you pass through the shadows of a lonely shrine forest, sand is sprinkled down on you, pitter-patter, to give you a fright. And no one has ever seen who does it. Similar tales of being showered with sand are also told in Hyogo Prefecture.

What catches the ear is the name: baba, "old woman." If no one has seen her, no one can know whether she's an old woman at all. And yet people called this unseen something a "baba."

Why "baba"? The tales don't say. But giving it a name turns something unknowable into a slightly more familiar "someone." It's no longer just sand, but sand that someone is throwing, and that makes it a story you can tell to others. Perhaps that was part of what the name was for.

The shrine forest

The sunakake baba is said to appear in the shadows of lonely shrine forests.

The woods around a Shinto shrine are often thick with tall trees, and many stay dim even in the middle of the day. They were cared for as places where the gods dwell, and people did not cut their trees lightly. Right there in the village, yet with a different air from everyday life. Walk through those shadows alone, especially at dusk, and every little sound and stir starts to catch your attention.

Something comes pattering down over your head. You look up, and no one is there. The tale of the sunakake baba seems deeply tied to that uneasy feeling of passing through the shade of the forest.

Yokai known only by sound

The sunakake baba isn't the only yokai you can't see, only hear or feel.

• Azuki-arai, the "bean washer": by a riverbank, you hear a scritch-scratch sound like someone washing azuki beans. But peek over, and no one is there, they say
• Tengu-daoshi, "tengu felling": deep in the mountains, you hear a great tree being chopped down. But when you go to look, there's no fallen tree anywhere. People long ago took this to be the work of the tengu

The nurikabe, which blocks the way on a night road, was also once a yokai with no shape at all. You can read more in our story on the nurikabe. Sand, sound, a road you can't pass: each is a name given to "something" that clearly happened, even though no one could see it.

Drawing something no one has seen

Today, many people picture the sunakake baba as the old woman who appears in manga and anime. But in the old tales, she is a yokai no one has ever laid eyes on.

So on the sunakake baba's Yokaipedia page, we drew only her white hair and face floating faintly in the air, with her body melting into the background the lower it goes. Sand bursts from both her hands, and a mound of sand lies at her feet. What you can see clearly is the sand she has thrown.

If you're ever on a lonely forest path and hear something pattering down from above, go ahead and look up. Chances are, no one will be there.