Onibi

◆ The legend

A pale blue fire that floats softly over fields, graveyards, and damp ground at night. Sometimes there is just one; sometimes several appear in a row, it is said. They drift without a sound, vanish the moment you come near, and glow again once you step away — a slipperiness that people have told of all over Japan. Some say they are most likely to appear on nights of soft, steady rain.

Onibi have long been thought to be the souls of the dead, people or animals, turned into fire. Perhaps those who saw a blue flame by a grave thought of whoever was resting there. Rather than a single yokai, onibi works almost like an umbrella name for the many "strange fires" known by different names from place to place — fox fires and hitodama, the flying soul-flames, are sometimes counted among them.