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The Kappa is generally known as a clownish, mostly friendly water spirit in Japanese mythology, but a cursory web search recently revealed the creature’s darker nature.

In Japanese ghost stories and Shinto mythology, the kappa is a water spirit that inhabits rivers and lakes. It’s generally considered a mischievous, mostly harmless cross between a turtle, a human and a frog. In modern tellings, kappa reside in rivers and play mostly harmless tricks on human residents. In fact, they’re so adored that the monster’s name and likeness adorns a popular conveyor belt sushi chain.

But there’s a sinister backstory behind this beloved spirit’s habits that makes it maybe not particularly deserving of its celebrity as the de facto face of Japanese yokai; and that backstory involves drowning children and, yes, we’re going to say it… Anal vampyrism.

See, there’s always been a slightly uncomfortable relationship between kappa and humans. Kappa, while mostly friendly tricksters in the eyes of the Japanese public, have a reputation for occasionally catching and drowning children. In fact, the kappa’s slightly schizophrenic personality as both lovable jester and bloodthirsty murderer has led to Japanese communities posting signs near rivers and lakes urging children to beware of the creature lest they end up victimized by the spirit.

Little did we know, though, that the vexatious critter of folklore has a history of, occasionally, sucking the very souls out of victims… through their anus.

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When one of our Japanese writers stumbled across an Urban Dictionary post for “Anus Vampire” (we have no idea how he ended up there and, for the sake of our sanity, will refrain from asking questions), he found a description that explicitly references the Japanese kappa as a “Spirit in the Japanese Shinto religion” that feasts on human souls by sucking them out through victims’ anuses.

Incredulous – again, in Japan, the kappa is largely viewed as a friendly, even fortuitous Shinto spirit to encounter – our Japanese writer consulted a Japanese yokai expert to verify Urban Dictionary’s claims. Said expert confirmed that there’s an entire class of yokai that are interested in, uh, “butt stuff,” and, indeed, the kappa is fabled to attack people in bathrooms and to emerge through toilet plumbing to suck the souls or, depending on the source, the blood of victims through the rectum.

Sure, the expert our author consulted is a fellow writer for our Japanese sister site, but she (K. Masami) is an undisputed authority on the matter; she’s even got a kappa capturing license, which, yeah, is on par with a leprechaun hunting license, but at the very least denotes a prodigious knowledge of the creature.

We’re actually more surprised that the crowdsourced Urban Dictionary actually got this obscure fact right despite the general Japanese public being largely unaware of the kappa’s sinister and kind of gross habit of anal vampyrism. Still, in the extremely unlikely case that you should run into a kappa in or around a bathroom or river, take the advice of the Urban Dictionary’s example sentence: “Run for your lives, I think I just saw an anus vampire!”

Feature photo: Wikimedia Commons
Insert: Urban Dictionary (edited by RocketNews24)
[ Read in Japanese ]