This week on myths and legends we're in Japanese folklore with two stories of the power of well stories

We'll see a trick for dealing with water zombie neighbors and how if you find yourself shouting awkward phrases at birds you might

want to try to get out of the house a little bit more. The creature is the reason

why you shouldn't turn into a boar to eat your children. This is myths and legends, episode 381.

Lend me your ears. This is a podcast where we tell stories from mythology and folklore.

Some are incredibly popular stories you might think you know, but with surprising origins,

others are tales that might be new to you but are definitely worth the listen.

Like we said at the top of the episode, we're back in Japanese folklore with two folk tales. They are more than fairy tales though because the first one does require a little bit of historical background.

In the early imperial days of Japan, the emperor didn't have an air. Oops, that was actually kind of a

funny problem because at a certain point there were so many people with claims to the

Imperial throne they actually had to spin off two separate clans from the families in question,

which I'm sure seemed like a great idea until those clans went to war over who got to be

emperor. In the tale of the Heke, one clan, the Minamoto clan, one out of the Tyra clan, also known as the Heke, culminating in the utter defeat of the latter in a famous naval battle, where the six-year-old Tyra claimant was present and also

killed when his grandmother grabbed him and leapt overboard to avoid his

capture. We'll get started in the first story. Hundreds of years after the war't a mistake. It was by design. It was to stop the

screaming, the cries in the watery darkness. The final pleas of terror from men who,

even though they had prepared their whole lives for a meeting with death,

now, but it might be better to reschedule.

The fishermen saw the only be hovering over the bay or dancing on the waves. Demon fires, thousands of them. They knew the dead were restless. They had died in defeat, following their child emperor and dropping overboard.

Off into the water, looking up at the moonlight, warped by the waves, feeling the panic in their minds as their last air left them.

A strange place, the bay was home to not just the demon lights, not just the crabs that looked like the samurai that died on that day, but on

windy and stormy nights, anyone who cared to visit the bay could hear the final cries of

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