Icicle Woman

The Icicle Woman is a ghost story from Japan about a man who meets a ghostly woman who is as beautiful and slender as an icicle. This story is based on a Japanese folk tale called “Tsurara Onna” or “The Icicle Wife”.

There was a man who had never married. He lived alone in a small house in the wilderness of Japan. He was very lonely and longed for someone he could spend his life with.

One Winter morning, he was gazing out his window, when he happened to notice some icicles hanging under the eaves of his house.

He said to himself, “I wish I had a wife as beautiful as those icicles.”

That night, there was a knock on his front door. When the man answered it, he saw a beautiful woman standing on his doorstep. Her body was long and slender and her face was pale as snow. He invited her in out of the cold.

As time passed by, the woman never left and the couple fell in love. They decided to live as husband and wife.

There was just one small problem. The man noticed that his beautiful wife never took a bath. Whenever he tried to talk to her about this, she refused to discuss it.

One day, the husband had enough. He grabbed his wife and dragged her into the bathroom. The screamed and cried and tried to wriggle away from him. He threw her into the piping hot water, then left her there and slammed the door shut behind him.

An hour passed and all the man could hear was silence. There were no splashing sounds coming from the bathroom at all. Thinking this was strange, he opened the bathroom door and peeked inside.

It was empty. His wife was gone. All that he saw, floating in the water was a the haircomb his wife always wore.

The man was heartbroken. He assumed his wife had left him and ran away. He decided to move on with his life. A few months later, he met a new woman and they fell in love. She came to live with him and they passed the months happily together until Winter came around again.

After a night of heavy snowfall, the man looked out the window and noticed a huge icicle under the eaves of his house. He went outside to knock it off, but there was a woman standing outside in the snow. He recognized her. It was his wife.

Inside the house, the new woman heard a terrible agonized shriek. She rushed outside and found the man lying in the snow. He was dead and blood was spreading out through the snow around his head. A single huge icicle had pierced right through his eye and penetrated his brain.