The Centipede Princess’s Tomb (Morioka, Japan)

It is a cursed burial mound capped by a stone tower. Legend has it that hordes of venomous creatures once crawled out of it.

Inside the city of Morioka, on the grounds of Kōdaiji Temple, stands a ten-foot-tall stone tower known as the Tomb of the Centipede Princess. The woman behind the tale was Lady Otake, an Edo-period noblewoman and wife of the local daimyo. The strange events that later swirled around her name were rooted in her bloodline. Lady Otake was a direct descendant of the hero Tawara Toda, who, according to lore, killed a gigantic man-eating centipede (ōmukade) with a single arrow. The monster’s dying hatred seeped into the arrowhead. When Lady Otake married, she brought that arrowhead with her as a family heirloom, unknowingly carrying into her husband’s household a dormant curse that still hungered for revenge against the killer’s descendants.

The curse surfaced only after Lady Otake’s death. While washing her body, the maids discovered that livor mortis on her back had formed the clear outline of a huge, writhing centipede. At the time such a mark was considered undeniable proof of demonic possession, and from then on the late noblewoman was called the Centipede Princess.

Grasping the danger, her husband built a special tomb meant to imprison her spirit. The grave rose on a high hill, ringed by a thick stone wall and a deep moat of running water—substances insects and evil spirits were said to dread. A wooden bridge let priests cross the moat to offer prayers, but on the very first night legions of centipedes swarmed up and chewed the bridge to splinters. Carpenters rebuilt it several times, yet each night the insects gnawed it away again, showing that the spirit rejected all prayers.

The manifestations soon worsened. Venomous centipedes poured constantly from the tomb’s cracks, and guards reported that the dead woman’s hair had transformed into a one-eyed serpent—a sure sign of a yōkai in Japanese folklore. The snake slithered across the stones, keeping watch over the grave.

In the original myth, Tawara Toda slew the giant centipede at the plea of the Dragon King, who often appears in Japanese stories as a colossal serpent. The centipede had been devouring the Dragon King’s children, and in gratitude the dragon rewarded the hero with magical gifts. Thus, Toda’s bloodline carried both the dragon’s blessing and the centipede’s curse. When the curse awakened, Lady Otake’s own spirit—or the protective magic of her lineage—may have taken the form of a serpent.

Because normal prayers, paper talismans, and running water could not contain the monster, the caretakers chose a desperate measure. They melted lead in great furnaces and poured the boiling metal into every crack of the stone tomb. The lead sealed the structure tight and, in esoteric practice, heavy metals are believed to ground and block demonic energy.

It worked. The manifestations stopped completely.

From 100 Cursed Places · Fern Flower Press