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Dear Mr. Holbrook:

I love to read about supernatural haunting and haunting at sea. Do you know much about FUNAYUHREI the ghost ship of Japanese folklore? I can’t find much information about it except the usual - that it appears suddenly without sound or lights usually during a fog and is fatal.  Jonathan, VA

 I have seen it in one book "Ghosts and the Japanese" Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends by Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken that has many different legends. According to this book, "The term Funa Yurei is a collective expression designating the ghost ship itself as well as other ghosts on the phantom ship or in the sea." The difference in the name Funayuhrei and Funa Yurei may be in the pronunciation of the word between Japanese and English. The book has it the way they would pronounce the words in two parts, one part is "Yurei" which means Ghost and "Funa" which is Ship. There are many different types of "Yurei" listed in the book and not all are actual phenomenon that can be seen. There are many that can just be heard and felt and not all are on the sea. In the folklore of costal Japanese, the Funa Yurei are the spirits of people that have died in sea disasters who can appear in ghostly ships at sea. The phantom ship is said to materialize suddenly during a very dark night, in the fog or in the moonlight. The ghosts onboard often demand that a ladle or bucket be passed to them, but careful sailors will only supply a bucket without a bottom- otherwise the ghost will use it to fill their ship with water until it sinks. The sailors that encounter a Funa Yurei do not have to be bad people or have done something to offend the dead like in many of the folklore of the Japanese. The sailors are just the victims of the residual "goryo"(vengeful ghost) of unburied and un-ritualized people that have died at sea. In the book it notes: "The Hokusai Sketch-Books (1958, 138), Michener includes a print called Ship Ghost by Hokusai (1760-1849), accompanied by an explanatory note on the well-known attempt by ghosts to fill up a boat with ladles full of water." Perhaps the legend came from this or vise versa, the internet has several different takes on the Funa Yurei also.

I also looked it up on the internet and everything that I saw was linked to a new book that has the story in it. So like you said the Funayuhrei is a ghost ship that travels silently at night or in a thick fog. It appears suddenly without sound or lights. Meeting one on the sea is fatal. If the victims are lucky if they drown and if they are unlucky they might be captured, tortured and eaten by the Isohime a giant fantastical mermaid that likes to catch the survivors of sinking ships. This is one of the accounts that is on the internet and another has it a little different. If a ship meets a Funayuhrei that it will turn violently in circles before sinking. Then the ship that sunk would become a Funayuhrei to roam the seas in search of other ships to sink.

The new book that may have started the interest in the Funayuhrei folklore or ghost story is "Ghost Files: The Haunting Truth" by The Ghost Society. There are many different stories out there that can be written about without even doing an investigation on the site. And when dealing with folklore or legends there are many different interpretations of even versions of the same story. This is evident here with this Japanese ghost story, I cannot say which one is the original but my bet would be the story that is in the sketch book.