Hachishakusama (八尺様, はっしゃくさま, hasshaku-sama) is a tall woman in white from a modern Japanese internet horror story, not a traditional legend. An anonymous poster told it as a true teenage memory on 26 August 2008, on the occult board of 2channel. She stands about eight shaku, roughly 2.4 meters, makes a strange “po po po” sound, and preys on the young.
A Hat Above the Hedge
Spring break. A high school boy has ridden his motorbike out to his father’s family farm and is lying on the sunny veranda, doing nothing, the way you only can at your grandparents'.
A sound drifts across the garden. Po, po po, po. Not a machine. A person, though he cannot tell whether it is “po” or “bo.”
Above the hedge, which is about two meters high, a hat is gliding along. At a gap in the hedge he glimpses the woman wearing it, in a pale dress. Then she is gone, and so is the sound.
A tall woman in platform boots, he decides. Over tea he mentions it to his grandparents, and both of them stop moving.
That stillness is the scariest moment in the story of Hachishakusama. Nothing has happened yet. Everything already has.
What the Name Hachishakusama Means
The name is a measurement with a title on the end. 八 (hachi) means eight, 尺 (shaku) is the old Japanese unit of length, and 様 (sama) is an honorific.
In Japanese the characters are read together as hasshaku-sama, the “chi” of hachi folding into a doubled “s.” English-language sites mostly spell her Hachishakusama, stringing the separate readings together.
One shaku is fixed at 10/33 of a meter, about 30.3 centimeters, so eight shaku comes to roughly 2.42 meters, just under eight feet. Her English nickname, the eight-foot-tall woman, is a happy accident: a shaku and a foot differ by less than two millimeters.
The sama matters as much as the number. It is the suffix Japanese uses for customers, for gods and for anyone you must address with care. Nobody in the story calls her a ghost. To the grandmother she is a troublesome thing that lives in these parts, and you do not offend it.
The Hachishakusama Story as First Posted
The story appeared in the 196th installment of a long-running 2channel thread for stories “so scary they are no joke” (死ぬほど洒落にならない怖い話を集めてみない？). The poster wrote as a man looking back more than ten years to the spring before his final year of high school, and never names the town. What follows is my summary.
The Grandmother’s Warning
The grandfather questions the boy hard, makes a phone call, and drives off to fetch an old woman the post calls only K. The grandmother explains, her voice shaking.
Hachishakusama lives in this district. She looks like a very large woman and laughs in a voice like a man’s. She looks different to each witness, a young woman in mourning clothes, an old woman in formal kimono, a middle-aged woman in farm clothes, but she is always a woman, always far too tall, always with something on her head. When she fixes on someone, they are dead within days. Her victims are mostly young, children most of all. The last was about fifteen years ago.
She cannot leave. Only a few roads let her out, and where each one crosses the old village boundary a jizō (地蔵) statue holds her in, four in all, at north, south, east and west. The boy later hears that the village agreed to keep her as part of an old bargain with its neighbors, perhaps for water rights.
The Night in the Sealed Room
K gives the boy a paper talisman, an ofuda (お札), to keep on his body. Upstairs, the windows are covered with newspaper and more talismans, salt is heaped in each corner, and a small Buddhist statue sits on a wooden box. Stay inside until seven in the morning, he is told. Nobody will call you before then.
After one in the morning, something taps on the window glass. Then his grandfather’s voice comes through the door, asking if he is all right and inviting him out. The voice is almost right. He knows it is not his grandfather, and the salt in the corner has turned black on top. He prays before the statue, clutching the talisman, until morning.
The Drive Out
In the morning a nine-seat van full of men waits in the yard. The boy sits in the middle, surrounded, eyes shut, head down, while K chants. The sound returns. Through slitted eyes he sees a pale dress keeping pace with the van, bending to look in, then knuckles on the glass. The men cannot see her, but they hear that.
Then it stops. Every man in the van was a distant blood relative, packed around him to confuse her. His father, it turns out, lost a childhood friend to her. Later, on the phone, his grandfather denies calling through the door that night.
Ten Years Later
He never goes back, not even for his grandfather’s funeral. Then, about ten years after that spring, his grandmother phones. Someone has broken one of the jizō, the one on the road toward his home. He ends the post telling himself it is superstition, and listening.
Po Po Po and the White Dress
The sound is the part that sticks. The post writes it ぽぽぽ, a human noise the narrator could not settle as “po” or “bo.” The writer Asazato Itsuki, who compiled the Encyclopedia of Modern Japanese Kaii (日本現代怪異事典, 2018), gives both spellings, ぽぽぽ and ぼぼぼ.
It works because it means nothing. A word could be answered. A noise only tells you where she is. And when she does use words, they come in the voices of people you love.
The post gives her only a pale dress and a hat. By 2021, Asazato noted, the standard picture was a white one-piece dress and a white hat, usually drawn wide-brimmed. It is an innocent summer outfit. The horror is all in how high above the hedge it floats.
The Jizō Statues and the Rules of Survival
Jizō are the small stone bodhisattva statues at Japanese crossroads and village edges, traditional guardians of travelers and children. Here they guard the road in reverse, keeping something in.
The rest is a set of rules a child could follow:
- Carry the talisman and keep it on your body.
- Seal the room with paper over the windows and salt in the corners.
- Wait for seven o’clock, a clock time that reads like a contract.
- Do not answer a familiar voice.
- Shut your eyes and hide among your own blood.
- Never come back.
Every rule in the Hachishakusama story is about attention. Do not look, do not answer, and do not let her pick your face out of the crowd.
Why Hachishakusama Spread: Netto Kaidan
Japan’s first wave of modern urban legends lived in mouths and magazines. Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman, ran through cram schools and newspapers in 1979. Iikura Yoshiyuki, a folklorist at Kokugakuin University, told Nippon.com that this wave peaked in the early 1990s and cooled off in 1995.
Then the internet took over. The same interview lists Hasshaku-sama, with the kunekune (くねくね) of the rice fields and the cursed box kotoribako (コトリバコ), among horror stories that began on 2channel before magazines and television picked them up. Japanese researchers call this strain netto kaidan (ネット怪談), internet ghost stories. The folklorist Itō Ryūhei uses a neater term, denshō setsuwa (電承説話), tales passed on electrically. It sounds exactly like denshō (伝承), the ordinary word for folk tradition, but it is written with the character for electricity.
The format did half the work: first-person stories told as true, by people nobody could identify. Kisaragi Station, posted to the same board in 2004, used the same trick (it is in our guide to Japanese urban legends). Iikura adds that stories online go to extremes, copied word for word or rewritten completely. Hachishakusama has had both: her text circulates intact, while her image was redrawn from top to bottom.
From Message Board to Global Meme
Fiction came first. Miyazawa Iori’s novel series Otherside Picnic (裏世界ピクニック) published a chapter called “Hachishakusama Survival” in Hayakawa’s SF Magazine in December 2016, and the 2021 anime gave its second episode the same title.
Then came the vampire. In February 2021, IGN reported that Tomonori Takano, art director of Capcom’s Resident Evil Village, named the legend of Hasshaku-sama as one inspiration for the towering Lady Dimitrescu, alongside Elizabeth Báthory and Morticia Addams.
In mid-July 2021 she boomed again on Japanese Twitter, and Asazato noticed that fan art now often drew her guarding a small boy, or as his friend, sometimes more than a friend. A little boy and a giant woman make an appealing pair, he suggests, and the white dress and hat give her the clean look of a heroine.
In English today, a search for her name brings up fan wikis, Reddit threads, YouTube narrations and indie horror games. Every one of them goes back to a single anonymous post from 2008.
Hachishakusama and Older Yokai
She is new, with no trail before 26 August 2008. But she is built from old parts, and Japanese writers have pointed out several.
Giant mountain women. Asazato points to Heisuiroku (秉穂録), a miscellany by the eighteenth-century Owari scholar Okada Shinsen, which records a dead woman about eight shaku tall seen in the mountains of Kumano, her hair reaching her feet. Many accounts of yamaonna (山女), the wild women of the mountains, give the same height. But they have no “po po po,” no hat and no taste for children, and they keep to the mountains, while Hachishakusama walks through a farming village.
The borrowed voice. Asazato also compares the sealed room to the tale of Watanabe no Tsuna in the “Sword Book” (剣巻, Tsurugi no maki) of The Tale of the Heike. Tsuna cuts off the arm of an oni (鬼), a demon, and goes into strict seclusion. The oni returns in the shape of a woman who raised him, is let in, and takes its arm back. It is the same trick: lure the victim out of a protected room by wearing a loved one’s face, or voice.
The thing that grows. In 2013 Itō Ryūhei published a paper setting her beside the nobiagari (伸上り), a Shikoku yokai that stretches taller the higher you look, escaped by keeping your eyes on the ground. It is hard not to think of the boy in the van, head down, eyes shut.
These are parallels, not a pedigree. Asazato offers the Tsuna tale only as a possible model, and nobody knows what the 2008 poster had read.
She also sits awkwardly among Japan’s ghosts. A yurei (幽霊) is a dead person who cannot rest, usually with a name and a wrong behind it. Hachishakusama has no past life and no grudge, only a district she cannot leave. That puts her closer to the yokai of village tales, a thing of a place rather than a person who died there.
Sources and Further Reading
- 憑かれたら、殺される…身長2m越えの女性「八尺様」の恐ろしすぎる実態, Asazato Itsuki, Gendai Business (Kodansha), 2021 the 26 August 2008 post in thread 196 of the occult board, the story, ぽぽぽ and ぼぼぼ, the July 2021 Twitter boom, the white dress and hat in fan art
- Twitterで大ブームの怪異「八尺様」、その「知られざるルーツ」を分析する, Asazato Itsuki, Gendai Business (Kodansha), 2021 Heisuiroku and the eight-shaku mountain women, the Watanabe no Tsuna parallel, the guardian-of-a-boy image
- Japanese Urban Legends from the Slit-Mouthed Woman to Kisaragi Station, Nippon.com, 2019 Iikura Yoshiyuki on the first wave, its 1995 decline, and Hasshaku-sama among the 2channel-born legends
- 「のびあがり」と「八尺様」: 電承説話の身体と妖怪, Itō Ryūhei, Sekenbanashi Kenkyū 21 (2013), CiNii Research the folklorist's paper pairing her with the nobiagari, and the term denshō setsuwa
- Nobiagari, Yokai.com the Shikoku yokai that stretches as you look up and is escaped by looking down
- How Capcom Designed Resident Evil Village's Lady Dimitrescu, IGN, 2021 art director Tomonori Takano naming Hasshaku-sama among her inspirations
FAQ
What does Hachishakusama mean?
Hachishakusama (八尺様) means roughly “the honorable eight-shaku one.” Hachi is eight, shaku is an old unit of about 30.3 centimeters, and sama is a respectful title, so the name is her height, about 2.4 meters. In Japanese it is read hasshaku-sama.
Is Hachishakusama real?
No. She first appeared in an anonymous first-person story posted to 2channel’s occult board on 26 August 2008, in a thread where people traded scary stories told as true. The post names no town, and no record of her exists before it. What is real is how far the story traveled.
How tall is Hachishakusama?
Eight shaku, about 2.42 meters, or just under eight feet. In the story the narrator first sees her hat moving along the top of a hedge about two meters high.
Why does Hachishakusama say “po po po”?
The story never explains it. The narrator hears a human-sounding “po po po” that could also be “bo,” and his grandmother calls it her laugh, in a voice like a man’s. It tells you she is near. Worse, she can also imitate your family’s voices.
How do you survive Hachishakusama?
In the story the boy carries a paper talisman, spends the night in a room with covered windows, salt in the corners and a Buddhist statue, and ignores the familiar voice at the door until 7 a.m. Then his relatives drive him out with his eyes shut. Four jizō statues at the boundary roads keep her from following.
Was Lady Dimitrescu inspired by Hachishakusama?
Partly. In a February 2021 IGN interview, Tomonori Takano, art director of Resident Evil Village, named the Japanese urban legend of Hasshaku-sama as one inspiration for Lady Dimitrescu, together with Elizabeth Báthory and Morticia Addams.