Hasshaku-sama

A very tall woman from a ghost story posted anonymously on the Japanese message board 2channel on 26 August 2008. Nippon.com lists her among internet horror tales that have reached a wide public.

Japanese and English Wikipedia both date Hasshaku-sama to an anonymous ghost story put up on 26 August 2008 in a thread on 2channel's occult board where users collected frightening stories. The name covers both the story and the creature in it. English Wikipedia says her origins are otherwise unknown.

Nippon.com, in a 2019 piece quoting folklorist Iikura Yoshiyuki, lists Hasshaku-sama, a huge woman over two metres tall, with the kunekune and the kotoribako box as tales that have reached a wide public. Iikura says most of these started as internet horror stories and grew too long to pass on by word of mouth.

In 2022 the Asahi Shimbun's book site interviewed Yoshida Yūki about his book Gendai Kaidan-kō. The interviewer sums up its argument: the unsettling women in the tales of Kashima-san, kuchisake-onna, Teke Teke and Hasshaku-sama project the image of a mother who kills her child, a theme tied to the red woman who often appears in modern ghost stories.

IGN reports that Takano began the design of Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village from the idea of a bewitching vampire. The influences included the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, Anjelica Huston's Morticia Addams, and Hasshaku-sama, spelled Hashaku-sama in the interview.