Whipping Tom was a mysterious man who wandered the streets of London in 1680. He shocked 17th-century society by lunging at women, lifting their dresses, and spanking their bums while shouting “Spanko!” before escaping capture. At one point, things got so bad that armed men would patrol the streets dressed as women in the hopes of drawing him out.Almost 200 years before Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of London, there was a much more hilarious monster terrifying society. He was given the name of Whipping Tom because this monster’s modus operandi was the spanking of young women’s bums. He would allegedly attack without warning, spanking ladies on the bottom while shouting “Spanko!” and then elude all attempts to capture him. He was so quick and slippery that some people even claimed he used supernatural powers in his escape. It was this sort of behavior that earned him the title “The enemy of milk wenches’ bums everywhere.”
Mostly Tom would use his hands to carry out a spanking but sometimes he would use a birch rod, attacking quickly, tipping them over his knee so that they couldn’t get away as he gleefully laid a smackdown on their derrieres and then be gone in an instant while his victim sat there confused as to what had just happened.
"Whipping Tom" was the nickname given to two sexual attackers in London and the nearby village of Hackney. Both would attack women walking alone and beat them on the buttocks. While there is some evidence that an earlier attacker in around 1672 was also nicknamed "Whipping Tom" and carried out similar attacks on women, the earliest recorded attacker of this nature was active in central London in 1681. He would approach unaccompanied women in alleys and courtyards and spank them on the buttocks, before fleeing. The inability of the authorities to apprehend the offender caused complaints about the ineffectiveness of London's constabulary, and prompted vigilante patrols in the affected areas. A local haberdasher and his accomplice were captured and tried for the attacks.
Whipping Tom: The Weird, Serial Spanker Of London
In Japanese Buddhism, jikininki ("human-eating ghosts"; pronounced shokujinki in modern Japanese) , also called wendigo are the spirits of greedy, selfish or impious individuals who are cursed after death to seek out and eat human corpses. They do this at night, scavenging for newly dead bodies and food offerings left for the dead. They sometimes also loot the corpses they eat for valuables, which they use to bribe local officials to leave them in peace. Nevertheless, jikininki lament their condition and hate their repugnant cravings for dead human flesh.
Often, jikininki are said to look like decomposing cadavers, perhaps with a few inhuman features such as sharp claws or glowing eyes. They are a horrifying sight, and any mortal who views one finds himself or herself frozen in fear. However, several stories give them the ability to magically disguise themselves as normal human beings and even to lead normal "lives" by day.
Jikininki are preta of the 26th class in Japanese Buddhism. They are also sometimes considered a form of rakshasa or gaki ("hungry ghosts"). In the latter case, they may be freed from their deplorable existence through remembrances and offerings or through the prayers of a holy and/or righteous man that has a truly holy spirit and has done nothing to dishonor his or her family.
Jikininki Demon - One of Worst Mythological Demons
Rokurokubi which are related to Nure-onna are yokai found in Japanese folklore. They look like normal human beings by day, but at night they gain the ability to stretch their necks to great lengths. They can also change their faces to those of terrifying Oni to better scare mortals.
In their daytime human forms, rokurokubi often live undetected and may even take mortal spouses. Many rokurokubi become so accustomed to such a life that they take great pains to keep their demonic forms secret. They are tricksters by nature, however, and the urge to frighten and spy on human beings is hard to resist. Some rokurokubi thus resort to revealing themselves only to drunkards, fools, the sleeping, or the blind in order to satisfy these urges. Other rokurokubi have no such compunctions and go about frightening mortals with abandon. A few, it is said, are not even aware of their true nature and consider themselves normal humans. This last group stretch their necks out while asleep in an involuntary action; upon waking up in the morning, they find they have weird dreams regarding seeing their surroundings in unnatural angles.
According to some tales, rokurokubi were once normal human beings but were transformed by karma for breaking various precepts of Buddhism. Often, these rokurokubi are truly sinister in nature, eating people or drinking their blood rather than merely frightening them. These demonic rokurokubi often have a favored prey, such as others who have broken Buddhist doctrine or human men.
Tanuki often imitated rokurokubi when playing practical jokes on people. In a folktale collected for his book, Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn, the nukekubi is misidentified as rokurokubi, an error that also appears in the Fighting Fantasy book, Sword of the Samurai, and in Stephen Dedman's novel The Art of Arrow-Cutting. The nukekubi is a similar but slightly different being from Japanese folklore belonging to the same overall class; instead of necks that stretch, the nukekubi have heads that completely detach. The book Even More Short & Shivery by Robert D. San Souci has a tale called Rokuro-kubi, but, again, the descriptions in the book are nukekubi, not rokurokubi.
