Funayūrei are Japanese ghosts believed to be the vengeful spirits of those who died at sea. As the souls of the shipwrecked, they try to capsize or sink vessels and to draw the living over to their side. By legend they ladle water into a boat to fill it, so sailors keep ready a ladle with its bottom knocked out.
They are sometimes counted as a kind of umibōzu or as a living spirit, and can appear as an atmospheric ghost-fire. They come on rainy days, on new-moon or full-moon nights, and on stormy, fog-bound nights. The image of the drowned dead multiplying by pulling the living under shares a register with our world’s proliferation — the ended thing that does not end but spreads.