'Killing Stone' of Japanese Legend Splits in Two

A famous stone in the mountains of central Honshu Island, Japan, has split in two, and that's an extremely bad omen, according to ancient Japanese mythology. Legends say that the Sessho-Seki—"Killing Stone"—contained the transformed corpse of Tamomo-no-Mae, a woman who was possessed by an evil nine-tailed fox spirit many centuries ago, the Guardian reports. The shapeshifting "kitsune" spirit, the most notorious of its kind, was part of a plot to kill Emperor Toba, legends say. According to folklore, the volcanic rock releases a poisonous gas that kills anybody who approaches it. The stone, which was declared a historical site in 1957, has played a major role in books and plays over the centuries.

Visitors to the slopes of Mount Nasu over the weekend were horrified to see the stone had split in two, but there have been no reports of escaped fox demons in the area. Instead, authorities believe water entered the rock through cracks that appeared in recent years and eroded it from the inside, reports the Guardian. Tourists flocked to the site after hearing news of the rock's split, with one saying they felt like they had "seen something that shouldn’t be seen," per IFL Science. The area is highly volcanic and the presence of poisonous gases may be behind some of the legends, Atlas Obscura notes. (More Japan stories.)