Since we’re coming upon winter (in the northern hemisphere at least), I’m going to take a moment to discuss a decidedly winter-themed creature. That creature is the Japanese yuki onna.

Fun fact: yuki onna literally means “snow woman.” It also has a bunch of different names depending on where you are in Japan, but for simplicity’s sake I’m going with the above.

Yuki onna are youkai. The word s typically translated as “demon” in English, but this isn’t really accurate, since it refers to a wide variety of Japanese mythological critters. A more accurate translation would be something like “spirit.” In some versions, they’re actually the vengeful ghosts of women who froze to death. Because Japan loves them some vengeful spirits.

Anyway, yuki onna take the form of supernaturally beautiful women wth long black hair, either depicted wearing a white kimono or just buck ass naked. As their name suggests, they typically show up during snowstorms.

They also like to murder people, typically young men. This is either through draining their life force, luring them away to die of exposure, or just outright freezing them wth magic. One way that shows up in a lot of tales is they’ll show up with a kid that they try to get passersby to hug. Anyone who touches the kid then gets instafrozen.

There are apparently ways around this, though. In one story, a traveling warrior manages to bet around this by holding a tanto (a type of short sword) between his teeth. Not sure how this kept him from becoming a human ice cube, but it does.

This isn’t to say that yuki onna are always malicious. In fact, there are quite a few stories where dudes end up marrying them. One of them involves a yuki onna who marries a guy, who gets confused that she refuses to bathe. So one day he forces her, and she basically melts. Which, yeah, that was kind of a dick move on his part.

Another story in this vein involves a boy who’s spared by a yuki onna, on the promise that he tells no one about their encounter. The boy grows up, gets married, and has kids, then one day tells his wife about this crazy thing that happened to him when he was a kid. His wife actually turns out to be the yuki onna in question, and is less than pleased that he broke his promise. She just leaves, though, for the sake of their kids, but tells him that if he’s ever a dick to them, she’ll come back and straight up murder his ass.