The sound of a woman wailing in the lane outside your house at midnight. A horseman with no head riding down toward your door. A stranger at the bedside of your dying grandmother who is not, it turns out, a stranger at all.
Part 1 of this pair covered the figures who do death’s administrative work — the jackal-headed judge, the ferryman on the river, the winged messenger, the four-eyed hound, the armored woman on the battlefield, the three sisters at the foot of the world-tree. Those psychopomps were functionaries. They had jobs. They operated within a cosmology that told them exactly what to do.
This half is different. These are the figures humans invented when the bureaucracy ran out — when death stopped being a cosmic office with ledgers and stamps and became simply what it is: a thing that comes for you. They don’t process you, sort you, or ferry you. They announce you, pursue you, rule you, mock you, prey on you, collect you. Their energy is not administrative. It is appetite. Here are the last six archetypes: the wailer in the dark, the rider in the hunt, the ruler on the dark throne, the loa in the top hat, the predator who mistakes the dying for prey, and the hooded figure in black who came for everyone after the Black Death.
The Wailer: Death Announced by Sound
Some psychopomps don’t arrive — they are heard.
The Irish Banshee is the archetype. She is a fairy-woman who attaches herself to specific families — traditionally those whose surnames begin with O’ or Mac — and keens outside the house when one of them is about to die. The wail is not a warning in the sense that you can act on it. The death has already been decided somewhere else. The Banshee is the announcer, not the agent. Her cry is high, sustained, drawn-out, and by all accounts unmistakable — anyone who has heard it once knows what it is the second time. The oldest Irish sources describe her with red-rimmed eyes from weeping for every member of the family who has ever died.
The Scottish equivalent is quieter and, if anything, more unnerving. The Bean-Nighe — the “washer-woman” — is encountered at the edge of a stream, usually at dusk, scrubbing at a pile of blood-soaked clothes. The clothes belong to the people about to die. If you see her before she sees you and can approach quietly enough to seize her, tradition says she will grant you three questions — one of which can be whose shrouds she is washing. The Bean-Nighe is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth without being churched. She is doomed to wash until the date her life should have ended. Some traditions say she has a single pendulous breast, and a man bold enough to suck it can claim her as a foster-mother and extract favors.
The Morrigan is the war-version of the same archetype. She appears above battlefields as a crow or raven, croaking over doomed warriors before they fall. Cú Chulainn, the hero of the Ulster Cycle, sees her wash his bloody armor in a ford — the Bean-Nighe motif applied to the greatest Irish warrior — and knows immediately that he is going to die.
Slavic tradition invented the most musical version. The souls of the dead in old Slavic belief flew as birds to a realm called Vyrai, the bird-otherworld somewhere south of the living world. And certain bird-women flew back. The Sirin is a bird with the face and breast of a woman whose song is so beautiful that listeners forget themselves and die. The Alkonost lays its eggs on the shore and her song, too, kills — though her song is understood as a warning for the end of things rather than a lure. The Gamayun speaks prophecies about death and disaster in a voice humans can only sometimes bear to hear. The Slavic death-signal is not a scream. It is a melody.
Japan extended the same logic in a direction no European tradition did. The Goryō are the vengeful spirits of powerful people — emperors, ministers, generals — who died under injustice and whose rage now causes plague, famine, earthquake, and political disaster. A Goryō does not wail at a single window. A Goryō announces death at the scale of an entire city. The cult of Goryō-shinkō emerged in the Heian period as an attempt to placate them through shrines and festivals. If enough people were dying of smallpox, someone of sufficient rank must be angry — and mass death was how they told you so.
The Rider and the Hunt
A horse in motion is one of the loudest things a pre-modern human ever heard. It should not surprise us how many death-spirits ride.
The Dullahan is the Irish version. He rides a black horse (or drives a coach), carries his own head under his arm, and stops outside the home of whoever is about to die to call their name. His whip is made from a human spine. Gold is the only thing that repels him — a coin thrown in his path will make him turn away. His horse — the Dullahan’s Horse — has six eyes and breathes fire, and the road smokes under its hooves.
The Breton Ankou is grimmer and more procedural. He drives a cart with ungreased wheels that can be heard creaking down country lanes at night, and he is accompanied by two skeletal attendants who load the bodies onto the back. The unique Breton detail: the Ankou of each parish is the soul of the last person to die there in the previous year. The job passes on. Every year a new Ankou begins his twelve-month shift, collecting from his own neighbors until someone replaces him. It is the only psychopomp tradition that conscripts its dead to drive the cart for their living former neighbors.
The Welsh gave us the Wild Hunt in its earliest attested form. Gwyn ap Nudd is the king of Annwn who leads a spectral cavalcade across the night sky during winter, hunting souls. Alongside him — or sometimes as a rival — rides Arawn, the other Welsh otherworld-king, with his hounds the Cŵn Annwn. And there is Mallt-y-Nos — “Matilda of the Night” — a Norman noblewoman who loved hunting so much that she vowed she would continue to hunt after death even if God denied her heaven. She got her wish. She now rides in the Hunt forever, weeping, because she can never stop.
Scottish folk belief preserved an even darker formation. The Sluagh is the “host of the unforgiven dead” — souls who were denied heaven, hell, and fairyland and now fly in a great wheeling mass from the west, always from the west. They enter houses through any window facing their direction of travel. A dying person should never be left alone near an open west-facing window, because the Sluagh will fight to claim the soul before the body has fully finished with it.
English folk tradition gave the Hunt Herne the Hunter, an antlered ghost of Windsor Forest whose appearance in oak trees foretells the death of kings. American tradition localized the horseman entirely to New York’s Hudson Valley as the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow — a Hessian soldier decapitated by a cannonball who rides each night looking for his head. Irving borrowed, knowingly, from the Dullahan. The Americanization made the rider darker in one specific way: he is not a psychopomp on assignment. He is a dead man pursuing his own unfinished errand, and anyone who gets in the way becomes a secondary victim.
And in the Pacific, the Nightmarchers — the Huaka’i Pō of Hawaiian tradition — are processions of spectral warriors who walk ancient trails at night, carrying torches and chanting. They march the old routes their living versions marched. A living person who sees them is supposed to lie face-down in the dirt, eyes closed, and whisper the name of an ancestor who might be among them. Anyone who looks up, or who is not claimed by an ancestor in the column, is taken. The Nightmarchers are the only psychopomps in this list whose danger is contingent on where you were standing when they walked past.
The Dark Throne: Queens and Kings of the Below
A psychopomp delivers. Someone has to receive.
The oldest attested underworld sovereign is Ereshkigal, the Sumerian queen of Irkalla, the Mesopotamian land of the dead. Ereshkigal was bound to her throne — she could not leave, could not ascend to attend the banquets of the other gods, could not marry into the upper pantheon without special negotiation. When her sister Inanna descended to claim the underworld, Ereshkigal had her stripped, killed, and hung from a hook. When Inanna was eventually resurrected, a substitute had to be sent down in her place. No one goes up from Irkalla without someone else going down. Ereshkigal’s consort is Nergal, a plague-god who originally came down to apologize for an insult and was offered the throne as a marriage bargain. The Mesopotamian underworld is a closed system: a fixed number of thrones, a fixed population of the dead, and a queen who has been in grief since the beginning of time.
Japanese cosmology gave the role to Izanami, the creator goddess who died giving birth to the fire-god and descended to Yomi, the land of the dead. Her husband Izanagi followed her to bring her back, but in the dark he looked at her face and saw she was rotting, her body crawling with the thunder-gods of putrefaction. He fled in horror. Izanami, enraged at being seen in that state, chased him — sending first the Yomotsu-shikome, the hags of Yomi, and then an army of the dead. Izanagi sealed the entrance with a great boulder. Izanami, from the other side, swore to kill a thousand of Izanagi’s living subjects every day. Izanagi replied that he would create fifteen hundred new lives daily to replace them. The population of the world is the daily difference between what Izanami takes and what Izanagi makes.
The Maya developed the most theatrical underworld in any mythology. Vucub Came and Hun Came — “Seven Death” and “One Death” — are the two principal lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. Xibalba is not a dark void; it is a bureaucracy of cruelty, staffed by twelve lords each of whom presides over a different form of suffering. There is Flying Scab and Gathered Blood (who sicken travelers’ blood), Demon of Pus and Demon of Jaundice (who cause suppurating wounds), Bone Staff and Skull Staff (who reduce people to bones). The Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh survive six houses of trials in Xibalba — the House of Darkness, the House of Knives, the House of Cold — before defeating Vucub Came and Hun Came and establishing the order in which death now happens.
The Turkic and Siberian world gave the role to Erlik, the dark brother of the creator god Ülgen. Erlik rules the underworld (tamu) from a palace of black mud and iron, surrounded by the souls of the wicked whom he tortures. In shamanic tradition, his demons are the abaasy — predators who cause illness by dragging pieces of the soul down to Erlik’s domain. A shaman’s job is to descend, negotiate, and retrieve what Erlik has taken.
The Aztec underworld is Mictlan, presided over by Mictlantecuhtli and his consort Mictecacihuatl. The journey of the ordinary dead through Mictlan takes four years — eight trials, each more hostile than the last, including a river of blood, eight deserts, a place where obsidian winds cut the skin from the body. The dog-psychopomp Xolotl guides souls across the rivers, but the deserts must be crossed alone. Itzpapalotl, the “obsidian butterfly,” is one of Mictlan’s more feared residents — a skeleton-winged queen who devours souls that fail their trials.
Even the Greek Hades and Persephone belong in this list despite appearing benign by comparison. Hades is the receiver rather than the psychopomp — the stern, wealthy, reclusive god who keeps the books of the dead. Persephone is the queen who was abducted into the role and now divides her year between the underworld and the living world. The Greek underworld is less cruel than Xibalba or Yomi, but it is still a closed country. Once you are in, you are in.
The common element: every culture that imagined a psychopomp also imagined someone for the psychopomp to deliver to. The afterlife has a landlord.
The Ghede and the Top Hat: Death as Trickster
Haitian Vodou did something no other tradition quite managed. It made death funny.
Baron Samedi — the most famous of the Lwa — is the loa of death, resurrection, and sexual appetite, and the leader of the Ghede, the spirit-family of the dead. He wears a black top hat, a tailcoat, dark glasses with one lens missing, and face-paint resembling a skull. He drinks rum infused with twenty-one hot peppers, smokes cigars, curses constantly, and makes extremely crude jokes at anyone unwise enough to stand in his way. Possession by Baron Samedi during a ceremony is recognizable by the sudden switch from ordinary speech into vulgar humor and obscene gesture. He presides over the moment when a soul leaves the body; without him digging the grave, no one stays dead, and no one who is meant to die gets where they are going.
What Vodou grasped that other traditions did not is that death is not solely a matter of dignity. It is also undignified — embarrassing, bodily, absurd. People die on the toilet. People die mid-sentence. The corpse does humiliating things before the body is prepared. Baron Samedi is the theology of that reality. He is a psychopomp who has made peace with death’s comedy, which means he is a psychopomp who can be negotiated with in ways the grim reapers of other traditions cannot. If someone is dying and you want them to live, you petition Baron Samedi, because he controls the dirt of the grave. And the Baron can sometimes be bribed or flattered out of digging.
The broader Ghede family — the Guédé loa — include Maman Brigitte (his wife, patroness of cemeteries), Ghede Nibo (the loa of those who died young and violently), Ghede Masaka (the cross-dressing guardian of the graveyards), and dozens of others. Possessions by the Ghede during Fet Gede — the Haitian day of the dead — are characterized by laughter, obscenity, and boundary-breaking behavior that would be impossible in any other context. The Ghede make jokes about race, gender, class, and death itself. The Haitian theological intuition is that death, taken too seriously, destroys the living. The Ghede are there to ensure death does not get the last laugh.
There is a distant echo in the Yoruba Ajogun — the “warriors” of destruction, eight personified calamities including Death (Iku), Disease (Arun), Loss (Ofo), and Paralysis (Egba) — but the Ajogun are enemies of humanity rather than mediators with death. The specific genius of Vodou was that the loa of death is one of us — a trickster with a rum bottle who happens to dig the graves.
When the Guide Becomes a Predator
In every cosmology with psychopomps, there are figures who look like psychopomps but whose role has gone wrong. The escort becomes the ambusher. The guide becomes the hunter.
The Raven Mocker is the most specific and terrifying example in Cherokee tradition. It is not a spirit. It is a living witch — usually an old one — who has learned a forbidden art. When the Raven Mocker hears that someone is dying, it takes the shape of a raven, flies to the sick person’s house, and lands on the roof making the distinctive croaking that gives it its name. Invisibly, it steals the dying person’s remaining years of life and adds them to its own — which is why Cherokee tradition holds that ancient witches are witches who have been stealing lifetime for decades. The only defense is a medicine man who stays at the dying person’s bedside and can see the Raven Mocker coming. If the medicine man can name it, the Raven Mocker will die within seven days, its stolen years expiring all at once.
The Ojibwe Baykok is the skeletal, desiccated spirit of a warrior who died dishonorably — who broke the warrior’s code, or was killed in an ambush without a chance to fight back. The Baykok hunts living warriors with an invisible bow and arrows made of shadow. Its hunger is infinite because it has no stomach to fill, only a rattling cavity where the belly used to be. It cannot be fought. The only known protection is to be a warrior of sufficient skill and honor that the Baykok cannot find a lawful opening.
Mexican folk tradition knows La Llorona, the weeping woman, who drowned her own children in a river in a fit of jealousy and was denied heaven until she could find them. She cannot find them. She takes, instead, any children she encounters at riverbanks at dusk. La Llorona is what happens when a grief-psychopomp loses track of whose death she is supposed to be attending. She announces death and she collects — but her collection is indiscriminate and her grief is inexhaustible.
Mesopotamia had the most complete rogue-psychopomp system. The Gallu were demons — seven of them — originally dispatched by the gods to drag specific souls down to Irkalla. But they were known to grab anyone, and they were the demons who seized Dumuzi to fulfill Inanna’s substitute-debt to her sister Ereshkigal. The Edimmu and Ekimmu are another category entirely: the restless dead who failed to receive proper funerary rites and who now prey on the living out of hunger for the offerings they never received. They pass through walls, drink blood, cause illness. The line between “psychopomp” and “predator” in Mesopotamia is the line between the demon who obeys orders and the dead person who did not get a burial.
Japanese tradition ends the pattern on its most memorable image. The Yomotsu-shikome — the “hags of Yomi” — are what Izanami sent up after Izanagi when he fled the underworld. They are the underworld’s security detail, dispatched to retrieve what should not have left. They are pursued until Izanagi throws down a comb (which becomes a grove of bamboo they must stop to eat) and a peach (which repels them), and finally seals the entrance with a boulder. The Yomotsu-shikome are the only psychopomps in world mythology whose explicit job is not to deliver the dead to the underworld but to recover the living who accidentally got too close.
These are the figures every culture invented and then tried to keep at the margins of its theology. They are what happens when the system designed to process death becomes the appetite of death itself.
The Reaper in Black
The hooded skeleton with the scythe and the black robe is the youngest figure in this entire article. He is also by far the most widely recognized. He appeared during the fourteenth century, in Western Europe, and he was made out of mathematics.
The Grim Reaper emerged between 1347 and 1353, during and immediately after the Black Death, when the population of Europe lost somewhere between a third and half of its inhabitants in under a decade. Plague disrupted every previous image of dying. Priests died administering last rites. Physicians died visiting patients. The anointed and the unanointed died with identical speed and in identical agony. The existing psychopomps — angels, saints, the personal Christ of late-medieval devotion — could not account for the scale. Europe needed a figure for death that could kill everyone, indifferently, without judgment, at industrial pace. The scythe came from the farming image — death harvests. The hood came from the monastic habit. The skeleton came from the mass graves that were, by 1350, the most commonly-observed state of human remains in any European city.
The Reaper is a post-theological psychopomp. He does not weigh your heart. He does not sort you into Valhalla or Hel. He does not escort you anywhere specific. He arrives, he takes, and he does not explain. He is what you get when the machinery of judgment has broken down and what remains is only the arithmetic.
The closest earlier antecedent is the Slavic Marzanna, the goddess of winter and death, whose effigy was traditionally drowned or burned at the end of winter to exorcise the cold season. Marzanna is older than the Reaper, but she shares the essential feature: death as a seasonal force rather than a personal fate. You do not die because Marzanna has weighed your deeds. You die because it is winter.
Japan’s Shinigami is a more recent invention — the word itself is Edo-period — but it functions as the Japanese equivalent of the Reaper in modern media. Traditional Japanese death theology had no unified death-god; you might be met by a Buddhist bodhisattva, a local kami, or a vengeful spirit. The Shinigami filled a gap created by contact with Western imagery. It is what Japan imported when its own psychopomps became too regionally specific for a modernizing, unified culture.
Modern Anglophone folklore has let the psychopomp disintegrate further. The Vanishing Hitchhiker is the ghost of a young woman who flags down drivers on rainy nights, accepts a ride home, and disappears from the passenger seat before the destination — often revealed to have died on the same road years or decades before. She is a psychopomp with no cosmology behind her. She has no destination she is leading anyone to. She is just a presence the road produces.
The general vocabulary has followed. Contemporary ghost stories speak of revenants, ghosts, spectres, and wraiths — four near-synonyms for “spirit of the dead” that have no shared theology between them. The Reaper collects, but what he collects becomes a vague posthumous category. In medieval Christendom, to die was to go to judgment. In modern secular imagination, to die is to become a ghost — which is to say, to become a being without a defined destination.
This is the endpoint of the evolution. Every archetype in Part 1 had somewhere to take you. Every archetype in Part 2 is progressively less interested in the question. The Reaper takes, and the ghost drifts.
What the Pattern Reveals
Twelve archetypes across the two halves of this series; something near a hundred entries across the site; twenty cultural traditions represented. One core insight sits underneath all of it.
The psychopomps of Part 1 are a cosmology. The psychopomps of Part 2 are a dread. The Egyptian soul-weighing courtroom, the Greek ferryman, the Norse choosing-field, the Hindu dog-pair — these are figures a priest could explain. They belong to theological systems, with their internal logic and their written sources and their professional interpreters. The Banshee, the Dullahan, the Ankou, the Raven Mocker, the Reaper — these are figures a grandmother explained to you at bedtime. They belong to folk experience: to the actual felt reality of a death in the household, a knock in the night, an empty seat at the table.
This split is not regional. Most cultures in this series produced figures in both halves. The Irish gave us Morrigan and Banshee but also the judges and fate-hands implicit in the wider Celtic literature. The Greeks gave us Charon and Hermes, but they also gave us Thanatos and the Erinyes — figures that shade into the predator category. The Japanese gave us Izanami (a ruler), Kṣitigarbha (a guide), Shinigami (a reaper), Yomotsu-shikome (a predator), and Goryō (a wailer). The same culture produces both the bureaucracy and the nightmare, because every culture needs both.
What the bureaucracy says is: “Death happens in an order, and that order is knowable.” What the nightmare says is: “Death happens, and the order we invented to understand it is a thin veneer over something much older and much hungrier.” Humans need both. We need to tell ourselves that there is a scale, a ferryman, a choosing; and we also need to admit, in the back of the mind, that there is also a wailing in the night and a horseman at the gate. The honest answer — the answer every deep mythology gives — is that there is no one psychopomp. There are twenty. They are doing different jobs. Some of them are negotiable and some of them are not. Some of them have offices and some of them have hungers. And the moment your life ends, one of them, from somewhere in the catalogue, is waiting.
The remarkable thing is that human beings, across every continent and every millennium, have refused to believe they would be going alone.
Explore More on Gods and Monsters
The wailers and bird-women: Banshee · Bean-Nighe · Morrigan · Sirin · Alkonost · Gamayun · Vyrai · Goryō
The Hunt and its riders: Wild Hunt · Dullahan · Dullahan’s Horse · Ankou · Mallt-y-Nos · Gwyn ap Nudd · Arawn · Cŵn Annwn · Sluagh · Herne the Hunter · Headless Horseman · Nightmarchers
Rulers of the dead: Ereshkigal · Nergal · Izanagi and Izanami · Vucub Came and Hun Came · Erlik · Mictlan · Itzpapalotl · Hades · Persephone · Tezcatlipoca · Camazotz · Xiwangmu
Haitian Vodou and the African diaspora: Baron Samedi · Lwa · Ajogun
The predators and the restless dead: Raven Mocker · Baykok · La Llorona · Gallu · Edimmu · Ekimmu · Yomotsu-shikome · Shikome · Soucouyant · Tibicena · Hupia · Canotila
The reaper and the modern vernacular: Grim Reaper · Marzanna · Shinigami · The Vanishing Hitchhiker · Revenant · Ghost · Spectre · Wraith · Draugr · Gjenganger · Myling · Strigoi · Jiangshi · Yūrei · Jikininki · Onryō · Preta · Dybbuk · Plague Spirit
Related overview entries: Psychopomp · Kali · Mahakala · Dakini · Hecate
Mythology guides: Celtic · Norse · Slavic · Japanese · Mesopotamian · Aztec · Mayan · Caribbean · Yoruba · Hawaiian · Polynesian