Berezkin Analytical Catalogue · Motif
H12A — Dead wife haunts her husband.
Source data for narratives and traditions is drawn from Berezkin’s Analytical Catalogue. If you use this data, please acknowledge and link to it: Ю.Е. Березкин, Е.Н. Дувакин. Тематическая классификация и распределение фольклорно-мифологических мотивов по ареалам. Аналитический каталог.
Summary of motif
OverviewThe wife dies, the husband comes for her, or he kills her himself for adultery; she turns into a monster and haunts him.
Berezkin category: Paradise Lost
This is of motif type Cosmology and etiology and is part of group 8, Queer and monstrous beings, creatures, objects and loci, folk beliefs related to particular phenomena and objects.
H12 has 3 other sub-motifs
RelatedH12. The living visit the afterlife to bring back the dead (except for texts about a shaman bringing back the soul of a sick person), or, without a specific goal, go there accompanied by or following in the footsteps of the recently deceased.
H12a. The wife dies, the husband comes for her, or he kills her himself for adultery; she turns into a monster and haunts him.
H12b. In the afterlife, the dead or demons feed on excrement.
H12c. The husband follows his dead wife into the afterlife, but cannot bring her back, or brings her back but loses her again.
Top 10 motifs with similar dispersal patterns
Phylogeny| Motif | Similarity | Motif summary |
|---|---|---|
| E30A | 96.70% | A man without a wife or a woman without a husband uses a substitute spouse made of wood or other material until a real spouse appears. |
| A32B | 96.04% | The figure or imprint of a toad or frog is visible on the lunar disc; the moon is associated with this animal. |
| F45B | 95.94% | A woman gives birth to a son conceived by (the rays or light of) the sun. |
| J57 | 95.43% | Conceived by the Sun, a woman gives birth to sons or a son; when they come of age, they visit their father. See motif J56. |
| L119 | 95.35% | The hero and antagonist fight in the air, tearing off each other's limbs. Usually, their allies on the ground try to preserve the limbs of their leader and destroy those of their enemy. |
| K27XY | 95.31% | Several men (animals), each of whom can do something better than the others, work together to accomplish difficult tasks set before them by their opponents. The competition is not intended to find a worthy suitor for a girl or to get rid of an unwanted suitor. Cf. motif K27o3 (Competition between two teams). |
| J52 | 94.91% | A character (usually zoomorphic and female) treacherously kills another. The victim's children take revenge by killing the murderer's children. |
| F72 | 94.39% | A woman asks a man to tie her up before intercourse so that it looks like she is being raped. |
| J53B | 94.39% | Two women live together, both have children. One of them leaves the house with the other, kills her, brings her meat home and starts cooking it. The children of the deceased notice their mother's breasts (in California â eyes or liver), or the mother's breasts themselves turn to her children. |
| F15 | 94.37% | The character sticks his plant-like penis out of the ground (provoking a woman to sit on it). |
See the 100 most similar distributions →
Map of motif dispersal
DistributionDrag the map to pan, use the scroll wheel to zoom — choose a texture or projection below
Traditions
4 recordedThis motif has been recorded in 4 traditions: Japanese folklore outside of Ryukyu, Navajo, Hopi, Tewa (San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Nambe; Hano), Tiwa (Taos, Picuris; Sandia, Isleta), Towa (Jemez)
If you wish to get access to data for projects and research, then please contact us, we do our best to help
How to cite: Fielder-White, J. (2026). The Folklore Database. https://folkloredatabase.com
0009-0006-1672-4451
Where applicable, users should also cite the relevant original sources, catalogues, and classification systems, including Berezkin, ATU, Thompson, and other cited authorities, alongside the page accessed and the last time accessed.
Editorial annotations and database enhancements Š Jonathan Fielder-White licensed under CC BY 4.0. Berezkin-derived narrative and metadata licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Full rights information can be found here.
All rights are reserved in the database structure, selection, arrangement, metadata, classifications, software, interface design, and original editorial content.
Important: The Folklore Database expressly reserves all rights in relation to text and data mining, automated extraction, scraping, machine learning, dataset creation, and the training, development, validation, or improvement of artificial intelligence technologies or systems. No part of this website or database may be scraped, copied, reproduced, harvested, downloaded in bulk, or otherwise used for AI training or commercial data extraction without prior written permission.
Designed and Developed by Jon Fielder-White.
Š 2024â2026 Crecganford / Jonathan Fielder-White. All rights reserved.