"The Nightly Weeping Rock" by Kuniyoshi (1796-1861)

A pregnant woman travelling from Nissaka to Kanaya to meet her long absent husband was set upon by a thief and murdered. Her blood fell on a nearby rock, which then became the abode of her spirit. Each night plaintive weeping and cries for help emanate from the rock.

In the print the ghost has just handed the baby to her husband. She tells him about the murder and how the baby was saved by the miraculous intervention of the Bodhisattva Kannon. Her husband subseqently takes revenge.

This story belongs to a category of ghost stories involving pregnant women. Generally in these stories, each night a woman appears at a small shop to buy rice candy and nothing else. After a number of nights of this, the shopkeeper gets suspicious and when the woman leaves the store he follows her. The woman leads him to a cemetary and dissappears into a grave. When the grave is opened, a newborn baby is found. The baby was kept alive by the ghost of his mother feeding him the rice candy.