Hello and welcome back to the MOST amazing channel on the internet.
I am your host, Rebecca Felgate and today we are talking the Top 10 Grim Reaper Urban
Legend….. eeesh…it’s a spooky one!
I don’t care for Mr Reaper so much…but I suppose he slash she is the personification
of death…so that is understandable.
Today in this video we are looking at Grim Reaper Legends from All over the world …. That
creep travels far and wide.
Before we get into the video I want to ask you if you believe in the grim reaper?
I’m honestly not sure I do!
Let’s have a good Grim Reaper chat in the comments section down below!
OKAY 10 - The Japanese Legend of Shinigami
In Japan, legend has it that there are terrifying bringers of death by the name of Shinigami.
Talk of shinigami became popular when the East became influenced by the west.
Shinigami are numerous and are said to work in pairs to insure that a person does at the
correct time.
The legend has it that one day a man was contemplating suicide but Shinigami came to visit him to
tell him that it was not his time to die – that life is a candle, and people have differing
lengths.
One only dies when the candle burns out.
The Shinigami offer the man the ability to see Shinigami as well as some knowledge that
can make him rich – when visiting a sick person, if a Shinigami was at the end of the
bed, it meant they had a chance to live.
If they were at the head of the bed, they would surely die.
The man abused this knowledge and took money off families to cure their sick – knowing
full well whether they would live of die based on the location of the spirit.
One time, a family pleaded for him to save a doomed person with a Shinigami at the head
of their bed – offering him unfathomable riches.
The man decided to trick the Shinigami by rotating the bed.
They DID not like this….
To punish him, they burned his life candle to near end and told him he could save himself
by transferring his candle wick to another’s candle.
Unfortunately for the butterfingered trickster, he drops the candle and dies.
9 - The Irish Legend of the Bunworth Banshee In traditional Irish lore, the Banshee is
a female spirit who heralds the death of a family member by wailing or singing a lamenting
tune.
Descriptions of the banshee vary – she sometimes has long sweeping hair and wears a cloak – but
sometimes she is a haggard old woman.
Either way, she is a female crying… either tunefully or in wailing fits.
It is thought that seeing the Banshee is a clear omen and that death will visit the house
she mourns by, although it is hard to tell which family member will be struck.
It is said that if two or more Banshee are seen together, it marks the death of an important
or notable person.
The Banshee is rumoured to only laments only the descendants of the pure Milesian stock
of Ireland – so he O somethings and the Mac somethings and the Geraldine’s….
But plenty of other Irish stock fear the Banshee.
8 - The Mexican and Aztec Day of the Dead Mexicans kind of have a macabre humour when
it comes to death and I can respect that.
Anyone from Mexico watching?
The day of the dead is a big party in Mexico and they have La Calavera Catrina, who is
a female skeleton wearing a fancy hat and is basically the personification of death.
She stems back to the Aztec mythology of the Queen of Mictlan who keeps watch over the
bones of the dead and presides over festivals celebrating the afterlife – early forms
of the day of the dead festivities.
In Mexico the female figure of death will a silly hat kind of satirizes the whole notion
– if death is something you can pop a floral bonnet on and party with, it cant be so bad…right?
7 - The Dance Macabre The Dance Macabre is a death dance, said to
be performed by all souls on their way to the grave.
The Dance stems back to a Middle ages allegory for death in which bishops, kings, emperors,
children, labourers and the homeless would unite together and dance – highlighting
the universality of death.
The Dance Macarbe is depicted in a lot of artworks, with the first recorded painting
at the Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris.
Like the notion of the grim reaper – the Dance Macabre was thought up after the Black
Death era.
6 - Pesta The Norwegian Plague Hag Pesta is like the Norwegian grim reaper and
came around in Norse folklore following the horrifying Black Death.
The Black Death killed half of the population of Norway, so you can understand why the Norwegians
gave the brutal illness, the bringer of death, a human face so they could better understand
it.
Pesta was the character they invented, and these days she is applied considered to be
a general death omen, like the grim reaper.
She is characterised as being a haggered, ashen faced woman who wears a red skirt and
carries a broomstick and a rake.
The legend from the plague era goes that if you saw Pesta with a rake, there was some
home that some of your community would survive, but if she yielded a broom then there was
no hope for any of you.
These days Pesta is still talked about as a death bringer – like the grim reaper,
once she is seen, she is unavoidable.
5 - The Baltic Legend of Giltin?
In Lithuania, death comes old, ugly and with a curious blue nose and a deadly poisonous
tongue.
Giltin? was once beautiful, but she was trapped in a coffin for seven years…which frankly
is my worst nightmare.
The experience scarred her, as I imagine it would anybody, and she became the watch of
death on her release.
Her job is basically to wait for the right time to kill people, which she does by licking
them.
Great.
Signs that Giltiine is nearby include cracks in doors, ceilings and walls and disturbances
amongst animals.
Less urban legend, more ancient legend… but perhaps the origin of all subsequent death
related personifications…
4 - Thanos Thanos is like the original grim reaper…although
he was always depicted as a total hottie, which says a lot about the ways the Ancient
Greek’s viewed death versus the way that we view it now.
Back in Ancient Greek times, death was a passage to the afterlife and less feared than it is
now – humans have subsequently spent thousands of years trying to cheat death… but unsuccessfully.
We can fly, but we still have to die… and somewhere along the line death got uglier
to us.
Anyway, Thanos is a babe, but his name means to die.
He is the son of night and darkness and the brother of sleep.
He carried an extinguished torch and ushered people into the underworld.
3 - The Angel of Death Ah, the angel of death.
The Angel of death is a popular legend among the religious.
Heaven, Hell, angels, demons.
In Judaism, the Angel of death is called Azrael and he is constantly recording and erasing
names of people in a large book of the living.
In some descriptions he has four faces and four thousand wings.
Outside of Judaism, the angel of death has become a popular symbol, with many people
actually having claimed to have witness the figure.
The title was later bestowed upon one of the nastiest humans to ever live, the Nazi doctor
Joseph Mengele…who sadly was very very real.
2 - The Breton Ankou In Brittany in France, as well as some areas
of Cornwall and Wales in the UK, legends of the Ankou are rife.
Ankou is said to be a henchman of death and a protector of graveyards.
Although the Ankou is always depicted as an adult male wielding a scythe, the legend goes
that the position is filled by the last person to die in the parish that year – meaning
they change yearly.
Every Parish has its own Ankou, and if more people die than usual of a year, people will
say things like the Ankou that year was a particular fierce one.
One story says that three men saw an old man on a rickety cart one evening and they mocked
him mercilessly, throwing stones at him and breaking his wagon.
One of the men felt bad and returned to help him, fix the cart.
In the morning, his hair had turned a bright white, and the two who had not returned had
died.
So I have decided to make number one an actual real life grim reaper just to make things
scarier… get a load of this beaky menace cause he was REALZ.
1 - The Plague Doctor Ooooh the Plague Doctor really scares me!
This is also the only I guess factually affirmative legend on this list.
The Plague doctor is so scary because he basically looks like the best villain slash scariest
serial killer of all time.
An enigmatic figure in history, indeed, plague doctors wore full cloaks, gloves, goods and
a strange beaklike mask – with the beak stuffed with pleasant smelling substances
like mint or rose petals.
Back in the day people thought illness was spread by bad smells.
Because the plague doctor was tasked with treating the sick, he was seen as a grim reaper.
That and his nightmare inducing costume.
Most of those who contracted the plague died, so when the plague doctor was seen it really
was a symbol of death.
The doctor also was tasked with bringing out the dead – so most of the times he was seen
he really was a death omen.
SO that was the top 10 scary Grim
Reaper urban legends.