Onibi.

Onibi (鬼火, おにび) are among the broadest categories of supernatural light in Japanese tradition. They appear as drifting flames, small blazing globes, or clusters of pale fire hovering where no lamp should be. Unlike a single named creature with stable anatomy, onibi are defined by circumstance and meaning. The landscape provides the body. A graveyard, battlefield, or night road becomes the frame within which the fire is understood.

That gives onibi a strange authority. The light itself may be slight, but its presence rewrites the place around it. An empty field becomes a field of the dead, and a dark roadside becomes evidence that something unseen still moves through it. The fire is less a creature than a disclosure.

Onibi do not always attack. More often they hover, drift, mislead, or simply announce that the witness has entered a spiritually dangerous landscape. They may appear over graves, along funeral routes, or across ground linked to battle and violent death. In some tellings they draw travelers off the road or deepen fear until misjudgment does the damage that the fire itself never directly inflicts.

Because of that, onibi belong to the wider Japanese understanding that some places remember death materially. Fire is one of the ways that memory becomes visible. The encounter is unsettling not because the flames behave spectacularly, but because they suggest that the boundary between natural night and haunted night has already been crossed.