I have nothing to add here but you’ve got to check out these macabre woodblock newspaper prints this ost from Pink Tentacle. I especially love that these were a prominent form of mass entertainment.

For a brief period in the mid-1870s, artistic woodblock prints known as “newspaper nishiki-e” were a popular form of mass entertainment in Japan. These colorful prints fed the public’s enormous appetite for sensationalism by retelling shocking stories culled from the major newspapers of the day. The Meiji government swiftly cracked down on the publishers of these “unofficial” sources of information, causing them to disappear as quickly as they had appeared, but not before hundreds of issues had been published and circulated around Japan. While newspaper nishiki-e most often retold stories of scandalous or heinous crimes, they occasionally presented accounts of monsters, ghosts and mysterious happenings, such as the ones included here.

Here’s the description of the one pictured above:

This print shows the ghost of a disgruntled candy store owner who grew ill and died after falling deep in debt to his neighbor, the owner of a successful tempura restaurant. The ghost has returned to settle the score.

There are eight others over at the original post.