Katsushika Hokusai made five ghost prints in his seventies for an unfinished series called One Hundred Ghost Stories, around 1830. The series draws on a Japanese party game in which friends told frightening tales in a room lit by a hundred candles, blowing one out after each story, and a spirit was said to appear when the last went dark. The prints show a maid named Okiku, who was thrown down a well and returned as a worm, and a laughing cannibal that combines a jealous horned demon with a mountain witch. Other scenes include a husband's murdered wife who curses him from beyond the grave. Hokusai turned from landscapes to this darker world in these late works.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.