Rokuro-kubi are yōkai that used to be ordinary human beings, but somehow they have come to suffer
from a ghostly affliction that allows their heads to float away from their bodies, their necks stretching in
between like a fleshy garden hose, sometimes indefinitely. Usually they are women.

The rokuro-kubi's condition is sometimes brought about by a curse, and sometimes as a supernatural
manifestation of the person's desires. The neck-stretching almost always happens at night, often while the
rokuro-kubi sleeps, and the freed head may wander through the house perpetrating such obake-esque
mischief as sucking the life energy out of people and animals, and licking up the oil of andon lamps.
Some of them simply wind up using lintels high above doors and windows as their pillows, and scaring
the living daylights out of anyone who happens to peek in on them.

Rokuro-kubi women are often unlucky in love, frightening their new husbands away when the men discover
their wives' unnerving nocturnal abilities.