Fox Fairies

Foxes are traditionally creatures of cunning, and according to Northern Chinese myth, when a fox reaches fifty years of age, it will be able to turn itself into a woman. At the age of a hundred, it will be able to transform into a young girl. At a thousand, it will become a celestial fox, and will have grown nine tails. They often appear in the form of girls to scholars studying in the evening, and seduce them. The scholar makes love to the girl, and finds that she has disappeared in the morning, but she returns once more in the evening to to do the same thing. The scholar finds himself getting weaker and weaker, until he learns from a Taoist that the girl is a fox who is sucking him dry to obtain the essence of immortality. In case you find yourself in a similar position, other signs that the girl is a fox fairy are her surname, which she will say to be Hu, meaning fox, and the fact that she never changes her clothes, but they never seem to get soiled. Fox fairies also lived invisibly with people in houses in old Beijing, with a fox official keeping watch in the tower at the eastern side gate of the city. Families who share these houses were to put out food for them and not complain when they made noise at night, or else the foxes would put filth in their food supply. The Japanese also believed in fox fairies, which they called koki teno and assumed human form by entering the bodies of mortals or by finding a skull in a cemetery and facing the North Star. They could be recognized by their fear of dogs.