Japanese folklore is full of trees that are not entirely trees. The Edo-period yokai compilers — Toriyama Sekien chief among them — catalogued an entire forest of them: trees that grew faces, trees that whispered, trees that swallowed travellers whole. The Hangman Tree belongs to that family — a great gnarled thing standing alone in a misty mountain wood, its long sinuous branches drooping in loops like ready-tied ropes.
The story is always told the same way. A traveller takes a shortcut through the forest at dusk. The path narrows. The wind drops. He looks up and sees the tree — older than the others, taller, somehow watching. As he passes beneath it, a branch dips. By the time the next pilgrim comes through the wood, there is nothing of the first traveller to find but a pair of straw sandals beneath the roots.
In the older Edo prints the tree is shown with faces in its bark — sad, watchful, half-human — said to be the spirits of those it has taken, absorbed slowly into the wood. It is closely related to the Jinmenju, the 'human-faced tree' of Chinese and Japanese miscellany, whose fruit ripened into laughing human heads that fell from the branches when they had finished giving their one short laugh.
Like most yokai, the Hangman Tree is a moral story standing on roots. Don't take the lonely path at dusk. Don't travel the mountain road alone. Don't underestimate the old wood — Shinto already taught that a tree old enough has a kami in it, and a kami that has been ignored or wronged for long enough turns into something else.
Wear the Hangman Tree and you wear the oldest fear of every Japanese mountain forest: that the trees were here first, that they remember, and that some of them are still hungry.