祟り（たたり）
Tatari
Harm sent by an offended spirit or god: a curse that follows a wrong.
Tatari is what you get for cutting the wrong tree, moving the wrong stone, or killing the wrong fox. It is not a spell cast by a person but a reaction, like a burn: a kami or a dead spirit has been offended and answers with sickness, fire, a run of deaths in a house. Before felling a tree more than a hundred years old, a woodcutter made offerings so that the kodama inside it would not answer this way.
The stone on the plain of Nasu that killed every bird and animal that touched it was the tatari of the fox Tamamo-no-Mae; the dog spirit of the inugami families was feared as a tatari that could be sent on purpose. Shrines to vengeful spirits exist to turn tatari into protection.
Related yokai
Kodama
木霊（こだま）
Kodama can mean both a presence within an old tree and the echo that returns from a mountain — but Japanese tradition gives it no single fixed body.
Tamamo-no-Mae
玉藻前（たまものまえ）
In the fifteenth-century tale, Tamamo-no-Mae is the most learned woman at the court of Retired Emperor Toba. He falls ill, divination names her as the cause, and she flees to Nasu as a fox. The killing stone came later.
Inugami
犬神（いぬがみ）
A possessing spirit of western Japan with no agreed-upon body — and a label that excluded entire households from marriage and community life.
Oiwa
お岩（おいわ）
Oiwa is the wronged wife of Tsuruya Nanboku's 1825 kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan — poisoned under the name of medicine, betrayed, and returning to pursue her husband. On stage, she emerges from a burning lantern.