Kowabana 6, p.20
Kowabana 6, page 20
But tarot cards don’t cause curses, while Kokkuri-san does. Black magic and communicating with the dead; it’s vague which of the two is more dangerous, but either way, Kokkuri-san is a dangerous game, at least according to what I’ve seen.
I was the committee member for the library at school, and one day I stayed behind after everyone had gone home to finish some work. When I was done, I went outside to wait for my friend who I promised to walk home with. I leaned against a tree by the front gate and waited for him to finish his club activities. I watched some girls playing Kokkuri-san in a nearby classroom while I waited.
The girls were gathered around a long desk, their fingers on the coin as they played and had fun. I couldn’t hear their conversation through the window glass, so I just watched them while playing my own soundtrack in my head. Then I suddenly saw “something” that looked like it entered one of the girls through the top of her head. I dunno how to describe it. Kinda hazy? Whatever it was, I couldn’t see it very clearly, but instinctively I knew that “something” had gone inside her. Although, considering what happened afterwards, maybe my memories were just a fabrication…
The girl suddenly stood up, confusing her friends, and then left the room. She didn’t grab her bag, so they probably assumed she was going to the toilet, but instead she left the building and walked right past me, out the school gates. I realised something was terribly wrong, and I watched her curiously.
Our school gate faced a heavily trafficked highway and coming and going was always dangerous. Especially in the mornings and afternoons when lots of cars were around. The girl kept walking at the same pace out onto the road.
By the time I realised what was going on, the gym teacher had also noticed something strange and started yelling. “Hey, what are you doing?” He ran out and grabbed her by the shoulders. The girl shuddered and then, as though coming back to her senses, fell to the ground. She looked around, confused, and then screamed as a car passed by in front of her. There’s a saying that goes something like being dispossessed by a spirit. It was exactly like that.
A few days later I heard that the girl was taken to the student counsellor’s office and told off, but she didn’t even remember playing Kokkuri-san, let alone what happened after. All she remembered was being in front of the school gates after being dragged off the road by the gym teacher.
Of course, Kokkuri-san was banned from school after that… But that just made everyone play it even more, and everywhere you looked it seemed that people were playing. However, this was the only case where I saw something take place before my very eyes.
Hide and Seek in the Old School
* * *
When I was in junior high, I went to my elementary school reunion. Things were going great, and I was hanging with the guys I always used to play with there. We got to talking and someone suggested we play hide and seek again, like we used to as kids. We left the party and made our way to the forest by the shrine that we always played in when we were younger.
Because we always played there as kids, we knew all the good hiding spots. That meant the game would end quickly and wouldn’t be very interesting, so we decided to go play by the old school building instead.
The old building was terrifying and creepy, and when we were kids we were petrified of it. We never got to play there because we were so scared, so it seemed like the perfect time to try it now. Everyone was on board with the idea.
I lost and had to be “it” first while everyone else went to hide. It was getting dark outside, so I wanted to find everyone quick so we could get out of there.
We used the old school building until we were in the second grade, so we generally knew where everything was. I was supposed to count to 60, but honestly I was a little scared, so I only counted to 20 before I started looking for everyone.
I searched all over; in the cleaning lockers, under the shelves, anywhere someone might generally hide, but I couldn’t find anyone. The old school building only had two floors, and despite searching both floors, I didn’t find a single person.
Around the time I started to think that I should have found at least one person, I heard a scream from above. It was the voice of one of my friends. I rushed upstairs and looked down the long hall, but nobody was there. ‘Maybe they hid somewhere,’ I thought and looked around, but of course, I didn’t find anyone.
A bad feeling came over me and I wondered if everyone had gone home without me. If so, then I’d just go home myself as well. Screw them. I was the kid everyone always made fun of when we were younger, so it wouldn’t even be the first time something like this had happened to me.
Feeling annoyed, I went downstairs and towards the entrance when again I heard a scream. That same friend again… I decided to ignore it and continue on my way home. They wouldn’t get me. Not this time.
Around 9 p.m. I got a call at home. It was my homeroom teacher from junior high. For some reason he got mad and screamed at me. “Come to school this instant!”
When I got there, the teacher was standing there with the others who had played hide and seek. They all turned to frown at me.
“What on earth are you kids doing playing here so late?” He told us off, but that wasn’t the end of it. On the way home, everyone spoke coldly to me.
“You knew, so why did you run?” they said.
Of course, I didn’t know anything. “Know what?” I asked, but they all ignored me. Did they think I was playing dumb? But in reality, I hadn’t seen anything. All I’d heard was that scream. The strange scream I’d never heard coming from my friend before. Twice.
I work in a factory now, and just the other day I heard that friend was involved in an accident near the old school building. He got injured pretty badly, which reminded me of this story.
The Eccentric Girl
* * *
When I went to university, there was a strange student in the same grade as me. She was infamous throughout the entire school, and she was often seen walking around holding a teddy bear, or coming to school with her hair cut different lengths, and sometimes she even came wearing a military beret. But she was a serious student, and her grades were good.
Around the end of our third year, everyone was busy with getting ready to find work. This girl started to go even more crazy, however, and the eccentricities that she’d kept to herself at that point started to overflow.
Even though she commuted to school from home, people saw her hanging around late at night, and every now and then she was seen dashing off into the nearby forest. One day before a test, my friend saw her in the library. She’d pulled all the books off the shelf and was lining them up again, this time by height and width. He wanted to ask her what she was doing, but they weren’t very close friends, so he couldn’t.
“What do you think she’s doing?” he asked his other friend.
“Maybe the librarian asked her,” he replied, but the librarian just watched her silently from afar.
But after that, she returned all the books to their former place. She seemed to have memorised where they all came from and muttered to herself as she put them back. “No, this one was over here next to this one… and this shelf had 21 volumes…”
One time she ran up the stone stairs to the cafe like a dog, and inside she drank a small plate full of soy sauce. This caused her to suddenly throw up, so the staff had to drag her outside.
After that, we didn’t see her again until graduation. It might sound funny, but actually being there in person was terrifying.
I heard that during less populated times, she was even seen crawling up and down the stairs…
Observation Shed
* * *
The high school I went to was about 120 years old. To the untrained eye, the curves of the buildings that had been built and rebuilt numerous times could only be described as “strange.”
Although they are rare now, there is a one-story building with stairs inside, leading right up to the roof at the end of the hall. In another building, the door to the music room, which is right by the entrance, is buried, so nobody can get inside (from the outside, it appears to be boarded up by numerous plywood planks).
Yet the strangest of all has to be the extremely weird “observation shed.”
I travelled quite a bit to get to school, but every now and then I stayed with friends who lived close by. One day, we decided to go stay in that shed. At first glance, it looked just like any other house. It was about eight tatami mats large, with an old phone and a small kitchen inside. As for why it was called the observation shed, that night, I put my life on the line to find out.
Me and one other friend decided to spend the night. We were carrying on like it was a school trip as we lay our beds out. We chatted as we ate dinner, and then suddenly the phone rang. Scared, we picked up, but it turned out to be the janitor. Some other girls had heard all the noise we were making, and he was concerned. He warned us not to be too noisy, and we went to hang up. As we did, he continued.
“Ah, I forgot to mention it, but… Make sure you close the curtain on the west side before you go to sleep.”
“Okay,” we answered and hung up, but we had no idea what he meant. There was a graveyard behind the school, but that wasn’t to the west of us, so we thought it strange, and my friend opened the curtain. There was an old well decorated in hemp rope right there.
The school was shaped like a U, and the shed blocked view of the well from it. I got chills down my spine the moment I saw it.
“It’s kinda creepy,” we said and ended up pushing our beds together to sleep.
How long did we sleep? I woke up, the top of my shoulders cold and trembling. I glanced over and my friend was gone. There was no toilet, so I thought she must have gone to use the teachers’ toilets. I waited, but she showed no signs of return. I opened the door and looked outside, but there were no signs of her anywhere.
“Where on earth did she go…?”
Worried, I returned to the room and looked over at the window. My friend was standing by the well in her underwear, her hands moving by her waist.
‘She really went out there to pee?’ I wondered in amazement. I went to close the curtain when I was overwhelmed by this strange feeling. I looked over at the well again and almost screamed. She wasn’t peeing. She was wrapping the rope around her waist. She squatted and tied the other end of the rope to a large stone.
I was speechless. Then, a white hand reached out of the well. It reached around, as though looking for something, and then finally grabbed the rope. My friend hung her head and didn’t show any response.
The hand slowly pulled the rock closer. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t.
‘Ah… It’s gonna take her…!’ I thought when the phone started to ring and brightly lit up the darkness. I fell backwards on the bed. It was like I had overcome the paralysis gripping my body, and I flew outside barefoot to save my friend. I somehow got her back inside. I called to her for god knows how long, and then finally she seemed to come to before bursting into tears.
Released from the fear gripping me, I burst into tears with her. We decided to call someone for help and picked up the phone. This time, however, we both fell back on the beds. The entire phone was gone, and not only that, but the part where the line connected was empty.
We later discovered that soon after the school was built, student after student killed themselves at that very well. They tried to cover it, but the workers started to die, one after the other, so they gave up. They decided to hide it from the public eye instead when renovating the school, but still people threw themselves down it, so they built the observation shed instead. However, the man on watch in the shed threw himself down the well too, so in the end they abandoned it.
So, how did we receive the call telling us to keep the curtain closed? And was it really the same guard who used to work in the observation shed…?
Terrifying Old School Building
* * *
The elementary school I went to was over 120 years old. It was a really, really old school. The building was an old wooden design, and the halls squeaked when you walked down them. Ghost stories were all the rage at the time, and when home time came during winter, the halls were so dark that I didn’t want to walk down them alone.
We had the usual scary stories that every school has, like the portraits in the music room came alive at night, or the anatomy model in the science room would get up and move around, and that Hanako-san lived in the toilets; we had all the usual school legends. Kokkuri-san was especially popular at the time, and I often played it with my friends as well. We didn’t treat it very seriously, and just asked silly questions; who the boy someone had a crush on liked, etc. We’ve never once seen or heard of a real ghost. None of us were able to see the supernatural, so we weren’t especially afraid.
That all changed, however, one day at the school gym. Just like the main school buildings, the gym was made of wood, and it was really old. It was probably even older than the rest of the school. It was okay enough for class, but the toilets and stairs got no light, and the darkness made it seem like something was constantly lurking in the shadows.
These days elementary school kids tend to go home straight after class is finished, but where I lived in the countryside, we went to the gym or the school yard to play. Until the teachers told us to leave, we’d play around the school to our heart’s content.
On this particular day it was raining, so we couldn’t play outside. We all went to the gym and played tag, volleyball, and all other sorts of games. It was always late when we went home. I think it was around autumn, so the days were getting shorter and it was kinda dark outside.
The gym, having very little sunlight, was gloomy, and the hall nearly pitch black. We would always play until the teachers told us to leave, so after we put all the balls away, we continued playing hide and seek in the hall. Thinking back on it now, us kids hiding in an already dark hall, tucking into places so nobody could find us, is a pretty terrifying thought, but at the time we weren’t really afraid of anything.
The kid who was “it” found us one by one until finally we’d all been discovered. Everyone had been found. Not a single person missing. And yet, we heard a voice. The voice of another child.
“Ready! Ready!”
We were playing hide and seek. They were ready to be found. But, everybody had already been found. We were all standing there. That was somebody else’s voice…
We all screamed and ran from the gym at once. My heart pounded wildly, and that night I was unable to sleep.
The gym was knocked down after that and a new one built in its place. The following year the school was knocked down and rebuilt as well. Now it’s a new, more modern school. Not the type of buildings you’d expect to find a ghost in. But, I’ll never forget that time. That dark hall in the gym where we played hide and seek with a ghost.
Haunted Jobs
Suspicious Job
* * *
Let me tell you about the one and only weird experience I’ve ever had.
It was during the spring vacation in March, and my friend came to me with a suspicious job offer. Information about what the job entailed was somewhat strange, and it involved dealing with an abandoned house somewhere in the Kansai area. All in all, it was two nights and three days of work, and outside of travel expenses, each of us would receive 300,000 yen for the job. The electricity and water were still on in the house, and beds had been set up for the two of us as well.
Now, all of this sounded pretty damn suspicious to begin with, but things got even worse when I found out he got the job offer from an old guy he met at pachinko. He came to me like it was the best job ever, but something about it didn’t seem right to me. I thought about refusing him at first, but I’d been needing to upgrade my computer, and it was 300,000 yen for just two days work, so in the end I agreed.
We got the bullet train tickets, information about the job and how to get there from the old man on the day, then set out towards the job site. The house turned out to be pretty big, the land covering close to 900 square metres. But the grass was dead and the pond dirty, with no signs of life inside. It was clear that nobody had lived there for at least 10 years or so, and it looked just like a big old abandoned house.
We decided to start cleaning from the second floor and worked until 8 p.m. carrying all the garbage and furniture down to the first floor. It was exhausting work, but I wouldn’t say anything of note happened. We ate dinner at a nearby family restaurant, but when we got back to the house, something seemed wrong.
It’s a little difficult to explain, but it was like, the moment I stepped through the front door, all the hairs on my body stood on end, like an awful chill hung in the air. I had no idea what caused it. My friend seemed to feel the same thing, and when I looked over at him, his face had gone pale. But there was nothing there, and neither of us said a thing about it either. We got cleaned up for the night and then went to bed.
I must have been asleep for about two hours when my friend suddenly shook me awake.
“What the hell?” I muttered, but then I quickly understood why.
We were sleeping on the first floor, close to the front door, but we could hear voices talking in the end room. We hadn’t heard anything about other people coming to the house. I was scared, but also worried that we might get wrapped up in some sort of trouble, so we couldn’t just leave it be, and I decided to go check out the voices.
I really should have put the lights on, but it wasn’t like either of our brains were working very well, so I didn’t even think about it.
