Kowabana 6 Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Spooky Spirits

  Midnight Shinigami

  Abandoned Hospital Basement

  Mountain Surveying

  Noisy Voices

  Rope from the Lake

  You are!

  Rule

  The Medium's Discovery

  The Thing Hitting the Window

  Hidden Swimming Hole

  House in the Graveyard

  Different to Reality

  Negative Cluster

  Accident

  Changing Ghost Photo

  The Supposedly Empty Room

  Children Blocking the Way

  Stiff Shoulders

  The Call Button

  Roaming Child

  The Ultimate Weapon

  My First Ghostly Experience

  The Apartment I Lived in During College

  The Tunnel My Classmates Went To

  Haunted by the Old Woman

  Call From 136

  The Shadow on My Cousin's Back

  Apartment with Covered Windows

  Late Night Snowy Road

  Manic Monsters

  It's Coming

  Winter Mountain Climbing

  Upside Down

  Steel Tower

  The Thing from the Sea

  Forbidden Slide

  The Countryside Daikon-san

  Snow Hut Cave In

  Human Horrors

  This is My Apartment

  Countryside Crematorium

  Wall

  Bound

  First Cooking Class

  The Laughing Woman

  Snuff Video

  Car Accident

  Prank Call

  Bang Bang

  Increasing Bruises

  Woman on Rainy Days

  Scary Schools

  Strange Incident Near the Culture Festival

  Cursed Letter on the Blackboard

  Don't Use the Elevator

  Volleyball Stuck in the Roof

  The Transfer Student Who Couldn't Come to School

  Kokkuri-san with the Spiritually Sensitive Girl

  Long-haired Woman in the Toilet

  Terrifying Beethoven Portrait

  Second Grade Summer Extra Classes

  Mystery of the Music Room

  Ghost in the Forbidden Classroom

  If I Had Turned Around

  Hanako-san of the Toilet

  Follower

  Buried Severed Head

  Old School Library

  Skull in the Science Room

  School at Night

  What the Teacher Saw

  Stain on the Wall

  The Haunted Desk

  Black Shadow in the Boarding House Skylight

  The Toilet Door That Opened by Itself

  Camp Ghost Photo

  Outdoor Test of Courage

  Door to the Roof

  Girl in the Pool

  Footsteps

  Possessed by Kokkuri-san

  Hide and Seek in the Old School

  The Eccentric Girl

  Observation Shed

  Terrifying Old School Building

  Haunted Jobs

  Suspicious Job

  Ryokan Job Offer

  Strangeness on the Night Shift

  The Doctor's Clinical Records

  Street View

  Tale from the Ghost Production Staff

  I Shouldn't Have Brought Him Along

  Convenience Store

  Invitation

  Abandoned Love Hotel

  Terrifying Experience at the Seaside School

  The Phone That Seldom Rang

  Terrifying Curses

  House on the River

  Forbidden Love

  Nodogami-sama

  Total Family Annihilation

  Uzu Doll

  Eerily Unexplained

  Drive to Izu

  The Waiting Woman

  I Heard a Strange Voice When Talking to My Girlfriend

  The Mystery Behind the Boy's Death

  Snowy Mountain Lodge Killings

  Hidden World

  Too Soon

  Station Toilet

  The Building People Jumped From

  Phantom Building

  The Strange N-san

  I'll Be Waiting

  Noisy Doll at Night

  Mystery at the Multi-tenant Building

  It Follows

  Sign in the Mountains

  Ski Resort

  Round Hole in the Basement

  The Sound of Rain

  Third Man and the Jizo Statues

  When You Understand

  Empty Building

  Public Toilet Graffiti

  Studio

  Woman in the White Dress

  Yellow Parka

  Messages in the Abandoned Building

  Clairvoyance

  Ringtone

  Well

  Boyfriend

  Mother

  Abandoned School Mirror

  Ghost Passsenger

  Falling Rocks

  Train

  Prowler

  Traffic Accident

  Ice Pick

  Mask

  Abandoned Building

  Hit and Run

  Wife's Diary

  Yumi

  Kotatsu

  Ghost

  Campfire

  Neighbour

  Girl in My Class

  Cliff

  Prank

  Glance

  Japanese Doll

  Lady Friend

  Clover

  Newsletter

  Rate This Book

  Want Even More?

  About the Author

  Kowabana Vol. 6

  ‘True’ Japanese scary stories from around the internet

  Tara A. Devlin

  Kowabana: 'True' Japanese scary stories from around the internet Vol. 6

  First Edition: December 2019

  taraadevlin.com

  © 2019 Tara A. Devlin

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  INTRODUCTION

  Welcome to volume six of Kowabana: ‘True’ Japanese scary stories from around the internet! If you’ve read any of the other volumes, you’ll know exactly what to expect here. This time around there are over 150 anonymous Japanese creepypastas dug up from the depths of the internet. Some are from the dawn of the 2chan forums, others are more recent, but inside these pages you’ll find the usual assortment of Japanese ghosts, unfathomable monsters, haunted buildings, haunted people, nefarious curses, human horrors, and much more.

  But that’s enough from me. Get ready for another adventure into the terrifying world that is Japanese internet horror!

  Spooky Spirits

  Midnight Shinigami

  * * *

  I don’t know whether it’s our family line or our lineage, but generation after generation, people are born into our family with a strong ability to sense the supernatural. That’s what I’m going to tell you about today.

  I was in high school at the time. Now I’m your regular hard-working businessman in a suit with a leather briefcase, but at the time I was pretty rough around the edges. Embarrassingly, I used to get up to a lot of mischief at night and ride around on my bike. Embarrassingly, the cops took me under their care multiple times.

  One day, I was chatting with my buddy about visiting a famous ghost spot in Hiroshima. I wasn’t afraid of anything, so we all went together to put ourselves to the test.

  It was around one in the morning when we arrived. Everyone was acting scared, but I wasn’t at all.
I mean, like I explained earlier, the people in my family always had strong ties to the supernatural, and I had heard that I had a guardian spirit watching over me. Not only that, but this guardian angel was particularly strong, so I wasn’t scared in the slightest.

  Nothing ended up happening. It was so dull that we went around to several other ghost spots around town, but still nothing happened. We all went our separate ways and before I knew it, it was morning.

  I went to school and spoke to my friends from the ghost hunting trip the night before. It turned out to be the quiet before the storm…

  It happened that very same day. At the time, I shared bunk beds with my brother; him on top and me below. It must have been around two in the morning. Suddenly I heard this loud piercing sound in my ear and my body froze. I couldn’t move anything but my eyes. Most people would probably get scared and struggle, but I wasn’t afraid of anything.

  ‘Ah, sleep paralysis, huh? I feel like this has happened to me before, but there’s a perfectly good scientific explanation for it,’ I thought. I didn’t bother to struggle and just waited for it to pass. But then I noticed something strange. No matter how long I waited, nothing changed, and the temperature in the room began to drop.

  It wasn’t cold like winter, but like the chill was in my bones. Instinctively it set me on alert, and I knew it wasn’t like anything I’d ever run into until that point.

  While mild panic was settling in, someone appeared at the door. The door wasn’t open, so it clearly wasn’t my parents. When I looked over, I saw four people in white clothes wearing masks. They were holding large sickles, like you might see in a comic book. The mask on the left was a hannya mask, followed by an old man, a plain woman, and then a tengu. They approached me silently, not even an audible footstep.

  One of them said something to me. I didn’t know which, but one of them was definitely saying something. Honestly, I was so scared and forlorn that I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It sounded like “The spirit… The protector…” but I couldn’t understand it. However, the last thing they said was perfectly clear.

  “There won’t be a next time.”

  At that, they left the room. The paralysis holding me broke, and I was able to move again. “There won’t be a next time.” Goosebumps broke out over my body for the next few minutes. Honestly, at that moment, I was ready to disappear from the world. You often hear people talking about the turning point of their lives, well that was mine.

  A few days later, I was thinking about who those four people in white clothes could have been. At first I thought they might have been evil spirits that followed me home from the ghost spots, but now I think they might have been guardian spirits. Because they had protected me from evil, I put myself to the test that day. Nothing happened, but when they saw how I was acting, perhaps they came that night to warn me. That made the most sense. If I was stupid and recklessly visited another ghost spot after that, I wouldn’t get another chance.

  There’s more to this story though. One of my colleagues, T-san, said that he had the same experience that I did, right after visiting a ghost spot with his older brother. It was a different place to the one I visited, but it was a pretty famous ghost spot, nevertheless. The next day, he dreamt about “beasts wearing masks,” he said.

  “They’ve done well to protect us for this long, huh?” I said. He immediately asked me why I’d say such a thing. Then he hit me with the truth. His older brother died that very same night the beasts in the masks came to visit him…

  Once more, from that moment on I decided to live the most righteous life I could.

  Abandoned Hospital Basement

  * * *

  This happened when I was in university, so about two or three years ago now. I left the countryside and started going to a university in another prefecture, when one day I got a call from back home saying that my grandmother had taken a spill. She’d looked after me ever since I was a kid, so I rushed back home and to the hospital as soon as I could.

  Thankfully, she wasn’t in a serious condition, but I took the week off from both uni and work to stay with her just in case. My brother was using my old room, and I was bored in the lounge, so I decided to call some of my old friends in the area. Everyone was busy with work or study, but I did find a few who had some time, so I decided to meet with three of them from the local university the next day.

  Still, not just my hometown, but the entire prefecture was rural as all hell, so there wasn’t much to do other than karaoke or bowling, or if we went for a half hour drive, we could visit a net cafe and play pool. We talked about going out for drinks, but my money for the week had mostly run out, and I had to think about the next month as well, so I refused. In the end we gave up and went to a family restaurant to hang out for a while.

  It was a Tuesday night. I had two days left before I returned, and three of us chatted at the restaurant.

  “I’m so bored,” I said. “As usual, there’s nothing to do here.”

  “If you compare it to Tokyo, sure,” A said. “Must be nice living somewhere else.”

  “Hmm, well, why don’t we go over there,” B said. “Over there” was the local abandoned hospital, an infamous place when we were kids. According to the rumours, there were still surgical tools left over in the operating room, and dried up bodies in the basement, and they said the ghosts of the nurses still lurked in the building. It was the type of place that always had rumours like that.

  To be honest, I was kind of scared and didn’t really want to go, but A and B were real excited, so they called C and he agreed to meet us there.

  The hospital had been abandoned for quite some time, and sat in a village even more countryside than our own, surrounded by nothing but rice fields and farms. I don’t know if the land was cheap because it was in the middle of nowhere, but when it opened, it was a pretty fancy looking three-story building.

  “One of my senior classmate’s friends came here once and threw away his cigarette butt inside,” A said when we got there. “But then he suddenly started acting strange, saying he had to go back home to some town, even though he lived somewhere else.”

  ‘You could have said that before we got here,’ I thought, growing annoyed, but I didn’t want anyone to know I was scared so I just replied, “Oh yeah?”

  A short distance from the hospital were various rice fields and a few street lights, but that was it. The glass front door was chained and padlocked to keep people out. Other bored kids probably had the same idea as us, because there was all sorts of rubbish and graffiti around, and most of the windows on the first floor had been broken.

  “So, what are we gonna do? Wait for C?” I said.

  “Nah, let’s go in now. He’s got a car so we’ll know when he gets here,” A replied.

  “Alright, well I’m gonna head in first. Let’s go through this window,” B said.

  Each of us held a cheap torch we’d picked up from the convenience store and went inside. Thinking back on it now, we really shouldn’t have.

  Glass crackled beneath our feet as we landed inside. My entire body went cold and broke out in goosebumps for some reason. I honestly wanted to jump right back out the window and run away, but A and B continued on ahead, and A had the car keys anyway, so I chased after them.

  Being behind everyone else truly is terrifying. I couldn’t see anything, and I was terrified that Sadako or something would come running out of the darkness behind me. We arrived at the open reception area and B shone his light around. There were files scattered all over the floor, dirt on the chairs, and inside the nurse’s centre the shelves were all tipped over and the windows broken. It was a mess.

  “Well that’s terrifying,” A said, looking pleased. His voice echoed like we were in the mountains. “Where are we gonna go next?”

  “We gotta go downstairs,” B said. “Let’s go see the dead bodies. The dead bodies!”

  The feeling I had must have been foreboding. For some reason, I really didn’t wa
nt to be there any longer. I reluctantly tried to convince them otherwise and said we should go upstairs instead. What I actually wanted was to leave the place entirely, but I didn’t want them to make fun of me for suggesting we actually go home. We peeked inside the sickrooms and examining rooms on our way, and halfway up the stairs to the second floor I saw something strange.

  Scared, I kept looking behind us on our way up, and right in the space near the wall and the end of the stairs, I saw feet. That area was where the stairs led down into the basement.

  I was terrified. I froze on the spot and could barely breathe.

  “What’s wrong?” B said from above. The paralysis that seemed to have gripped my body snapped, and I told myself that it was just my imagination and ran after them.

  The second and third floors were scary, as I thought they’d be, but we safely explored them with no strange events. We found an old broken TV in one of the smoking rooms, and A laughed. “Ah, my friend Y probably did that,” he said.

  We went back down to the first floor, and A and B started to make their way downstairs. I knew I had to stop them.

  “I’m telling you, it’s dangerous. Let’s just leave it be,” I said.

  “What are you so scared of?” A replied.

  “Haha, he’s just a big chicken,” B said.

  Their teasing pissed me off, so I reluctantly followed them down. I remember the basement being really dark.

  We looked around, remarking on the difference that the lack of moonlight made on the room. Couches, wheelchairs, and even antiseptic bottles had been left hanging on the walls. Yet something about it felt off. It was more neat and orderly than upstairs. A opened a nearby door, and B turned his light down the hall.

  “Hey, isn’t that the operating room?” he said.

  The light barely reached the end, but we could see the familiar sign you see in dramas. The red light that turns on during an operation. We couldn’t see any letters on it beneath the torchlight, but B got so excited that he ran off towards it. A followed him. That’s when I started to feel sick. It felt like that time when water got stuck in my ears, like I had a bad cold; it’s somewhat difficult to describe, but it was almost like I was about to have a mental breakdown.