Blue-roofed House

Location: 6 Chome, Midorigaoka, Iwamizawa City, Hokkaido Prefecture, 068-0835

This ghost spot comes from Reikan: The most haunted locations in Japan Vol. 2!

The Blue-roofed House, as it’s commonly referred to, can be found in the town of Iwamizawa, roughly 40 kilometres to the west of Sapporo City in Hokkaido. As the name suggests, the house stands out because of its light blue roof, and you can still visit it—or what remains of it—today.

The house was built sometime in the early 1980s, with records of its existence going back as far as 1984. It’s located directly opposite the Midorigaoka Cemetery, a 50-hectare site that opened in 1943 and is currently home to tens of thousands of human remains; both buried and cremated.

It’s unclear when exactly the house was abandoned, but in 2005 rumours began to spread online that the house was haunted, so the last people to live in it likely left in the early 2000s at the latest. People have claimed you can capture floating orbs in photos taken at the house, and on occasion you can see someone looking down at you from the windows on the second floor. The bottom floor is now entirely boarded up, as are most of the windows on the second floor, but a select few remain uncovered.

One of the most common stories regarding the house is that it was built by a taxi driver in the early 1980s. The man moved in with his wife and young child, but before long his wife started cheating on him. She decided that a divorce was in order and moved out, taking their child with her. The taxi driver, absolutely distraught, then killed himself in the bathroom.

After that, the real estate tried to sell the house, but because it was a “stigmatised property” (a property where someone has died on site) they had trouble finding takers. Nobody wanted a stigmatised property, no matter how cheap it was.

In the end, the real estate dropped the price low enough that they were able to find a group of university students to rent the house. The students moved in, but only a few short months later, one of them committed suicide in the bathroom, just like the taxi driver had. After that, a Shinto priest was invited to cleanse the house of the unclean energy pervading it, but it apparently had no effect.

Rumours had it that a company then bought the house to use as one of their live-in offices and a foreign worker moved in, but again, before long this person moved out and it has been abandoned ever since. All of these rumours are, of course, just rumours, but what’s a good ghost spot without a slew of unproven and terrifying stories to stir up interest?

Further stories have claimed that other suicides have also taken place at the cemetery across the road, and that the house sits on the “path of the dead,” essentially, the road spirits use to travel from this world to the next. Buildings that are located on these paths are often subject to strange happenings that no amount of cleansing can fix, and the Blue-roofed House is no different.

In addition to the Shinto priest spoken of earlier, others claim that various priests, monks, and spirit mediums have visited the house over the years in an attempt to cleanse it, but all have failed. It’s even said that one monk from a temple in nearby Kurisawa spent several nights in the house trying to exorcise it, but in the end had a breakdown and fled during the night.

Ghost hunters who have visited the house over the years have also claimed to have fallen victim to random accidents after returning home. One who lit a cigarette inside the house then found their house on fire several days later. Another crashed their car on the way back from the house. It would appear that just visiting the house is enough to bring bad luck upon oneself, and it’s not just limited to those who live there.

Rumours of a suicide taking place in the house have apparently been around since at least the 1980s for those local to the area, and many blame the house’s location. The front door faces the southwest, also known as the urakimon or unlucky quarter in Japanese. Demons, illness, and death are said to enter this way, just as they do through the kimon, the demon’s gate that lies in the northeast, of which several windows in the house also face. Almost as though the house was deliberately built to invite evil in…
The Blue-roofed House has changed hands numerous times over the decades, with all of its owners apparently moving on quite quickly. This, combined with its current abandoned state and location opposite a massive graveyard no doubt led to the rumours of its haunting.

In the early 2010s the house started to crumble, and over the years more and more of it has been boarded up. At present, the area facing the cemetery is almost completely boarded over to cover the deteriorating walls. Yet visitors to the house in recent years also claim that a motion sensor light has been installed by the front door, so while nobody lives in the house, someone is still clearly looking after its remains.

Did the house’s unlucky location beckon evil and misfortune to all who lived inside? Or were the rumours created simply to stir up interest in this dilapidated house with the blue roof? We may never know, but if you’re brave enough, you can still visit the house yourself. Or at least, what remains of it.