The Most Dangerous Ghost Spot in North Kanto

This happened about two years ago. This has nothing to do with the supernatural and seems like small fry compared to all of your stories, but it was scary to me, so I’d be happy if you listened to it as a nice palate-cleansing side dish. If I write the place names down too clearly, people will immediately guess where it is, so please forgive the somewhat fake names I’m about to use.

A few stupid friends and I would pick up a kind of “ghost map” from the convenience store during summer and use that as a guide as we travelled around various ghost spots.

My hometown is a small village at the foot of a famous sacred mountain, and there are all sorts of really famous temples and shrines lined up in the mountains. You could say that this treasure trove of ghost spots is one of the most haunted locations in all of Kanto.

The ghost map showed various places, such as a bridge where ghosts beckoned people a short distance from a waterfall famous as a suicide spot, as well as a tunnel where the ghost of a woman who died in an accident loitered; lots of stuff like that.

Unlike the big cities, there’s not a whole lot to do when you live out in the mountains. Before long we’d already visited all the ghost spots we could (neither myself nor my friends could see ghosts, so we never saw anything at any of them), so when we were discussing where to go next, one of my friends (I’ll call him A-kun) suggested something.

“I visited a blog that lists all sorts of ghost spots, and it seems like there are a lot of them in northern Kanto.” He didn’t read the blog closely, so we looked for it again to decide which haunted location we’d visit next.

We easily found the blog again. The owner lived in Tokyo and visited ghost spots all around the capital, Kanto, and even up to Tohoku, posting pictures and reports on their website. The blog listed a place it called “the most wickedly cold place in northern Kanto,” and I could barely contain my excitement at finding such an interesting place as I clicked the link.

The title alone was hair raising. “A river dyed in blood, a swamp swirling with the malice of those killed in accidents~” It was something like that.

The blog owner drove to the site by car, but as they got closer, the car kept stalling and having engine troubles, despite having just come back from inspection. They apparently felt that they weren’t welcome at this particular spot.

Seeing that, I half-joked, “Some people really think that way, huh? Like they’re some kind of self-styled spirit medium or something, haha.” But when I looked at the comments on that article, there seemed to be a quite a few from regular blog visitors that agreed. “There was an awful ringing in my ears when I went there too.” “I heard this deep voice that seemed to ring out from the ground once I passed over a really famous bridge, and it seemed to be saying, ‘Leave, outsider.’”

I kept reading, unable to believe my eyes, but there were several places that caught my attention. The photos the blog owner posted leading up to the cursed ghost spot from Tokyo, they were places I was familiar with… Come to think of it, there was a river less than a minute’s walk from my parents house where lots of people died in a train accident long before I was born.

Then it finally hit me.

The worst, most evil ghost spot in all of northern Kanto… was my hometown.

For sure, lots of people died in that train accident, and before that a bunch of kids died mysteriously in some festival. I also know that originally one of the kanji used in our hometown’s place name wasn’t such a good character, so they replaced it with a better one that reads the same way.

‘How stupid, there’s no way,’ I thought, and the more I read, the more annoyed I got. It was right around the time that Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was getting popular, so the blog owner exaggerated the “suspicious” behaviour of the locals. He wrote things like, “The laughing old ladies stared silently at me, expressionless, when I walked by,” and stuff like that. I mean, I don’t know how it works in Tokyo, but in our town, if someone comes in that we don’t know, people are gonna look at them. It’s not done with any ill intent.

When the blog owner was done talking about everything else, they finished with a single photo of the most evil, dangerous place that you shouldn’t approach in that area.

My parents’ house was right there, along with some of the neighbours’.

At the time, I was astounded that my house was considered the most dangerous, evil ghost spot in all of north Kanto. Looking at the comments from complete strangers depressed me as well. “Just looking at that place gives me the chills.” “I can tell just from the atmosphere that there are all sorts of evil spirits swarming around that area, is your health okay after visiting it?” “There’s no denying that something terrible must have happened in that shed, huh?” Come on, they were talking about the shed where we raised our chickens and quails!

If you try to access that blog now, it’s gone (maybe they closed it or moved elsewhere). Sorry this wasn’t very scary, but to me it was certainly no laughing matter.

Thank you for reading this far.