Kowabana Encyclopedia: The Mysterious Ken-kun
Found in: Kowabana 17: The true terror behind cursed dolls
The mysterious Ken-kun is an interesting figure that has garnered quite a bit of attention since he was first shared on 2channel many years ago. Although it commonly goes by the title “The Mysterious Ken-kun and the Secret on the Second Floor” these days, the actual thread the story was shared in was titled “The Story of the Creepy House I Tutored in.”
Posted on June 4, 2014, it shares the story of a university student who took a part time job tutoring so he could make a little extra money. After handing out some flyers stating his rates, he got a call from a middle-aged lady asking him to come over and tutor her son for four hours every day. That would amount to 12,000 yen a day; money far too good to pass up.
The house is tiny and old, and when he finally meets the woman he spoke to on the phone, he’s shocked. She has visible dandruff, dark bags around her eyes, and a terrifying grin. He contemplates leaving right away, but the desire for money wins out.
She guides him to what appears to be a children’s room and there’s a kid sitting at a desk. But when he approaches, he realises it’s not an actual child, but rather, a doll. Handmade and dressed in a real child’s clothes. The old woman tells him that’s her son, and when he questions her on its very obvious doll-like nature, she blows her top and screams that it’s her son, Ken-kun, before bursting into tears.
The narrator hastily agrees with her, afraid for his life, and he starts talking to the doll like he’s teaching it while the old woman watches. After four painful hours are up, he tries to leave, but the woman insists he stay for dinner. Again, he finds it hard to refuse, afraid of what she might do, and before long she puts down a plate of dirty curry for him.
He lies and says it tastes great, and then she insists he spend the night. It would make Ken-kun really happy. Again, he tries to refuse, but grows scare when she loses it. The thought of being killed is even more frightening than the idea of staying here the night.
He’s to spend the night in Ken-kun’s room, much to his displeasure. But the old woman warns him not to go upstairs. If he needs the toilet, well that’s next to the dining room downstairs. He lies awake in the room until around 1 a.m., and thinking the old woman has to be asleep by this point, he decides to finally escape.
Yet as he tiptoes to the door, he finds she’s sitting in the dining room, almost watching guard. She questions him with a creepy grin. Surely he’s not trying to go home? He flees upstairs in a panic and finds a room full of stuffed toys and dolls. But that’s not all. He also spots what appears to be a person with a huge head and eyes that look like they’re going to pop out. The scream that comes from this figure is terrifying and unique, like “kyakyakya” and “hyahyahya”.
The narrator jumps out the second-floor window and runs all the way home, feeling no pain because he’s too scared. It’s not until later that he discovers he actually broke his ankle during the landing, but he was so worked up he didn’t feel it. He then quickly moved and never heard from the creepy old lady again, but he still can’t stop thinking about the figure with the oversized head and bulging eyes he saw on the second floor.
Initially, we’re led to believe that Ken-kun is simply the doll on the first floor. This doll appears to have been handmade by the old woman and dressed in a real child’s clothes, so perhaps she lost her real son at some point and it broke her, causing her to create the doll in his image and carry on like he’s still there.
That alone would be rather creepy, but then, when the narrator flees to the second floor, he discovers something even more horrifying. An actual, real, living and breathing person, but by the looks of them, physically disabled in some way. It all happens so quickly, and the sight of this person with the oversized head and large eyes, alongside the incredibly loud screaming, causes him to flee with zero regard for his own health. And that, it would seem, was the real Ken-kun, hidden by his mother on the second floor because of his physical appearance while she pretends that a homemade doll downstairs is actually him.
Despite being a relatively short story, Ken-kun has proven to be quite popular over the years. The original poster even hung around in the thread to answer questions for a bit, revealing that this took place in the Kanto area (but not Chiba), and that he quickly changed phone numbers after the incident. He didn’t remember the exact address of the creepy house, and sadly, he never got paid for the ordeal either, what with fleeing out the window and all. Someone also asked if perhaps the figure he saw was suffering from hydrocephalus (a condition where cerebrospinal fluids accumulate in the brain), to which he replied it was possible, but their head was so big that it looked like it was going to burst. Either way, he got out safely, and that was that.
And if you’re interested, you can check out a Japanese comic depiction of the Ken-kun story here.