Five years ago, when I was in middle school, I lost one friend.
Ostensibly it was due to mental illness, but in reality it was because she was possessed by some guys.
For me, it’s one of those memories I’d rather forget.
I had a chance to talk to an old friend the other day and was reminded of that time in a vivid way.
I think that by putting it in writing here, I can be a little more objective and forget my fears, so I will spell it out.
We (A, B, C, D, and I) were all supposed to take over the family business, so we had a lot of free time on our hands.
The school also thought it would be a good idea for us to skip school so that we would not interfere with the entrance examination group.
After the gymnastics festival, as long as I showed up at school in the morning, I could leave the rest of the day and seldom got angry.
One day, my friends A & B asked me about a neighbor’s mansion.
They said that the house had just been renovated, but the owner had hanged himself, the family had separated, and the house was vacant.
We were having a hard time finding a place to hangout after skipping school, and we thought we could drink and smoke as much as we wanted there.
I went right away the next day, leaving the school at noon.
I was a little scared to go into such a place, but I was surprised to find that it was a very nice house that I could not see from the outside.
AB kept saying, “It’s okay,” and kept going inside.
The kitchen door was open, as if they had already checked it out.
We went into what looked like a study, kept our faces out of the windows, and began to sneak around and have a drink.
But since we couldn’t speak loudly, we soon got bored and the five of us started to search the house.
Soon C said, “What is that?” and noticed the top of the wall of the room we were in.
At the top of the wall were two small windows that looked like a school music room or gymnasium broadcast room.
“Is this room over here, too?”
Upon closer inspection, there was a door on this side of the wall, and the door was blocked from this side by a bookcase.
I was given a shoulder lift and the window at the upper left side was opened by hand.
Now that I think about it, I should have questioned then that there was a slight stench coming from that window.
Still, I could not overcome my desire to sneak a drink and forced my way into the room through the window.
The room is filled with moldy dust and a rotten smell. It was damp and leaky.
The room wasn’t what one would call a music room.
I could tell that there was some sort of handmade soundproofing material on the walls and wallpaper over it.
The wallpaper was crusty from moisture.
The room was plain, with no particular furnishings, but there was a small desk in the corner.
On top of it was a blacked-out photo in a large photo frame.
The moment my friend A picked up the photo box and lifted it up, he was surprised to see the photo in a large frame.
A sheet of paper fell from the back of the forehead, and a bunch of hair came out of it.
The paper was a charm .
Everyone was so shocked that they could not speak.
Seeing A’s pale face, B said he would hurry to get out of the room.
All the wallpaper on that side of the room came off in a puff of smoke.
The same charm that came out from behind the picture was stuck all over the wall.
“What the hell?”
C, who is not a drinker, almost retorted with an oof right there.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no!”
“Hurry up, you’re making me sick.”
D and I pushed up B’s buttocks as she wriggled up.
I didn’t know what was going on.
Behind us, something was screaming in a strange voice.
It must have been A. He became obsessed with something..
I was too scared to look back.
I climbed up and jumped down into the room on the other side of the room.
D also came out and tried to pull the C out from the room side, but he said, “Ouch! . Don’t pull my leg!” C shouts.
Across the room, a voice that sounds like A is moaning with a strange rasping sound.
I heard C’s foot kicking against the wall.
“B, bring priest !”
D shouted backward.
Something is possessing A! Go to the back and bring me priest from the shrine!”
B dashed barefoot from the porch and we pulled C from the window.
“Legs! My leg!”
“Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt, but something bit me.”
When I looked, I saw that the heel of C’s sock had round teeth marks on it as if the whole heel had been bitten by something and was wet with saliva.
We could still hear A’s voice from inside, but we were too scared to look in through the window.
“I wonder if he’s going to haunt me.”
“What do you mean “haunted”? A is still alive.”
“I kicked him so hard when I came out.”
A Shinto priest in a sweatshirt came in from the porch, looking very pale.
“What’s going on? What are you doing? You idiot!”
B, who had come in with him, already had tears and a runny nose on his face.
“All right, you guys, go home. Go out this way, go into the shrine office from the back, and get Yorie-san to take a look at you.
And hey!
He suddenly grabbed me and twisted me up behind his back.
I heard a cracking sound behind me.
Go on.”
He pushed me back and we ran, unsure of what was going on.
Then we went up the mountain behind us to the shrine office, where a small middle-aged lady was waiting for us, dressed in white.
I think she was extremely angry with me, but I don’t remember much after that because of the relief I felt when I escaped.
Then A stopped coming to school.
My parents were called by the shrine a few times, but they didn’t give me any details.
However, they told us never to go behind the mountain.
Since we had been through such a horrible experience, there was no way we were going to go to the mountain, and we spent our time in the school being small.
The day the final exam was over. The life guidance teacher called us in.
I went to the guidance counselor’s office, expecting to get a big kick in the pants for all the work I had done so far, or a beating.
I went to the guidance counselor’s office and found B and D sitting there with me. The priest was also there. There was no life guidance teacher there.
As soon as I came in, the priest said to me.
“C is dead.”
I could not believe it.
I knew then that C had not come to school yesterday.
“He skipped school and came to check on A, who was hiding over here.
The moment he peeked into the tatami room through the back grate, he let out a terrible scream.
By the time I ran to him, his eyes were wide open and he was dead.”
The Shinto priest looked at us with serious eyes.
“Okay, think A is dead. And forget about C from now on.
It is blind, so it won’t come to haunt someone who doesn’t know who it is.
If someone remembers it, it will come to him, no matter how many years it takes. If he comes, it will be possessed and die.
And don’t let your hair grow back.
If you run away it, it will pull your hair first.”
When we were told this, we left the proceeding room with heavy hearts.
At that time, the priest cut off the back of my hair with a pair of scissors.
I thought it was just some kind of spell, but it was more than a spell.
On the way home, I went to a barbershop and had my hair shaved.
From that time on, I had to give up the idea of taking over the family business after graduation.
We then went on to pursue our careers in different prefectures.
We had to decide to never see each other, and if we did see each other, we had to pretend to be strangers.
I was able to enter a high school in a neighboring prefecture a year later, and I forgot about the past and immersed myself in my own life. I cut my hair short.
But every time I asked for a “shaved head” at the barbershop, I remembered the story of the priest.
Three long years passed, wondering if he would come today or tomorrow.
After that, I ronin further and was able to enter a university in another prefecture.
However, it was a bad idea for me to go back home for the Bon Festival.
I had always been a grandfatherly child, and my grandfather had passed away on New Year’s Day that year.
It was sudden, but my parents had said over the phone, ‘Why don’t you at least come home for the first Obon?
That was a bad idea.
I stopped at a station kiosk to buy a newspaper, and my girlfriend from junior high school was the vendor.
When she saw me, she burst into tears and started to ramble on about the deaths of B and D, respectively.
She told me that shortly after graduation, B locked himself in his room at the boarding house and hanged himself.
The room was closed with shutters and curtains, and all the doors were sealed.
He had also methodically attached each strand of his own hair to the top of the door.
There were marks on his ears and eyelids where he had tried to seal them with solder, but he had not done so and committed suicide.
I heard that D fled to Shikoku in the summer of 17.
He was found walking around in a town near Matsuyama, wearing only a pair of pants and laughing.
The hair on the back of D’s head had been plucked out as if by a raven.
D’s eyelids were not closed, but had marks where he had tried to cut them out himself with a knife so that they would never close.
I have never cursed a relationship in junior high school as much as I did at that time.
It didn’t matter to me now what happened to B and D.
In other words, I realized that I was the only one left who remembered that thing.
I arrived home with a tight feeling in my chest and found no one at home.
I later learned that in my region, there was a custom called “bereavement rounds,” in which the first obon was held at a temple in Nara, even for the head family if the family had a particularly strong bereavement.
I was brought there.
For the next three days I had to stay in bed at my parents’ house with a fever of over 39 degrees Celsius.
At this time I was prepared to die. I laid out a futon in the Buddhist room, wore white clothes as much as possible, and slept drinking water.
At dawn on the third day, A stood up in my dream.
He was skin and bones, blackened and white-eyed.
“You’re all alone, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you come over here, too?”
“No.”
“C wants to see you.”
“No.”
“If you don’t come, C will be lynched every day. He’ll be hung upside down with a sock in his mouth and kicked to the curb.”
“Bullshit. Hell can’t be that lenient.”
“Ha-ha-ha… Hell… hell is ….”
Then I woke up.
My throat was hissing with the sound of my breath.
I looked at my grandfather’s bedside tablets and saw that they were cracked.
I thought to myself.
If I told the story of the thing to as many people as I did, the thing would find me and the probability of my being possessed would go down.
I am very sorry for the length of this article. I thought the rough writing style would not be memorable for those who read it.
I am sorry if you read it, but please think of it as a dog bite.
If you want to improve your own chances of survival, I recommend that you expose this text to as many people as possible.
