When I was a kid, I lived in a very rural area.
It was a quiet farming village surrounded by mountains.
In that village, there was a rule that one week before and after the full moon day of a certain month of the year, you were not allowed to go into the mountains.
The children in the village were told that this was because it was the day when the mountain god would come down to the mountain.
During this period, a shrine for the god was built at the entrance of the mountain (we called it “Sagemi-san”), and a sacred rope was tied around the path from the mountain to the village to worship the god.
During this festival, not only children but also adults were not allowed to enter the mountain.
Children in the village had been strictly warned from the time they could remember, and it was not a fun time to go into the mountains, so no one went out of their way to go into the mountain.
Nevertheless, because the children were in their prime, there were always one or two fools every few years who would recklessly attempt to enter the mountains.
Those who were caught hiding in the mountains were severely scolded, had their heads shaved and were forced to miss school, and then were forced to stay overnight at a shrine in the next village for a week of training.
The children in the village were so afraid of the punishment that they did not go into the mountains. And so on and so forth.
The story so far may end up being a strange custom that is common in the countryside, but the incident happened when I was in the sixth grade of elementary school.
It is not that I saw “something” myself, and the “incident” itself was just a village custom and a mental derangement, and if it is said that it had nothing to do with the occult, it may be true.
The only thing that remains is the fact that my cousin’s sister, who had broken the village ban and gone into the mountains, went insane, and her brother, perhaps feeling responsible, went crazy afterwards.
That year, my cousin’s father could not take a vacation during Obon, so instead of returning home for Obon, the four of us (parents, brother and sister) went back to our hometown at an off-season time of the year.
This was a time of year when no one would normally visit.
And that was the source of all the mistakes.
Children in the village were strictly taught not to step into the mountains at that time of the year, but my cousins did not know this because they did not usually come back to the village at that time of the year!
My grandfather and grandmother taught them this, but perhaps the cousins who grew up in the city did not understand it as well as they should have.
Or maybe they thought it was just an old-fashioned village custom and thought it was a superstition.
There is no way to know now.
During the summer vacation when my cousins and I usually go back home, we have a day off from school, so we can spend the whole day playing with each other.
Unfortunately, it was a weekday and we village children had to go to school.
After school, we would play with our cousins, but at least in the morning they would play with their siblings alone.
While we were at school, my grandparents would watch them to make sure they didn’t go into the mountains, but they couldn’t stay with us all the time.
But they were obedient to their grandparents until the third day or so, or at least that’s what we were led to believe. At least that’s what they were led to believe.
It was on the fourth day after the cousins arrived in the village that the problem arose.
It was the middle day of the Sagemi festival, and the day of the full moon.
In the morning when we were at school, my cousin brother (let’s call him S) took my sister (Yuko) out of hiding from our grandparents and sneaked into the mountains.
S told my grandmother that he was going to play by the river with his sister and went out, but when we came home around noon (it was Saturday) and went to look for S at the river, we couldn’t find him.
At first I thought it might have been an accident, but then I asked my friend D’s auntie, who always lets me park my bike at the river when I go there.
She said “they haven’t been here since this morning”, so I decided to go with my friends to look for S and his friends.
Then my friend T found S’s bike (my grandfather’s bike) hidden under a tree near the entrance of the mountain.
I thought they had gone into the mountains to hide, so I tried to follow them, but I had been strictly told not to go into the mountains, so I decided to let my grandfather know before I did.
When I got home and told my grandfather, he said, “Is that true? he asked me with a look that was not like his usually mild-mannered grandfather.
My grandmother’s face turned bloodthirsty when she heard this.
My uncle (S’s father, my grandfather’s son and my father’s brother) also looked pale.
My aunt (S’s mother) didn’t seem to understand what was going on.
My grandfather called somewhere as soon as he heard from me.
After that, it was just too much.
The village youth group gathered at the entrance of the mountain where the shrine of Sagemi-san (the god of roads) is located, and the elders were discussing what was going on.
I remember thinking, “No matter how much it’s a village tradition, this is not the way to do it, just because a child went into the mountain. ”
After that, a while after the youth group gathered at the entrance of the mountain, S came running down the mountain path with a desperate look on his face as if he was being chased by something.
My grandfather, seeing this, grabbed a bag of sake and coarse salt that had been offered to Sagemi-san (the god of roads), took the sake and salt in his mouth, and poured the sake and salt over S’s head.
Then he ran up to S and poured sake and salt on her head in the same way.
Then he poured sake and salt in S’s mouth.
S was vomiting on the spot when he got the booze and salt in his mouth.
After S threw up everything he could, my grandfather came back with S.
When my grandfather and S were going through the shimenawa, the elders poured a lot of sake and salt on my grandfather and S.
After that, S was taken by the leader of the youth group to somewhere (I later heard)
My sister, Y. But for some reason, he and my grandfather didn’t want to go into the mountains to look for her.
I wondered why and asked my father, but he just shook his head and said, “It’s a bad day. ”
My aunt was half in a frenzy, screaming, “Look for my daughter!” but I remember my uncle, with a sad and resigned look on his face, was quieting her down.
In the end, four days later, Yko was protected at a shrine of a mountain god halfway up the mountain.
I heard later that Yko was already mentally deranged by that time.
For some reason, after she was found, she was sent to a shrine in a neighboring village like her brother, instead of to a hospital.
My father told me much later that there had been some trouble among the village elders at that time.
Later on, I heard that Yko is still at the shrine in the next village.
She is ostensibly a live-in shrine maiden, but in reality she is living a life of near confinement in a sort of prison cell because she has not recovered from her mental illness.
This is a taboo subject even within the family, so I can’t get any more details out of my family.
I could only get my father drunk enough to find out about the confinement.
As for S, he was in a state of shock for a while, and he was a bit delirious, but after that, he was fine, both mentally and physically, and was leading a normal life.
After that incident, my uncle and his family stopped coming home, so I never saw S directly again.
After that, S thought that she was responsible for making her sister crazy, and she became mentally deranged.
I heard that when she was 18 years old, she committed suicide in front of the shrine of the mountain god where she was found.
I had left the village for higher education by then, so it was when I came of age and returned to the village for the coming-of-age ceremony that I heard this story.
That’s all I have to say, I don’t know what happened to me either.
I’m sorry for being so long-winded, not scary at all, and not making any sense at all.
