One of my classmates in elementary school was named M.
His father was a well-known local man and a well-known obstetrician/gynecologist.
The hospital was an old two-story Western-style building with ivy on the exterior walls.
Some neighborhood children called it a haunted house.
The hospital was actually very prosperous, thanks to his father, who had a good reputation as a doctor.
However, when M was about to graduate from elementary school, his father suddenly passed away.
The hospital had to close.
M, his mother, sister, and grandmother were left behind.
A few years later, he entered a local high school.
When I was talking with M and his classmates, who had also become my classmates at that time
We decided to have a ghost story convention at M’s house, a Western-style building that used to be a hospital, but is no longer used.
I asked him if I could stay the night.
He said, “Sure, but only for the night of July 7th.”
“Why”
I asked him. He replied that that day, every year since my father died, my family travel because of the ghosts that haunt them.
Such stories about K added fuel to the fire, and also because July 7 that year was a Saturday.
Seven or eight people gathered for the long-awaited seventh day, or the evening of Tanabata, the seventh day of the seventh month of the year.
We gathered in the evening at M’s house, where no one was home.
We were having a lot of fun while sipping on beer, which we could not even drink.
Then, we decided to tell a ghost story in the hospital room.
We moved from the main house, where M’s family lived, across the courtyard and down a corridor to a Western-style building that used to be a hospital.
We placed a candle in the middle of the former hospital room and began to tell a few crude ghost stories of our own.
Then it was M’s turn to tell us about a ghost that appears every year on July 7.
I asked her what kind of ghosts she sees, and she told me that on the night of July 7 of the same year, before her father passed away, it was raining, and she told me that she saw her father’s ghost.
It was raining that day, and a pregnant woman, soaked to the skin and unknown to anyone else, was the only one there.
She came to the hospital, all alone, with her baby almost born.
M’s father took her to the hospital room anyway, but the baby was stillborn.
In the end, the baby was stillborn. It was a girl.
The mother’s body was also in a very weak and critical condition.
Anyway, she survived, and in the morning, when the nurse, who had been up all night, was taking a break
The woman, who was thought to be dying, disappeared from the hospital room.
She had no belongings to begin with, but she was found with her soaking wet clothes, and her name and identity were unknown.
They called the police and searched the neighborhood.
Finally, the woman could not be found, and she was never seen again.
So the missing woman comes out as a ghost? I asked.
M says, no, the stillborn baby comes out.
He said that she cried rather than came out.
M’s father, who thought that the missing woman might come back sooner or later, decided not to bury the baby, but to make a bone.
Instead of burying the baby, he put the bones in a spare room in the hospital.
He left the baby’s bones in a spare room of the hospital, a kind of storage room, and left them there until his death.
Since then, every year at midnight on July 7, a baby’s cry has been heard from the vacant room.
No one saw a ghost, but there was definitely a baby crying.
So that night, the family started staying out because it was so creepy.
M was a ballsy guy, or rather, he didn’t feel anything.
He was a strange guy, now that I think about it.
The room where we were having our ghost story that night was right next to the empty room where the baby’s bones were enshrined.
It was hard to believe that M, who is always so honest, was making up stories.
After hearing the story, some of my friends started to leave.
In the end, M, myself, and one other person remained.
We thought it was a bad idea to be in the next room, so we tried to move toward the main house.
Two of my friends who were supposed to have left earlier came back to the house with blood on their faces.
“What’s wrong?”
“Ghost!!! Ghost!!”
“What?”
“There was a woman soaking wet at the entrance of the hospital!”
“You’re serious?”
“I’m telling you, the rest of them got away.”
M’s house, which is surrounded by a reasonably high fence, has a kitchen door behind the main house or a service entrance next to the main entrance of that former hospital.
So they went around to the front of the house and came back in a state of panic.
We decided to go outside immediately anyway.
We used a bicycle that was close at hand as a springboard and scrambled up the wall.
At that moment we were sure that we could hear the baby crying.
A sobbing voice? A distant sound like emergency braking?
The mewling of a cat? It sounded like a lot of things, but the sound of a baby crying was certainly the most fitting.
I was in a sitting position on the wall at the time.
I was sure I saw a woman with long hair looking at me through the glass in the hospital window, holding some kind of box.
And then I fell off the wall.
I think I blacked out for a moment.
I was woken up by M and his friends who came over the wall right after me.
Strangely enough, I did not hear the baby’s cries from the other side of the fence.
Still, we ran down the street at night, at least some distance away from M’s house, and then we saw each other, out of breath, and decided to go back to our house.
“You idiot, you’re scary! Ahoy!”
And then, as I was hitting M.
M said, “Yeah, I’m scared…. I’m scared…,”
Then, remembering the woman I had seen earlier, I asked M, “Hey, do you keep baby bones in a box?”
“Yes, a box made of paulownia wood.”
Now it is a good memory…?
After graduating from high school, M moved out with her family.
Now, the place where that Western-style house used to be is a convenience store.
And M did not become a doctor, to his family’s disappointment.
