Judging by their horror movies, manga, tentacle porn, and vending machines that dispense schoolgirl's used panties, Japanese haunted houses must be the freakiest places on Earth....narrowly beating out Rick James' bedroom.

Lonestar: After seeing THAT (new window) woudlnt you have a chill down your spine?

Thats pretty cool, but couldn't understand a damn thing the guy was jibbering about. Why can't those people just speak english like everyone else?

Japanese culture has taught me that there is nothing to fear. Ultraman will save us all.

I really wish someone would teach to this person the language that is English. It is the very natural language to use for trading with others. I just do not get what this story is about because of what this person has said about being cool thanks to the fake ghosts. Maybe they are saying they are in front of an air conditioner and we are calling this the ghost.

CygnusDarius: The Exorcist vs. The creepy ghost from The Grudge. Who wins?.

The winner is a fat person who can sit on both of these! LAUGHTER OL!

I've lived here for nearly 4 years now and I've never heard of haunted houses as a way to beat the heat.

Then again this is the hottest summer since I moved to Tokyo, so I suppose I would have had no reason to hear about it. It's been in the 90s all week and they're calling for it to be like that through the end of September.

I live in Japan, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies...

Actually, Japan is great for urban ruin exploration. The Japanese have kind of a strange tendency to just shut down old places when they close and sort of abandon them. For instance, I've seen pictures of closed out pachinko parlors with the machines and and stacks of balls still sitting in places a few decades later.

This is an abandoned hotel/resteraunt I visited in Fukushima Prefecture, halfway up a mountain. It's an amazing place, and I wish I had taken establishing shots of the exterior last time I went. The place just shut down literally overnight. The front of it has been trashed pretty badly over 25 years (there is a bucket containing bus and train schedules that dates itself as Shouwa 51). There are about 4 or 5 arcade machines in the front of the shop. All busted to hell, but they looked like real expensive machines back in the day, including a sit-down motorcycle game.

There was a theater room off to the side that had a dozen floor tables with placemats beside each, the placemats containing an upturned bowl, a pair of chopsticks and a glass, waiting for the next day's performance. There was a theater in front on a raised platform, with the curtains open and banners to the side. The window off to the side had been smashed in and fog from the mountaintop cloudbanks poured into the room. It looked like a moment literally lost in time. The next time I visited it, the room had been destroyed by a collapsed ceiling, so I never got a photo.

The first photo shows the family room in the back of the building, where the proprieters lived. The person in the photo in the back was an honored ancestor and you can see purple and orange bits of fabric under him. These are o-mamori, spirit wards. It's kind of a strange thing, and you don't usually a setup like this in Japan.



Right passed the ruins of the family room, there's a small children's room. With all the toys laid out where the child had gotten done playing with them. Unfortunately, someone had kicked some stuff around a bit before I took the photo on a subsequent trip. Before that, you just got a sense that that room had been sitting the exact same way that a child left it for over 25 years. There was also another room with a huge amount of clothes off to the side. The first time I went, laundry was still hanging on the line. The line's since snapped.


The third photo is of a hotel room on the second floor. Amazingly, everything was fully furnished. Nothing had been taken out. I was too afraid to venture into one of those hotel rooms. The main floor is steel-reinforced concrete, but there's a lot of floor damage in other parts of the structure. And the Japanese tend not to build too strongly, so I never went inside a room. I could see all the TVs still in place in all of the rooms, and a fully stocked kitchen with a dozen coffee-makers, and hundreds of bowls, soup spoons, and stacks of plastic chopsticks.


The more I think about it, the more I'm sure that, back in the 1980s, whoever was running this failed establishment maybe spent a few months blowing off creditors and gathering all the cash they possibly could, and then one night just took off. The laundry on the line would even suggest that he didn't even tell his wife what was up until the last minute. Just boom, grab all the cash you have, including maybe your employees' next salaries, lock up, take off, and explain to your wife what's going down as you're driving to Kyushu to start over again. Meanwhile, the creditors weren't able to auction off the physical assets of the hotel because the proprieters simply vanishing off the face of the earth. In the age before computers could track everything and you didn't have to show your ID every time you do something significant, I'm sure this is how it went down.


Either that or the family fled the hotel because someone died there in the grip of a powerful rage...

Ron T Davenport: Harry Freakstorm: Baron Harkonnen

Here's the story:

It was the eighties and all the Japanese were making money hand over fist. The Fujimas were no exception. Though certainly small scale, they built a wonderful hotel which was modern, clean and well respected throughout the prefecture. Their future and the future of their children seemed assured and happy indeed.

Then, on a dark and stormy night, there came a visitor. He was, they say, an American. From America perhaps. He was a soldier on leave. He had missed the 7:05 bullet train and decided to take in a hotel for the night rather than wait for the 7:10. Fate directed him to the Fujima's. He was well received and given a room for the night. They offered him a meal of Sashimi, Sushi and fried tentacle but the soldier opened his AWOL case and showed the Fujima's an innocent bag. The logo "Taco Bell" meant nothing to them. It was a strange American phrase and nothing more.

A few hours later, there came a deafening road. It was as if the dead had woken up on the wrong side of Mount Fuji. There also came a strange smell. Death wrapped in wet leather and wearing sweaty socks. Had a nearby volcano erupted? The Fujima's definitely detected sulpher.

Another report shook the hotel. And another. The smell was awful. The Fujimas fled in terror never to return. The next morning, nearby residents reported seeing a soldier leaving the hotel. He reportedly caught the 8:07 bullet train to Yamakazakichini and was never seen again. But, it is said, that he left a large 'memento' in the toilet.

On dark nights, when the moon is full and the fall breeze is just so, you can still smell the essence of that soldier in that hotel. Had he only flushed.

Was he Army or Marine?

seeing as how he was at least house broken enough to use the toilet I'd say Army

Walker: Judging by their horror movies, manga, tentacle porn, and vending machines that dispense schoolgirl's used panties, Japanese haunted houses must be the freakiest places on Earth....narrowly beating out Rick James' bedroom.

The Japanese style of haunting is different form the American brand. With Americans, the ghosts and haunting tend to be limited to a particular area or residence. The Japanese version is like a disease, with the victim getting (often fatally) inflected after visiting the haunted area, and taking the ghost with him, inflecting other people along the way. People who didn't go near the original haunted area get inflected and suffer hauntings (and death) as well. Also you left out hair, which is often used in Asian horror.

Why is this all I can think of?



/Hot like...ummm...well, a couple asian schoolgirls, I suppose!
//What's that, Mr. Hansen?
///Sit over there? Sure. What's this all about?