89 - The Dead's Accusation

【死者の告発、shisha no kokuhatsu】

In 1976, there was a rumor that a ghost appeared on the city road facing Eifukuji Temple, in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture. A large water tank was located on the side of the road, and numerous people claimed to have seen a ghost in the vicinity of the tank. Although there had been no such rumors before, one after another, witnesses reported seeing a female ghost in a tattered black turtleneck sweater and skirt in the headlights of passing cars. The woman's face was sore and decomposed, her hair was falling out, and her appearance was frightening even to recall, according to every single account. Rumors of ghostly sightings persisted to the following year, and people in the area gradually avoided the area.

On the night of December 7, 1977, local firefighters went to the water reservoir near Eifukuji Temple to check the water level. There were rumors that a strange air in the area. As they approached the cistern and opened the lid, the firemen's nostrils were filled with an indescribable odor. When they checked the inside of the tank, they found something like a black cloth floating on the water. The firefighters stirred the tank to remove the garbage, wondering if someone had thrown it away as a prank. What they found was a human body instead.

She had been dead for two years, almost all of her hair had fallen out, the flesh was sore, and the decomposition had progressed to the point that the neck seemed likely to fall off when her body was pulled up. Her barely remaining corpse was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and skirt.

The police, who launched an investigation on suspicion of murder and abandonment of a corpse, immediately identified the victim's ex-boyfriend as the murderer. According to the investigation, on a November night in 1975, the murderer, who was being forced to marry the victim because of her pregnancy, strangled her to death in his car while they were out, and then threw her body into the water tank. That was just before the ghost rumors began.

The appearance of the ghost may have been an appeal for vindication from the woman who had been submerged in cold water for two years with her child.

Spirits usually appear in places where rumors of terrible incidents occur, but in this case, the body was found only after the apparition was seen. There have been other cases in which incidents were later discovered in locations where spirits have expressed their regrets.

The Jomon Tunnel in Hokkaido has long been rumored to be haunted, with rumors of male voices and bloody men standing in front of trains. In 1970, a body was discovered embedded in the wall of the tunnel by workers who were repairing it.

According to subsequent investigations, during the Meiji era, the zaibatsu (a conglomerate of merchants) and nobility, who were in the market for development profits, rapidly built tunnels in Hokkaido, with the work being extremely harsh: prisoners and the physically disabled were brought in and forced to work, and the bodies of those who dies from accidents or illness were buried in the walls or thrown away like garbage in holes they had dug.

It is said that more than 300 people lost their lives during the construction of the tunnels, and it is believed that this tunnel was one of those built on the corpses of these workers, whose regrets for dying in a dark hole are thought to have manifested as apparitions.