This happened a few years ago during the summer, when I was working as an office lady and living alone. The 1DK apartment I lived in at the time had a unit bath where the toilet and the bathtub were in the same room.
One night, figuring the bathwater was ready, I went to take a bath and opened the bathtub lid. I saw a shadow that looked like a human head. The upper half of the head was floating right in the middle of the tub, while everything from the bridge of the nose down was submerged. It was a woman. Her wide-open eyes stared blankly at the wall opposite the tub, her long hair drifting and spreading out like seaweed, and her thin, white arms—floated up by the buoyancy—were flickering in and out of view among the black hair. No matter what position someone tried to get into, there was no way anyone could fit inside the narrow bathtub like that. It was clearly not human.
Paralyzed by the suddenness of the event, I stood there naked, still holding the lid. The woman seemed to notice me standing there in shock. Moving only her eyes, she glared at me, and her grinning mouth opened up bright red deep within the water and her long, black hair.
*(Oh, no!)*
The next moment, I slammed the lid shut on the bathtub. Mixing with a gurgling sound from beneath the lid, I heard laughter. At the same time, there was a scratching sound coming from underneath the closed lid…
Making as much noise as possible, I grabbed whatever was nearby—washbasins, brushes, shampoo bottles—and piled them blindly on top of the lid, then frantically bolted out of the bathroom. On the other side of the bathroom door, the scratching sound from under the lid had changed into the sound of a palm slapping against it. I threw on the T-shirt and jeans I had just taken off, rushed out of the room, hailed a taxi, and fled to a female friend who lived nearby.
A few hours later… it must have been past midnight. Because I had run out without locking my door or taking anything with me, I went back to my apartment accompanied by my friend. My friend was the type to laugh off these kinds of stories, and being full of curiosity, she agreed to open the bathroom door for me.
The bathroom was very quiet. Everything I had piled onto the lid had fallen to the floor. There was no laughter coming from the water, nor any sound of the lid being beaten. My friend opened the bathtub lid. However, only steam rose up; there was no woman, not even a single strand of hair. The water was clean, too. Still, it felt creepy, so I asked my friend to drain the water.
That was when we found something awful in a completely different place. My body froze. Long black hair was sticking out from between the closed lid and the seat of the Western-style toilet. My friend noticed it, too. Being bold, she ignored my protests and lifted the toilet lid.
Inside sat just a woman's face, turned upward. Looking like a mask, the woman moved only her eyes to look at my terrified friend, and then at me. The moment our eyes met, the woman opened her mouth wide again, and this time she began to laugh in a clear, shrill voice.
*Hahahahaha… hahahahahahaha…*
In time with the laughter, the woman's face quivered in short little jerks like it was driven by clockwork, and her protruding black hair was sucked right down into the toilet with a creepy *whoosh*.
With a twitching face, my friend slammed the toilet lid shut. Then, holding the lid down with one hand, she twisted the flush handle with the other. The grating laughter was drowned out by the sound of flowing water and the suction noise of it being forcibly swallowed.
After that, perhaps because I was acting purely on instinct, I don't remember much. When I came to, my friend and I were standing outside her apartment with just a change of clothes and our valuables. Once inside, the first thing my friend did was open the lids of both the toilet and the bathtub, and she said, "Never close them."
Early the next morning, I begged my reluctant friend to accompany me one more time and went back to my apartment. But there was nothing left there. Even so, I broke the lease on the apartment and decided to move back to my parents' house. I couldn't care less about having a longer commute anymore.
Even now, when I take a bath, I wait for the exact moment my mother or sister is going in. And with my family's understanding, I have kept the toilet lid removed entirely ever since.