When I was in high school, I had a bizarre experience. It was so strange that no one around me has ever believed it. But it is 100% the truth of what I experienced. It was the autumn of my second year in high school. My high school didn't care at all about things like the school festival, but it put an enormous amount of effort into the sports festival—or rather, the cheering competition. Each class would come up with elaborate cheering performances. My class decided to build a large sign to place behind our cheering section, and we needed to look for wood to use as pillars. A classmate named A said, "It's not lumber, but we can get bamboo for free," so we decided on bamboo. Apparently, A's family owned a small plot of mountain land, and there was a bamboo grove there. We decided to go cut down some bamboo on Saturday afternoon. Besides A and myself, there were three others, making a total of five people. The bamboo grove was located at the very lowest part of the mountain. A narrow path ran right through the middle of the grove (unpaved, of course) and led up into the mountain (though it was only about 100 meters high, perhaps?). As we started cutting the bamboo, a strange sound echoed from far up the mountain path. *Miiiiiiiiin.* It wasn't a human voice. It wasn't the roar of an animal. It sounded like something a machine would make. Yet, I had no idea what kind of sound it was. I thought it might be a chainsaw or something, but A insisted, "Nobody should be coming to this mountain today." Besides, first of all, it didn't sound like the engine of a chainsaw; it was a sound coming from a different kind of machinery. They weren't cutting wood or anything like that. But someone was using some sort of machine deep in the mountain... The five of us looked at each other in confusion.
When the sound came again—*Miiiiiiiiin*—I grabbed my saw and started heading in the direction of the noise. I couldn't help being curious. The other four followed me. They seemed to feel the same way. With A, who knew this mountain well, leading the way, we climbed up the mountain path. *Miiiiiiiiin.* We heard it again. The sound was coming from the woods slightly off the mountain path. After walking just a short distance, A, who was in the lead, suddenly stopped, held up a hand to make everyone halt, and pointed to the right. In the direction he pointed was a door. Set right into the rocky cliffside, it looked just like the secret base from a tokusatsu hero show. It was a heavy-looking metal door, but it had no handle. How on earth was it supposed to open and close? Anyway, it was a strange door in a strange place. The door stood wide open. The interior was dark and hard to make out, but some kind of passageway seemed to continue inward. The sound had come from deep inside here. There was no proof, but everyone thought the same thing. "Hey A, what is this door?" "I don't know. When on earth did something like this get built?" A claimed he had no idea at all. "I've never seen anything this weird before," A muttered repeatedly while peering inside. Then he turned back to us and said, "Let's check inside, just for a second."
Worried that the door might suddenly slam shut and trap us inside, we placed a large stone under the open door to keep it from closing. B and C said they were too scared and wanted no part of it, so we left the two of them behind and decided the three of us would go inside. Entering the passageway, it was quite dark and hard to see. Since we were smokers, we took out our Zippos and used them in place of candles. When we touched the walls, they had the rough, bumpy feel of raw rock. However, it was clear this was not naturally formed. There were numerous straight, linear marks, as if it had been carved out by machinery. The passageway was wide enough for only one person at a time. After walking barely ten meters, we immediately emerged into a wide space that could be called a "room." And that was it. There was nothing else. Not even a trace that anyone had been there. As we stood there talking about whether this was the wrong place after all, a voice called out from the entrance. "Hey! Come back! Get back out here!" The two who had stayed behind were shouting. Their cries sounded panicked. Sensing something abnormal, we hurried back, only to find the door moving. The stone alone hadn't been enough to hold it, and the two of them were desperately pushing against the door to keep it open. The moment we squeezed back outside and all five of us stepped away from the door, it slammed shut with a deafening roar: *Miiiiiiiiin.* We watched the stopping stone tumble out from the passageway. That sound—that was the noise this door made when it opened and closed. According to B, it had started moving suddenly without any warning. They had panicked and tried to hold it back, but the force pushing the door shut had gradually grown stronger. If we had been even a little bit slower, we might have been trapped inside. Since it was already turning evening, we decided to come back and investigate again the next day. The following day, all five of us went back to the spot once more. However, for some reason, we couldn't find the door. The passageway was gone, too, of course. I still keep in touch with A to this day, but he says he has never laid eyes on that door ever since. The rock face is completely normal now, and that sound is never heard again.
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