When the Master said something weird, I couldn't help asking him to repeat it. "I'm telling you, it's transmission towers." It was around the autumn of my first year in college. At the time, I was learning the ABCs of the occult from the Master, an upperclassman in my club who was also an occultist. Some of the stories were cliches, but others were things I rarely heard from anyone other than him. At that moment, I didn't catch the meaning of the word "tet-tou" for a second, so I made him repeat it. "Transmission towers. Trans-mis-sion tow-ers. Iron... what, pillars? Anyway, haven't you ever seen one? If you look up at them in the middle of the night, there are quite a few." According to the Master, if you go to transmission towers in the suburbs at night, you can see human spirits climbing them. Why do ghosts climb transmission towers? Before I could even wonder about that, the premise that ghosts would climb transmission towers in the first place wasn't in my repertoire. I searched my mental database of ghost stories, but I don't think there were any about ghosts and transmission towers. The Master just said, "Eh, it's normal," with a straight face. He claimed that spirits gather not because a place is haunted, but because of the symbolic nature of the transmission tower itself.
I racked my brain to see if there were any transmission towers in my neighborhood, and the one from my childhood immediately came to mind. The towering transmission tower and power lines I used to pass by on my way home from school in the evening. By dusk, that majestic form would turn into an eerie silhouette, looking down on me. To be sure, transmission towers at night have a strange, creepy vibe to them. However, I didn't think I had ever seen a spirit there. Hearing the Master's story made me intensely curious, so I hopped on my bicycle and went looking for a nearby tower. When it came down to actually finding one, I wasn't very confident, but it turned out to be simple. Transmission towers stood out clearly even from a distance. After cutting through a residential area, I found one towering beside a river, parked my bicycle nearby, and grabbed onto the wire mesh at its base. When I looked up, there were no power lines. A battered plaque said something like "Maru-X Line - 12." It had probably been taken off the power grid due to relocation work or something. The reddish-black tower, covered in rust, felt lonely rather than scary. Or rather, the sun hadn't set yet. I killed some time at a nearby convenience store and bookstore, then headed back to the transmission tower. In the dark, the atmosphere was completely different. A suburban transmission tower with no pedestrians seemed to grow even larger when you looked up at it. The tower, which should have been red, was now black. It was a sucking kind of black, like a hole shaped into the dark gray clouds of the night. A wind seemed to have picked up, causing the off-limits wire mesh to rustle, and from the tower without power lines, the air blowing through its framework made a strange, howling sound.
There was no light around, and even when I strained my eyes, I couldn't see anything on the tower. The occult is all about perseverance. Not one to give up easily, I sat down and stuck it out until 3:00 a.m. I also had my doubts: could you actually see a ghost in a place with no rumors or anecdotes of them "appearing"? I kept projecting the image of a shadow sitting on the framework, but whenever I thought I saw something and rubbed my eyes, there was still nothing there. In the end, exhausted from the tension of trying to see the invisible, I retreated without even waiting for dawn. The next day, when I reported back right away, the Master wore a strangely pleased look. "Eh? You went to that transmission tower?" For some reason, he started saying he would go too. When I said, "Well, nothing appeared," he muttered something weird: "That's *because* nothing appeared." Without fully understanding, the two of us went to that transmission tower in broad daylight. Seen in the daytime, the eeriness of the night faded away, leaving it looking like nothing more than a rusted veteran soldier. Then the Master stroked his chin and said, "This used to be a famous haunted spot." Apparently, someone had poured gasoline over their head and committed self-immolation. There was a rumor that if you walked past this transmission tower in the middle of the night, you could hear the sound of someone sobbing that it was hot, so hot.
"There used to be a black stain around there." Beyond the wire mesh, the Master pointed to a spot where no stain was visible now. When I asked him, "Do you feel anything?" he shook his head. "I've seen it too. The spirit of the person who committed suicide, right here." As he said this, the Master's eyes had a distant focus. "They're not here now," he muttered to himself. "I see. I feel like I finally understand why they climb transmission towers." With that, he looked up at the iron tower, gleaming dully in the sunlight. I didn't get it. When I asked him, he brushed me off, saying it was a "secret." The proposition that the Master had arbitrarily raised and arbitrarily found an answer to was never brought up again. And yet, now, every time I look at a transmission tower, I think about it: Perhaps spirits who wish to vanish from this world climb the symbolic structure of a "transmission tower," reaching up into the sky, in order to leave this mortal realm. Long stairs or high-rise buildings probably won't do. Not as long as those places still lead to the world of the living.
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