Would anyone like to share some terrifying, bone-chilling stories?
Back in elementary school, my class went on a trip to a youth lodge by the sea. After doing a test of courage where we walked back and forth to a nearby shrine, it was finally time to go to sleep. Fueled by the strange, wired energy that comes right after being scared, a group of eight boys and girls gathered in the recreation room at the back of the building's first floor. Lights-out had just happened, so there was still a chance a teacher might come by on patrol, but we had reached the point of "oh well, if we get caught, we get caught." The reason was that we had someone among us who was unusually good at telling ghost stories. He usually didn't stand out, but perhaps it was some hidden talent—anyway, the quiet, understated way he told his scary stories created a deeply eerie atmosphere. We listened to him with rapt attention. No, perhaps it would be more accurate to say we were too terrified to leave. The tatami-matted recreation room had only low bookshelves lining the walls, and our huddled circle cast flickering shadows against them. He had placed a single candle right in the middle of our circle. Though he normally skipped P.E. and sat quietly in the corner of the classroom with a pale face, at that moment, he had complete control over all of us. Not a single person suggested that it was time for bed. We were simply too terrified to be told to walk back to our rooms alone.
His story progressed in a flat, monotone voice, and I could see the girls' faces growing increasingly stiff. The boys kept demanding the next story with a half-hearted, macho bravado, but they were undoubtedly just lying to themselves, trying to mask their terror as mere curiosity. Suddenly, his voice cut off, and silence filled the room. He raised a hand as if to take a brief break, brought a water bottle to his mouth, and swallowed. Someone sniffled, and like a chain reaction, the sound of *sniff, sniff* rippled through the dead-silent recreation room. Unable to bear the heavy atmosphere, one of the boys spoke up in a forced, cheerful tone. "Hey, let's play a game."
Everyone close your eyes, and at the same time, point to where you think a ghost is right now... The boy who suggested it looked at the rest of us, and both the boys and girls hesitated. But with someone chiming in with a "That sounds fun," the social pressure made it impossible to refuse. "Alright, close your eyes then." The boy who started it said, and I reluctantly closed mine, too. Suddenly, the sound of my own heartbeat grew deafeningly loud. "Did you point yet?" Hearing that voice, I panicked and pointed my finger somewhere at random. It wasn't because I felt a ghostly presence. Honestly, I felt that trying to *sense* anything like that was something I 'shouldn't do.' "Open your eyes," a voice called out, and I timidly lifted my eyelids. A short gasp escaped someone's lips. Almost everyone was pointing in completely different directions, but two of the girls happened to be pointing in nearly the exact same direction. They laughed it off with a playful "No way~," but I could hear the trembling in their voices. "Next story," he muttered flatly, leaning his shoulder forward slightly. We brought our faces closer to the candle's flame. Our circle tightened. Once again, his spine-chilling story began, ending with an oddly lingering resonance. The sound of breathing, each at a slightly different rhythm, echoed faintly in the dark. "Let's point to where a ghost might be again." The same boy said. "Sure, why not," another boy chimed in with fake bravery and closed his eyes. The rest of us followed suit. At the very least, I was too scared to be the only one keeping my eyes open. "Okay, open your eyes." When told to do so, I opened mine, and this time, a boy and a girl were pointing in the same direction. I instinctively averted my gaze from the white wall. I felt like if I looked too closely, I might actually see something. From then on, every time he finished a story, this psychic-experiment-like game was played. Even the boy who suggested the game now looked completely drained of color. Yet, no one dared to suggest stopping. It felt as though we were all trapped in an inescapable cycle of repetition.
And eventually, we began to notice. The directions we were pointing in were gradually starting to align. Every time we opened our eyes, there was a sharp intake of breath, and everyone's gaze would drift toward it. This time, four people were pointing at almost the exact same window. Heavy curtains were drawn, blocking any view of the outside. Surely, the tiny flicker of the candle couldn't be seen from out there, either. "Heh heh heh," someone let out an embarrassed laugh. Not a single person attempted to check outside the window, on the other side of the curtain. Everyone just awkwardly looked away from it. "Next story," he whispered again quietly. And the moment he started speaking, I realized this story was different from the ones before. It was a story about children gathering in the middle of the night, playing a pointing game to guess where a ghost was hiding. It sounded entirely too much like us. As the story moved from the first part to the second, our fingers began to line up more and more. Two people, three people, four people, five... And when the final story ended, everyone's fingers were pointing at the exact same spot... His story ended right there. And yet, no one exhaled. The continuation was about to begin right now. "Close your eyes," he said. No one could disobey. Before me, only the flickering candlelight remained in the darkness like a wavering heat haze. In the recreation room where we sat huddled in a circle, it felt as though every single direction was warping and shifting. I had a gut feeling that no matter where I pointed, I would end up pointing at something deeply horrifying. Shivering, my hand moved. "Open your eyes," a voice echoed from the dark. And we all saw that every single one of us was pointing in the exact same direction.
***
It was the spring of my first year in university. I was visiting a haunted spot, completely alone with an upperclassman I had befriended shortly after entering school. He was a bizarre individual with such an uncanny, encyclopedic knowledge of occult lore that I, a ghost story enthusiast, couldn't hold a candle to him. I called him Shisho (the Master) and followed him wherever he went. "There really are some things in this world that defy explanation." In the darkness, with the distant call of mountain pigeons echoing from afar, a small lamp illuminated our faces. After listening to my most prized terrifying experience, Shisho muttered just those words, nodded once, and fell silent. Having him offer no further reaction only made the fear swell. The place we were currently in was an abandoned-looking prefab shack, reached only after driving far away from civilization and winding our way up a mountain path. A variety of construction-like materials were scattered about, leaving the place in utter ruin, but the interior was spacious. We had dusted off a blue tarp and were sitting on it, but the empty space pressing in from all sides was unnaturally, intensely cold. Looking back, I can't believe we were reckless enough to hang out in a known haunted spot just to share ghost stories. Even while we were talking, I had felt a strange unease. There should have been only the two of us here, yet it felt as though a much larger crowd was standing by, eavesdropping. "So... that was your first time playing the pointing game?" Shisho finally broke the silence. "Yes. Probably for everyone else, too. Why do you ask?" Shisho narrowed his eyes and a faint smile touched his lips. "Shall I guess where everyone was pointing at the very end?" I was startled. At the same time, I figured there was no way he could know, since I hadn't described the layout of the recreation room in detail. "I can tell just from your story." Shisho stated it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I felt a slight surge of tension. There was no way he could know. But sitting inside that eerie prefab shack at night, that certainty began to waver.
***
Listening to the buzzing of tiny moths drawn to the lamp, I stared at his face floating in the darkness. "Everyone pointed at 'him'—the guy who told the ghost story." As he said this, Shisho pointed a finger right at the space between my eyebrows, then curled his fingers into a fist as if hiding the gesture. "Or, at least, that's what I'd like to say. But no." He continued: "You never tried to play that game seriously even once. You were too terrified to actually search for the presence of a spirit. In fact, you were terrified that your own finger might point to such a place. You thought that if you ended up pointing in the same direction as someone else, it would make the fear—the reality that a ghost was truly there—all too real. That's what you believed. And so, it's easy to imagine that you became trapped in an obsession: you *had* to point somewhere completely empty, conversely. And as the game went on, that mindset became the shared consciousness of everyone in the room..." Shisho's words were filled with an unshakeable, uncanny confidence. "After the two girls' fingers matched at the very beginning, everyone probably thought: 'It's way too terrifying to have our fingers line up in that direction again.' So, consciously or unconsciously, they avoided that direction. And then, naturally, some other boy and girl accidentally matched their fingers pointing somewhere completely unrelated. Say, the exact opposite side. And everyone thought: 'That spot's no good, either.' Once again, the available directions narrowed. Naturally, the probability of fingers matching again went up. The more they repeated it—" Tracing his finger through the empty air as if writing letters (*swoosh, swoosh*), Shisho glanced around the interior of the prefab shack. "And then, 'he' starts telling a ghost story that mirrors their exact current situation. That's playing dirty. No matter how terrifying it is, the filter of 'it's just a story' gets stripped away, and the ghost story starts encroaching on reality. Without a doubt, the children's minds were filled with terror. And thus, they became dominated by a single obsession: 'Next time, I absolutely must not point in the same direction as anyone else.' Let alone the ending of the ghost story he told, where everyone points at the exact same spot—that was something that simply could not be allowed to happen."
Shisho lowered his finger and bowed his head. "That's why everyone thought while keeping their eyes closed. A place where absolutely no one else would point. A place where a ghost has no business being. A place where it wouldn't even cross anyone's mind that something could be there..." A sudden chill ran down my spine. Could it be that Shisho actually figured it out? "That room—the recreation room—was on the first floor. Therefore..." Shisho lifted his head, thrust out his right hand, and slowly pointed his index finger straight down at the ground. "Everyone pointed down." The moment I heard those words, a vivid memory flashed back into my mind. The girls' screams. The boys' screams. The sound of scrambling footsteps fleeing every which way. When everyone's fingers pointed downward, I felt as though I had heard an unearthly screech right beside my ear. It felt as though a heavy, freezing liquid had been poured down my back. Panicking, trying to get away from the spot, I crashed into someone. As I picked myself up from the floor, I saw him—frozen in absolute horror right in front of the candle. Before long, a few people came wailing out of the recreation room, and hearing the commotion, a teacher came running down the hall in pajamas. We were thoroughly chewed out and given a solid smack on the head each. The boy who had brought the candle, in particular, was practically carried off to the teacher's room. His composure from when he was telling ghost stories was completely gone; he was crying and wailing, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
"You figured it out..." That was all I could say. Once again, I realized what an extraordinary person he was. "Strictly speaking, everyone's fingers were probably scattered all over the place. Right beneath themselves, or somewhere on the tatami mats. In any case, they weren't aligned in the way two or more people had matched earlier. But when you opened your eyes and saw the direction the other kids' fingers were facing, everyone's minds only registered that single symbol: 'down.'" It was only after having it pointed out to me that I realized it. Our fingers hadn't actually been aligned at all. Yet, we had hallucinated that they 'matched.'
"That game was too cruel for kids with such powerful imaginations," Shisho said, smiling with just his lips. I rubbed my left arm and cringed. To think that such a psychological trick was hidden behind that terrifying experience... Then, a faint snag caught in my mind. Wait. If that's true, then something didn't add up. "Didn't you say earlier: *'There really are some things in this world that defy explanation'*?" After listening to my story, Shisho had definitely said those exact words. Yet right after, he had provided a perfectly neat psychological explanation for it all. At the time, it had sounded like a statement acknowledging the unexplainable. But now it felt anticlimactic. "Who said I was talking about the punchline of your story?" Shisho exhaled slowly. At that moment, goosebumps broke out all over my skin. Scanning the four corners of the shack—where spiderwebs clung like smoke—under the dim glow of the lamp, Shisho began to speak: "Apparently, this place used to be the material storage yard for a bankrupt construction company. I haven't told you yet why it became a haunted spot, have I? Well, to put it bluntly, the company president hanged himself right here. Tied his necktie to that pillar right over there." He shined the lamp toward it. As if looking at something abhorrent, I instinctively recoiled. "And after that, rumors started going around that if you passed by the shack at night, you could see someone standing inside the window. The silhouette on the other side of that window apparently had an unnaturally long neck. The story goes that the dead president became an earthbound spirit, unable to find rest, and still wanders inside this prefab shack." However, Shisho paused for a beat. "If you trace back the reason why the president hanged himself, you stumble upon another interesting rumor." *Clunk.* He set the lamp down and stood up. He stepped off the blue tarp and began walking in a circle on the bare dirt.
"The construction company went bankrupt because their cash flow dried up and they bounced a check. And what dealt the final blow to their finances was that they won a low-bid public works project from the local municipal government—bidding right at the minimum allowable price—despite starting with sloppy, careless engineering plans. As long as they tried to follow the blueprints, construction was delayed over and over again. While engaging in endless, bitter arguments with the municipal inspectors, their cash flow visibly stagnated. They somehow managed to finish the project, and the municipality paid them in full, but by that time, the construction company's backbone was completely shattered. They went bankrupt a year later—that's how the story goes, but... Actually, an incident occurred right in the middle of that public works project." Shisho stopped dead in his tracks. "It happened when they were digging up the ground for the foundation work. The site supervisor and a few workers unearthed something that looked like ancient artifacts from beneath the dirt. Normally, when someone discovers artifacts like a shell mound or ancient ruins, they are legally obligated to report it to the Board of Education. But for a construction company, this is a troublesome piece of cargo. Until a thorough investigation is completed, they are forced to suspend construction, and depending on the findings, the project itself might even be canceled. For a small or medium-sized construction company with no financial cushion, it's a matter of life and death. So, the president, upon receiving this report from the site supervisor, ordered them to cover up the discovery of the artifacts. And those unearthed artifacts were secretly transported to another location and re-buried. Naturally—on the construction company's private land. Shortly after, a prefab shack was erected right over that plot of land, as if to cover it up. It was used as a material storage yard, but eventually, the company hit financial ruin, and the president hanged himself and died right there... In other words, right here." Shisho said quietly. Perhaps the air currents had shifted just a fraction, but a stale, foul odor drifted from the bundles of straw piled in the corner of the shack. An inexplicable, creeping chill felt like it was crawling up from the soles of my feet.
"Just what was the thing they ended up unearthing? That record hasn't been passed down. The rumor itself seems to be something whispered in secret among the former employees of the construction company, heard secondhand from the workers who operated the machinery. They say the company's bankruptcy and the president's death were caused by the curse of those artifacts. Because they found something they never should have unearthed, and then did something as outrageous as burying it all over again. The fact that the president didn't hang himself at the corporate headquarters or some other facility, but rather at this deep-mountain storage yard— doesn't that alone feel bound by karma?" Shisho stood near the pillar and stroked it. The very pillar where the president had wrapped his necktie. "And the fact that the president's ghost is still trapped here... gives off a sense of dark, fathomless gravity." For a while now, growing louder and softer in turns, I had been hearing something like a ringing in my ears. I covered my ears, desperately fighting the urge to scream, yet I still couldn't pull my eyes away from Shisho's lips. Something was rising up. Something invisible. "Before you had heard a single word about the stories surrounding this prefab shack, you chose to share your elementary school experience when asked to tell a ghost story, completely unprompted. As if you had chosen it. That's why I said it. That there are things in this world that defy explanation." Without making a sound, Shisho sat back down right in front of me.
Come now, let's close our eyes and point.
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