Would anyone like to share some terrifying stories that are genuinely too scary to die for? 188
I’d like to tell a story about a doll. It was the spring of my second year in university. At the time, there was a regular female user named Mikacchi on a local occult forum I used to frequent. She was a fun—or rather, noisy—person, always acting as the center of attention and getting overly excited at offline meetups. One day, she said to me: "Hey, a few of my friends and I are holding a group art exhibition. Do you want to come check it out?" She was a senior at the same university (though I’d barely ever seen her on campus), and I knew she was in the art course and drew, but I’d never actually seen her work. "Sounds nice," I replied, while suddenly feeling a bit uneasy about the buzz around us. Right in the middle of a pub meetup, why would she invite just me? Sure, we met often at offline gatherings, but we weren't particularly close. I was just tagging along at the very bottom of the regular forum group, so naturally, opportunities to see her increased, that was all. I sensed there had to be an ulterior motive. When I pressed her on it, she caved pretty easily. She told me, "Bring geko-chan's boyfriend." Geko-chan was the big boss of our regular group, a woman respected for her uncanny, supernatural intuition. Her boyfriend was an eccentric who also happened to be my master in the ways of the occult. Considering the forum "below his level," he would only scoff at it and had never once participated. Then again, he didn't even own a computer. What on earth was her intention in asking me to bring this master of mine? "Well, you see, we rented that group exhibition space for a five-day contract, and today's the third day, but..." "...something's weird."
From what I heard, at the gallery where their paintings were on display, groaning noises could be heard from places where absolutely no one should be, and visitors would suddenly start feeling sick. "Just yesterday, after we closed up, cleaned, and tidied everything, there were long, black hairs scattered all over the floor for no reason. I mean, our 'visitors' are just my friends and people like that, and most of them dye their hair. The professors and old guys don't have hair that long. It was super creepy." Mikacchi exaggeratedly shivered, hugging her own shoulders. "And geko-chan, the one person you can rely on in times like this, has been away visiting her family for a while. Kyosuke went off to Tokyo, too." She rested her elbow on the table and muttered. "Which leaves us with just one option: geko-chan's legendary boyfriend." Mikacchi didn't seem to have met my master in person, but she had apparently heard the rumors floating around. What kind of rumors, I couldn't be sure. "Anyway, here's the flyer. Come tomorrow, okay? I'm on duty tomorrow from morning till noon, so get here before noon." She was extremely pushy. When I pointed out, "Tomorrow's a weekday, you know," she poked me and said, "You barely go to your lectures anyway." The next day, I invited my master just in case, and he tagged along without a fuss, saying, "Sounds interesting." The two of us walked through the city looking at the flyer, and our destination turned out to be a small, semi-basement gallery tucked away near an old-established department store. If you stepped just outside, there was a bustling arcade street with a constant flow of pedestrians even on a weekday afternoon, but this spot was strangely quiet, wrapped in a calm atmosphere.
Stepping inside, a female student with a short bob smiled and greeted us with an "Welcome." Was she from the same art course as Mikacchi? The dimly lit interior illuminated various paintings of all sizes hanging along the walls. "Ah, you really came." After inviting us, saying "really" felt a bit rich, but Mikacchi emerged from the back of the gallery. The moment she laid eyes on my master, her eyes went wide and she muttered, "Whoa, geko-chan... No wonder she keeps him hidden..." Ignoring her, my master let his gaze sweep across the interior of the gallery. The slightly mocking atmosphere he’d had on the way here shifted a little. "How many people are renting this place?" In response to my master's question, Mikacchi answered, "Six." "Friends from my course, and an underclassman. We get a student discount here." "And you all display your own paintings during the rental period?" "Yep. The six of us take turns being on duty to handle customers." "I see." My master let his gaze make another circuit around the room. "Oh, that's right. I think I might know who the culprit is. This way, this way." Mikacchi guided us to a secluded corner at the back of the gallery. Up until then, the displays had centered around still lifes like baskets of fruit, but one painting stood out as clearly anomalous. It was a painting of a doll. Against a generally dark blue background, a bob-haired doll was painted with the precision of a human portrait. It wasn't a deforming caricature of a person; it was rendered with realistic technique, making it instantly recognizable as a doll at a single glance. A black-haired head with a red kimono. They had a strangely soot-stained feel to them, housed within a small frame.
"See?" Mikacchi said in a small voice. It was certainly an eerie painting. Was it a traditional Ichimatsu doll? It was hard to call it a painting of a cute doll. For reasons I couldn't quite put into finger, it gave off a repulsive feeling, as if something non-human was impersonating a human and sitting right there. "Whose painting is this?" "Mine." Mikacchi exaggeratedly scratched the back of her head, wearing a troubled expression. "You had a model, then." "...A doll a friend of mine owns. It's super old. I got interested and asked if I could paint it." The downcast, plump face of the child bore an eerie shadow. The pale blue sash binding its chest was frayed in places, giving it a somewhat pitiful air. My master brought his face close to the painting with a serious expression, muttering something under his breath. "Is this really the one, though? What should I do. I actually really like it." "Is there some kind of curse or lore attached to this doll?" "Oh, yeah. A huge one. But this is just a painting drawn by yours truly, so I didn't care at all." "What kind of lore is it?" Just as I spoke up, my master pulled his face back, muttered "It's the reverse" with a difficult look on his face. When I asked, "Huh?", he hesitated without taking his eyes off the painting, shook his head, and said: "No, I still don't quite get it. Even if this is the cause, it's nothing more than a medium. I want to see the real thing." Mikacchi said, "Hmm," then the corners of her lips twitched upward into a grin. "If it's a complicated story, this isn't the best place. Want to go talk at a coffee shop nearby?"
My master and I nodded. Mikacchi had started off using polite language, but before I knew it, she was speaking to my master casually as well. "Oh, but we still have quite a bit of time until my replacement arrives, so go ahead and look at the paintings." When we first arrived, it was just the two of us, but by now another elderly man had shown up, and the short-bobbed woman was attending to him. I stood in the middle of the gallery and closed my eyes. I concentrated my mind, searching for any sense of wrongness. Sure enough, there was still an unpleasant feeling coming from the direction where the doll painting was. Maybe it was just because it was hard for the lighting to reach there, but that area felt strangely dark. "Hey, Mika, are those your friends? What were you looking at so intently?" The short-bobbed woman called out. "Yeah. Just looking at the doll painting for a bit." "The doll painting?" As the woman tilted her head in confusion, Mikacchi waved her hand dismissively, saying it was nothing. My master and I walked around the gallery while receiving explanations for the various paintings, though to amateur eyes it was hard to tell if they were good or bad. There were no difficult, modern-looking abstract pieces; most of them were relatively simple and realistic. "Look, look, that one's modeled after me," Mikacchi said, pointing to a painting of a nude woman. Contrary to her high-energy attitude, however, the two of us quickly grew tired of art appreciation. My master was especially blatant; while the short-bobbed woman was enthusiastically introducing the works, he only gave unenthusiastic, half-hearted responses. Looking a bit irritated, the woman finally said, "You don't seem to care much for paintings, do you?" In response, my master uttered something completely unexpected. "Paintings are, when you get down to it, just really dirty paper." To the woman, who was left speechless, he pressed on without missing a beat. "They're useless for anything other than looking at."
Thinking it was definitely a bad idea to let him keep going, I forcefully dragged my master outside, calling out to Mikacchi, "We'll be at the coffee shop nearby!" The noisy, grating sounds of the city traffic rushed in to greet us. Places like that gallery must have been soundproofed precisely so people wouldn't be distracted while appreciating art. I demanded an explanation from my master. "Why would you say something like that? To works someone went out of their way to paint." "I didn't mean to disparage them, you know." "If something you loved was made fun of, anyone would get angry." My master went "Hmm" and scratched his chin. "The occult is way more useless, though." I criticized him, partly out of self-deprecation toward myself. With that, my master suddenly let his gaze drift as if looking far into the distance, stood still looking sideways for a moment, and then slowly turned back toward me to say: "Things that are useless... you just have to love them, don't you?" At our feet between the two of us fell the shadow of a 'No Parking' sign. For a moment, I didn't know how to respond and just stared into his eyes. Nowadays, I know that those were the words of a playwright my master used to love. Perhaps he had just tossed them out on a whim. Or maybe they had slipped out from his subconscious. But at the time, rather than being angry, I was dumbfounded. I thought such words were stupid, thought *what the hell is that*, and yet, I never forgot them. After waiting about thirty minutes at the coffee shop while eating a light meal, Mikacchi showed up. "Sorrry, I'm lateee," she said, taking a seat with a light tone, acting as though my master's gaffe earlier hadn't happened at all.
Ordering a hot sandwich, Mikacchi immediately jumped into the main topic. "That doll in the painting belongs to a friend of mine from high school. Apparently, it's this super old thing her late grandmother gave her." That friend's name was Reiko-chan, and they still hung out together often, but recently her behavior had been a bit strange. Once, when she went over to Reiko's house to hang out, "I don't really get it, but she showed me a photo of a few women in Edo-period kimonos, and the woman right in the middle was sitting holding that doll." Reiko apparently started claiming that she was the reincarnation of that woman holding the doll. When Mikacchi tried to brush it off, Reiko got angry, insisted the doll was still in the house, dragged it out from somewhere, and hugged it tight while saying, "Right?" Mikacchi didn't think Reiko looked anything like the woman in the photo, and she had no idea what to say, but she didn't hate stories like that, so she just played along. Besides, she felt a strange sense of awe that such an old photo and doll still existed to this day, which was why she asked, "Can I paint it?" "So that painting is the one of *that*?" My master raised one eyebrow, as if realizing something. I waited for his next words to see what he had figured out, but nothing came. Stirring a sugar stick into her coffee, Mikacchi wore a rare, tense expression. "So, a few days after that—well, about three weeks ago now—Reiko-chan and four of us high school friends went on a hot spring trip." She paused for a moment. Her lips were trembling slightly.
"We got on the train, and at first, there weren't any four-seater groups available, so Me and Reiko-chan sat in a two-seater. We were chatting away the whole time, but about an hour in, the conversation turned to a book Reiko had said she was going to bring. As Reiko-chan was rummaging through her bag, she went, 'Ah, oops, wrong one.'" "What~? Did you bring a different book by mistake?" I asked. Swallowing hard, Mikacchi continued. "With a *slithering* sound, *that doll* came sliding out of her bag, and she went, 'I mistook it for a book'..." Hearing that, I felt a creeping sensation that gave me goosebumps—something I hadn't felt back at the gallery. "She's not a crazy girl, you know. On that trip and everywhere else, she was totally normal. It's just... what on earth is that thing? They say dolls can harbor souls, but..." As if it was possessed by something... Filling in the rest of Mikacchi's unfinished sentence in my head, I looked at my master. He had his arms crossed and looked like he was listening intently. Before long, he casually opened his mouth. "So the painting of that doll is the root cause of the strange events at the group exhibition?" "Must be, no matter how you look at it." Mikacchi muttered, "What should I do?" "Disposing of the painting won't solve the problem. Just a hunch, but if we don't do something about the doll itself, I have a feeling things are going to get bad." Leaning forward, my master continued. "Can we visit that girl's house?" "Yeah. Let me call her." Mikacchi stood up from her seat. When she returned a little later, she announced, "She said it's fine to come right now."
And so, the three of us headed to the house of that woman, Reiko. As we stepped out of the coffee shop, my master whispered to me: "Things are getting interesting." My stomach started hurting a little. We rode in Mikacchi's car for a little over fifteen minutes. Reiko's house was located in a residential area not too far from the center of town. It was a fairly large two-story house with a spacious garden. When we rang the doorbell, a woman with black hair came out shortly after and said, "Ah, welcome." As we settled into the guest room she guided us to, black tea was served immediately, as if it had already been prepared. Scones or some such pastries were served alongside it. "My family is all out right now, so please make yourselves at home." Her speech was refined. This kind of thing always made me feel a bit ill at ease. "Friends from university, you say? It's rare for Mika-chan to bring a guy over." We were a little anxious about what excuse we were using for being here, but I felt a sense of relief when she said, "Oh, the photo? I'll go get it now," and swept out of the room with a swish of her skirt. Mikacchi whispered, "Just so you know, the cover story is that you're old photo nerds." My stomach definitely hurt again. When Reiko returned, she placed a photo housed in a wooden frame on the table, saying, "It's a keepsake from my late grandmother." I tilted my head in confusion, having expected an old, faded black-and-white paper photograph. The item under the glass cover looked strangely metallic and didn't seem like paper at all. However, it showed three women in kimono lined up side by side. Because of the monochrome photography, their exact ages were hard to tell, but they looked young. Seated in chairs, for some reason they were all uniformly averting their gazes from the front. And the doll the woman in the middle held in her lap was definitely familiar to me. It was the doll from the painting.
"My grandmother's family apparently ran a photography studio stretching from the Meiji era. This photo was taken of the family back then, and supposedly my great-great-grandmother is in here somewhere," Reiko said, stroking the decorated wooden frame with a rapt expression. "Maybe she's the one in the middle?" My master leaned in close with an intense, piercing gaze. *Oh good, he's playing the photo nerd part well,* I thought, but then he suddenly closed his eyes and let out a deep sigh. "This is a daguerreotype." At my master's words as he slowly opened his eyes, Reiko lightly tilted her head. She didn't seem to understand. I had no idea what he was talking about either. "It's the oldest photographic technique, and it arrived in Japan at the very end of the Edo period. You expose and shoot on a copper plate coated with silver plating. Exposure took as long as twenty minutes, so to stay in the exact same posture so the image wouldn't blur, they would sit in chairs like this..." As he spoke, my master pointed to the head of the woman in the kimono, whose hair was styled in a traditional updo. A rod-like apparatus was protruding from behind her head. "...and fix it in place using a tool called a head rest. However, daguerreotypes were quickly rendered obsolete by the invention of the next-generation technique: the collodion wet-plate process. Pioneers of professional photography like Uenohiko Hikosuma in Nagasaki and Shimoka Renjo in Shimodamura popularized wet plates. When the Meiji era arrived, dry-plate photography took over, and a photography boom swept across Japan. Amidst that came rumors: that having your picture taken would steal your soul, or that people photographed in the center would die young. And then... 'ghost photos,' capturing figures that shouldn't have been there. The ancestor of modern psychic photography was already born in the early Meiji period, and its authenticity has been a subject of debate ever since." "Whoa," the women let out breaths of admiration.
Was he really an old photo nerd, this guy? No, rather, it was probably just that his obsession with ghost photos had come in handy. "So, daguerreotypes aren't the technique of a Meiji-era photo studio. Therefore, this wasn't taken as a tool of the trade, but likely out of retrospective or technical interest. The image is quite clear, so it seems to be an improved daguerreotype process with a shortened exposure time." Just as I'd felt, the material wasn't paper. Was it a copper plate? I stared intently at the three women. Thinking that this was a photograph from over a hundred years ago gave me a strange feeling. *Photographs really do trap time, don't they?* I felt a vague, hard-to-pin-down sentimentality. "I've heard that it steals your soul. And that you shouldn't be photographed in the middle." In response to Reiko's words, my master started to nod. "Yes. To the Japanese of that era, that was a very urgent issue. They must have felt that this unknown technique—which, unlike mirrors, projected oneself onto a flat surface as if detached from their own body—was somehow cursed. The women in this photo looking away is also a custom from that time. It was apparently believed that having your gaze captured was ominous." As I listened to my master's words, forgetting our original purpose, his tone shifted slightly. "This... the woman in the center, the one holding—"
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