I am currently enrolled at a regional university's medical school. While this isn't an occult story, there are various eerie places within the medical department. This is a story about one of them: the "First Department of Legal Medicine Specimen Room."
In the region where I live, there is no medical examiner system. All so-called unnatural deaths are brought directly to the university's Department of Legal Medicine, where judicial or administrative autopsies are performed. A wide variety of unnatural corpses are brought in—some of them so gruesome that even the seasoned members of the legal medicine department find them hard to look at.
These unnatural corpses are photographed as evidence, autopsied, and then returned to their grieving families. On rare occasions, however, families refuse to claim the bodies, or corpses of immense interest to the fields of legal medicine, anatomy, and pathology are brought in.
Many of these medically precious (and deeply grotesque) specimens are housed in the "First Department of Legal Medicine Specimen Room," commonly known as the "Cellar."
The Cellar is an extremely large room created by knocking down the walls of several basement classrooms. Large as it is, perhaps because it is in the basement or because the building is very old, the lighting doesn't reach every corner. Even in the daytime, you can't be sure of your footing unless the lights are turned on to their fullest.
However, anyone coming to the Cellar for the first time—myself included—is utterly shocked the moment the lights go on. Every single wall is plastered edge-to-edge with photographs of unnatural corpses (many of them in full color), giving you the eerie illusion that you've wandered into the hideout of a serial killer.
It looks for all the world like an "Unnatural Death Exhibition."
Roadkill, drowned corpses, stab wounds, bludgeoned bodies, gunshot victims, accidental deaths, disease-related deaths, suicides, electrocutions... Every conceivable sample of "death" is lined up in that room. Some women break out into cold sweat, more sensitive visitors vomit, and a few even faint from anemia. The men, too, all wear the same look of shock mixed with an indescribable expression.
The eeriness of the Cellar doesn't stop there. There is one corner that I still can't get used to, and whenever I have no choice but to visit, I try my best not to look at it. In that corner, there is an overwhelming number of "death masks of hanged corpses."
Long ago, a certain legal medicine scholar apparently thought, "The faces of criminals who die by hanging are all alike. Perhaps from the death masks of corpses, it is possible to categorize the faces of people prone to committing crimes." Collaborating with local authorities, he began collecting death masks.
From the very beginning of his collection, the majority argued that "it is only natural for hanged corpses to have similar facial features due to asphyxiation and the subsequent physiological process." But that professor refused to listen to any objections, traveling all over the country to relentlessly gather death masks of executed criminals.
The professor passed away after the Heisei era began, but reportedly never changed his stance until his dying bed. Due to these circumstances, there are currently over a dozen death masks on open display in the Cellar, and dozens more specimens are said to be sleeping somewhere within the research building.
Naturally, with such specimens around, various occult rumors spring up, but I try not to pay them much mind. The eyes of the death masks opening in the middle of the night, shedding tears, or letting out death-agony screams... Yet rumors are just rumors, and I've never heard of anyone in the legal medicine department actually experiencing such things.
However, there is another deeply unsettling spot in the Cellar, half-jokingly called the "Room That Never Opens." It's a long, narrow room secured by two large padlocks. Not only has no one—not even the professors—ever peered inside, but no one even knows what is stored in there.
There apparently were numerous attempts to open it in the past, but the people involved seemed to lose their nerve, and I've never heard of anyone actually managing to open it. Besides, the keys themselves have long since gone missing.
The room reportedly became the "Room That Never Opens" after that particular professor retired from the university. Until then, it was said to store his personal specimens—most likely death masks, but...
Next year, the research building is finally scheduled for reconstruction, and the Cellar will disappear. What on earth will come out of that room when that happens?
While this isn't an occult tale, there are still plenty of creepy places in the medical department. The story of the Cellar is just one of them. I hope to share another story if the opportunity arises.
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