This is a story I heard from a relative when I was little, about my late grandmother. It happened 60 to 70 years ago, before the war. My grandmother, who was probably around 20 years old at the time, was hospitalized to give birth to her first child. I've been told that a girl of about 10 years old was hospitalized in the next bed for a long-term stay, and she and my grandmother got along well. The girl was apparently hospitalized for an eating disorder or nutritional deficiency, though the exact details are unclear now. One night, as my grandmother was lying on her hospital bed, the window suddenly opened. A bizarre, pitch-black creature (?) about the size of a cat, resembling a monkey, came inside. Crying out "Ghee-ghee!", it climbed onto the bed where my grandmother was lying. Terrified, my grandmother grabbed the prayer beads she always kept close to her body and frantically chanted the nenbutsu. (Since my grandmother was a devout Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, it was probably a Jodo Shinshu chant.) She chanted while praying in her heart, "Please don't have anything to do with me or my unborn child!" However, whether due to fear or because of the creature (?), she couldn't raise her voice.
The creature (?) stayed on my grandmother's bed for a while, crying "Ghee-ghee!". After a little while, without doing anything else—leaving nothing behind but terror—it jumped off the bed. It then leaped onto the bed where the long-term patient girl was sleeping, and stayed in the room, crying "Ghee-ghee!" again. The creature (?) apparently lingered in the hospital room for several hours, but eventually went out the window and disappeared. Once she confirmed it had left, my grandmother waited a bit, felt a wave of exhaustion hit her, and fell asleep. The next day, the girl in the next bed was dead. Up until the previous night, she had been energetic with no particular changes, but in the span of a single night, she had withered away to an unbelievable degree and died...
After that, my grandmother safely gave birth to a healthy baby... a person who is my relative, an uncle. After giving birth to him, she miraculously went on to have nine more children! Including my father... seven of them are still living active lives today. (The last child was stillborn. Also, one of my aunts died of illness before I was born.)
In the early 1990s, when I was still young, my grandmother closed her 80-year life... During her lifetime, she told several people about the "small black monster." (I heard this story from my aunt, who is one of the people she told.) Looking back on that time, my grandmother apparently said, "That thing... it might have been the Grim Reaper, perhaps." Whether it was the Grim Reaper, a mysterious creature, or an evil spirit, the truth remains unknown. I sometimes think, "If this is a true story, and if such a monster really exists, maybe it was some kind of alien or UMA..." but what do you guys think the "small black monster" was?
Just now, the aunt who is the source of this story came down from the upstairs floor to walk her dog. Since I had some free time, I asked her for a few more details. - The hospital room wasn't a double room; it seemed to be a shared room used by multiple people. - Dysentery was going around at the time, and many patients were hospitalized for digestive system illnesses. - The dead girl had a bad stomach, but apparently it wasn't dysentery. - My grandmother wasn't really hospitalized to give birth; she was hospitalized because her health deteriorated while she was pregnant. - Even after the girl died, my grandmother remained hospitalized and witnessed the black monster several times. - The monster apparently pounced on sick people, and whoever it pounced on would invariably die the next day... - Every time it appeared, my grandmother held her prayer beads and chanted the nenbutsu in her heart. - The monster didn't open the window; it phased right through it. - While the monster was present, you couldn't make a sound. - My grandmother was fine, but around that same time, her niece suddenly died. Hearing these minor details makes it feel like my grandmother narrowly escaped death by a hair's breadth. She was apparently a deeply religious person, so is this a case of "the faithful shall be saved"?
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