This happened back when I was still living with my parents. It was a weekend in spring or summer, right after I started my senior year of high school. My room was pretty big, and an entire wall was lined with bookshelves—enough to stock a small secondhand bookstore. Since we lived out in the countryside, I spent more time reading at home than going out, and I remember I was reading like a maniac that day. I was going through a whole series of novels from start to finish, and I think I was reaching for the next volume when, peering through a gap between the books, there was a mask grinning from ear to ear. Instead of being scared, I was just dumbfounded and dropped the book I was holding. The moment it hit the floor, the mask vanished. Feeling totally creeped out, I left the book where it was and went down to the living room where my parents were. "Do you have a friend over?" my dad asked. "Keep it down." But our house layout meant anyone going up to the second floor had to walk right through the living room, and more importantly, I’d been home alone all morning.
When I told him, "I wasn't playing any music, and I was being quiet," he replied, "You were laughing out loud just now. You talk to yourself a lot, you know." Remembering that sickening grin gave me goosebumps, so I pressed him about it, and apparently, things like that had been happening for a while. Aside from the family PC downstairs, there was nothing in my room that would make me talk to myself, and I’m definitely not the type to talk back to the characters while reading. Feeling totally grossed out, I told my dad what I’d just seen, and it seemed to jog his memory. He told me that there was an old mask that had been passed down in our family—the exact kind of smiling mask I’d just seen. He said I’d been shown it when I was a little kid and cried my eyes out, so they had put it away somewhere. And the place where it was stored? Right next to my room.
Scared out of my mind, I went with my dad to check, and we found it inside a dusty paulownia wood box. It was a grayish-cream color, with a greasy, sneering grin. I touched it and checked the back, but it was just deeply unsettling. It felt like the kind of thing that would start floating around all by itself in the middle of the night. The shelf where that box was kept was right on the other side of the wall from my room's bookshelf. It felt cursed and creepy, so I asked if it had some kind of bad history, but my dad said he had no idea. It had just been around since he was a kid. In the end, when I asked if I could just burn it, my mom took it away to have it purified at a local shrine or temple. I don't know what happened to it after that, but she said the priest told her it was a mask carved from a sacred tree. Making useless junk like that... it seriously gave me the creeps.
Sorry, that ended kind of abruptly. That's the end of the story, though—I haven't seen it since it was purified (or whatever they did) at the temple. Or rather, I cleared out the books from that shelf and put a PC there instead. I still get scared of gaps between things to this day. If you just look at the individual features, it looked kind of like an antique Noh mask. But if someone suddenly thrust that into your view, it's undeniably sickening. Kind of like the slit-mouthed woman flashing a wide grin.
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