…Would you mind listening, just for a moment?
I cannot say with any certainty that it is true. Only that, in my years of service at this shrine, such stories find their way to me from time to time. Seen here, heard from so-and-so. Tonight I would like to pass one of them along to you.
It concerns a place just east of Daian-ji. You may know the old road that leads toward Byakugō-ji — the narrow path where the trees press close overhead and the light fails even in the middle of the day.
From what I was told, this happened some ten or more years ago now. A man was walking that road alone, well past midnight on an autumn night. I do not know his name. Only that he knew Nara well, and considered himself at ease on dark roads — or so he told someone, afterward.
There was no moon that night. The only light was the beam of his own torch. It was the kind of autumn cold that settles into the bones, with none of the warmth of summer still lingering in the grass — only the wet smell of old stone rising from the path beneath his feet.
He was passing alongside an ancient stone wall when something caught the edge of his vision, hovering in the air.
At first he took it for a light in a distant house. But it was too low for that. Perhaps waist-height from the ground — no higher. A mass of reddish light, almost orange, drifting and swaying softly among the trees.
He stopped and watched. And then, he said, the light turned toward him.
Turned is a strange word for it, I know. But that is what he said. There was no face. No eyes. It simply — turned.
And then, slowly, slowly, it began to move in his direction.
When he ran, the fireball quickened. That is what he said. He turned off the road, he pushed through the undergrowth, and still the red glow held behind him. Each time he looked back, it was a little closer. In his panic he lost all sense of where he was, and when he finally came to himself he was standing at the edge of a small pond beside the path.
He could not go back. So he jumped in.
An October pond. He said the cold was enough to stop his breath entirely. Waterweeds coiled around his legs, mud filled his shoes, and still he fought to keep his head above the surface, gulping air.
That was when he heard it. A sound like — jan, jan.
Like metal struck against metal, but not quite. More like something hard being beaten against something hard. The sound moved across the water toward him, then stopped, then came again. Each time it reached him he held his breath and sank beneath the surface, then rose again. He did this over and over.
He could not say how long it went on. When he became aware of himself again, the sky had begun to pale. The sound was gone. The light was gone. He pulled himself out of the pond, shaking, and made his way from that place on unsteady legs.
…Afterward, he looked into the history of that area near Daian-ji. There are old stories, apparently, of something connected to funeral rites being buried somewhere along that stretch of road. What exactly, I cannot say.
Those who know such things have suggested the sound may have been someone — or something — striking a metal coffin. Or perhaps, some say, it was expressing anger that he had entered the water at all.
…I truly cannot say what any of it means.
Only that last month, someone else reported seeing a red light near that same road. That person has not been sleeping well since, I am told — not once the sun goes down.
Please. If you must go that way, take the long way round after dark.
