This is a story that still circulates in Nishi Ward, Nagoya — and apparently, a number of people have gone to verify it for themselves.
Have you heard of Hebi-ike? Serpent Pond?
Out near the Shonai River in Nishi Ward, there's a pond roughly a hundred metres across. Just as the name suggests, stories tied to serpents have been passed down there since very long ago. Ask any of the older locals, and they'll all say the same thing without hesitation: don't go near that place. Press them for a reason, and they won't give you a straight answer.
On the bank of the pond stands a small shrine — Ryujinja, the Dragon Shrine — where a great serpent is enshrined and venerated as a dragon deity. How it came to be worshipped as such is a story that has survived in a rather peculiar form.
Long ago, there was a young warrior who heard rumours of a great serpent living in the pond. He ordered the villagers to drain it completely — he intended to see the thing for himself. Then he took his sword between his teeth and leapt in. That alone is remarkable enough. But no matter how much water they drew out, the pond would not run dry. It had no bottom. The serpent was never found. The warrior eventually gave up and withdrew — but it's said that from that day on, he became strangely silent, as though something had taken hold of him. There's no way to confirm it now.
And this is where the story becomes recent.
Not so long ago, a young man had an experience there. I heard it from a friend of his, not from the man himself, so some of the details may be slightly off.
The man had gone to Hebi-ike alone, at night. It was past midnight. He hadn't gone to test his nerve or prove anything — he simply had an errand nearby and happened to pass by the pond on his way home.
It was a June night, close and humid. As he walked along the bank, he noticed the smell of water. Ordinary enough, for a pond — but there was something wrong with it. Heavy and raw, like something rising from deep in the mud. And then, suddenly, the smell grew much stronger.
He stopped and looked out over the water.
The glow of a streetlamp lay faintly across the surface, but the pond itself was dark, nearly impossible to read. Still, the water was moving — very gently, tracing slow circles. There was no wind. And yet the surface turned, and turned.
It moved the way water moves when something large shifts in the depths below.
His legs stopped working. He stood there, unable to leave, unable to look away.
And then he noticed something.
At the edge of the pond, near the Dragon Shrine — there is a stone railing there. Someone was standing beside it. Past midnight.
He took it for a person. At first.
But looking more carefully, the outline was wrong. It had the shape of a person, but from the neck up, it swayed — a slow, continuous swaying, with no wind to cause it. As though it were standing at the bottom of the water.
He couldn't make a sound. He simply ran.
The next morning, he told a friend what he'd seen. The friend said one thing.
"That pond has an old story — that a great serpent, once helped by a human, comes back to repay the debt."
Hearing that, the man felt a chill move through him that was worse than anything the night before. Repaying a debt meant that somewhere, at some point, a human being had done something for that serpent.
The rippling water. The swaying figure. Perhaps they hadn't been the serpent coming to repay — perhaps they had been the one who was owed, coming to collect.
The pond is still there, inside an ordinary park. In the daytime, children lean over the railing and watch the fish, and everything looks perfectly fine.
But the older locals still won't go near it after dark.
They won't say why.
