Hey, are you listening?
This is about Nara… I can't vouch for any of it personally, so just take it as something I heard from someone else.
There's apparently an abandoned shrine out there — Shirataka Daijin, I think it's called — not too far from the city center. The story goes it used to be a training ground for some new religious movement, but now nobody tends to it. The torii rotted away long ago, and a lot of people say the moment you step onto the grounds, the air changes. Not just the staleness of an old place — something heavier than that, like something has soaked into the very soil and won't let go. Apparently it's been circulating as a spot for dares and ghost-hunting for years.
This happened a few years back.
Four girls, I think — a group of university students — went there one night. It was the tail end of summer, but mountain air goes cold even in summer, you know. They said the moment they passed under the torii, a chill swept across their feet. Not a breeze coming down from above — more like something crawling up from the ground itself.
Deeper in the shrine grounds, there's a small cave, hollowed out of the rock. Just big enough for one person to crouch inside — a dark little hole. Whether it was dug for religious practice or was always there, nobody knows. But hanging across the entrance was something like a shimenawa, completely rotted. What should have been white had gone black, pressed flat against the rock like it had been glued there.
One of the girls said, "Let's go in."
Some of them tried to talk her out of it, but it was a dare, so she took her flashlight, crouched down, and went inside. She came back out after maybe a minute, laughing — "Nothing in there." That should have been the end of it.
But then.
They were walking back toward the parking lot when she suddenly stopped. Like something had caught her attention, all at once. Before anyone could ask what was wrong, she murmured something under her breath.
It wasn't Japanese.
But it wasn't any foreign language either. The sounds had the shape of words, but led nowhere — no meaning waiting at the other end. Everyone who heard it said their mind went blank on the spot. And her voice was completely different from before. Low. Flat. No rise or fall to it at all. A voice she had never used before.
Then, slowly, she turned her head and looked back the way they had come.
Back toward the shrine.
But her eyes — something was wrong with her eyes. She wasn't blinking. In the darkness, the flashlight caught her face from the side, and her eyes held a faint, dull gleam. She just stood there, perfectly still, staring toward the shrine. Like a doll.
One of the others grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. Only then did she blink, and she said, perfectly normally, "What? What is it?" She didn't remember any of it.
Her friends got her out of there immediately, and the next day they took her to have a purification rite done. But what happened after that — whether she ever fully came back to herself — even the person who told me the story didn't know. "For a while she seemed totally normal," one of the friends apparently said, "but somehow her laugh felt different."
Hearing just that much, you might think it's not all that frightening. But that's not the part that bothers me most.
I heard a little more about that cave. When you shine a flashlight on the walls inside, the rock is covered — absolutely covered — in carvings. So fine and dense you can't tell at first whether they're writing or patterns. But if you look closely, the same shape repeats, over and over.
And the longer you look, the more those shapes begin to look like faces.
The more you stare, the more faces appear. They keep multiplying.
When she came out after that one minute, her flashlight batteries were nearly dead. Just before it went dark, she said she swept the beam across the rock one last time.
The face at the very back of the cave was the only one facing toward her.
…………That's all I know. But I think it's best to stay away from that place. At least, don't go out of mere curiosity.
Yeah.
