Can I tell you something?
It's about Hodogaya. I just — I need someone to hear this.
I didn't see any of it myself. It came from someone I know who lives out that way, so I can't say for certain how much of it is true. It might just be a rumor. But it's been sitting with me, and I can't shake it.
Apparently this was a few years ago. A construction crew broke ground on an apartment building somewhere in Hodogaya Ward — an ordinary stretch of residential street, nothing unusual about it, nothing that would make you look twice.
Not long after they started, while they were turning the earth with heavy machinery — they found bones.
Just one at first, they say. A worker noticed it, stopped, leaned in to look, and there it was: something pale and long, pushing up through the soil. The earth around it was soaking wet, they said — and strangely warm, like something alive. Or so my acquaintance told me, anyway. I don't know how much of that part to believe.
They stopped work and started digging more carefully. And found more.
More.
More.
No matter how deep they went, the bones kept coming. Not one person's worth — many people's, all mixed together, layered and tangled and heaped. It made the papers, apparently. The police came and investigated. But in the end, no one could say whose bones they were, or how old. An old burial ground, maybe, or something else entirely. It was left unresolved, neither one thing nor the other.
And if that were all — well. It's unsettling, but bones turning up in the ground isn't unheard of, is it.
But that's not where it ends.
After the work was halted, some weeks passed. Then one night, at a house not far from the site, a family was holding a wake. And when one of them went to the front door, they found a small wooden box sitting there.
Whether someone had left it, or it had simply appeared — no one knew. They opened it.
Inside were bones.
White. Dry. Human.
Not the kind of remains that come from a funeral home. Not a proper urn. Just a plain wooden box, and inside it, bones placed with no ceremony at all.
The person who found it couldn't speak for a while, they said. On the night of a wake, a stranger's bones left at your door. Who. Why.
When I heard that part, the chill I felt wasn't only fear. It was something else — the fact that whoever left that box had chosen that house. That's what I keep coming back to.
They knew it was the night of the wake.
After that, nothing was ever traced — not where the bones came from, not who had left them. What happened to the construction, whether it ever resumed — even that was vague in what I was told.
There was only one other thing my acquaintance mentioned.
Walking near that site at night, you catch a smell. The smell of earth — damp, heavy, freshly turned. Even when it hasn't rained. Even when there's no reason for it.
That's all.
…That's all there is.
