……This is a story I heard from someone. I cannot vouch for its truth, but I will tell it just as it was told to me.
It concerns that hotel — the one in Shinsaibashi.
The rumours have been seeping through the internet, it seems. They say it has begun to surface in videos on TikTok and YouTube as well. The whispers have soaked in so deeply that people considering a stay find themselves searching the hotel's name alongside the word "ghost."
Among those rumours, there was this one.
It was sometime last autumn, from what I understand. A man travelling alone on business checked into that hotel. The room was on the sixth floor, or perhaps the seventh — somewhere along the far end of the corridor. He couldn't recall the exact floor, apparently.
He was exhausted that night and turned in early. Sometime after two in the morning, he woke. No reason he could name. His eyes simply opened, quietly, on their own.
The room was dark. Only the low hum of the air conditioning filled the silence. He felt a vague thirst and reached for the water on the nightstand — and it was then.
From the direction of the bathroom, he heard the sound of water.
Drip. Drip. A small sound, like water falling from a tap left not quite closed. He wasn't certain he had shut it properly when he checked in. Reluctantly, he felt his way through the dark and pushed open the bathroom door.
Before he even reached for the light, the room seemed faintly white somehow. The cold of the tiles crept up through the soles of his feet, and that coldness brought him a little more awake. He looked at the tap — sure enough, drops were falling, one after another. He reached out to turn it off.
That was when he caught sight of the mirror.
The mirror above the sink.
……His own reflection looked back at him. Of course it did. And yet, he said, he stood there unable to move for a long moment.
Because in the mirror, just behind his own reflection — near the shoulder — there was another head.
Long hair. Facing downward.
He spun around. Immediately. But there was no one in the bathroom. Only the hum of the air conditioning, and the drip of the water. In the instant he turned, something sweet drifted past his nose — sweet, but faintly rotten — and then it was gone.
He could not sleep again that night. He pulled the covers up over his head and simply waited for morning. At checkout, he thought about saying something to the person at the front desk, and then stopped himself. He didn't know what he would even ask.
……The person who told me this story said: "I don't know whether it's true. But the man's face was unmistakably pale — that much I'm certain of."
Most guests pass their stay without incident. That, I'm sure, is the truth. And yet the story keeps being told, passed from one mouth to the next. That, too, is the truth.
……When he turned and found nothing there — was that a mercy? Or was it something else entirely?
Whatever was in that mirror may still be there. Waiting, head bowed, patient.
Waiting for someone to look.
