This is something I heard from an acquaintance of mine. I can't say I've verified any of it — but the strange thing is how much detail he remembers. Every little thing. That's what's stayed with me.
You know Shibuya Station, of course. The one they call the most complicated station in Japan. Since the redevelopment, the underground levels have pushed deeper and deeper, new passages keep appearing, and even locals find themselves thinking, wait — where am I? That much, you hear all the time.
My acquaintance — I'll call him K — says it happened last autumn. The second-to-last train of the night. Work had run long, and he was trying to make a connection at Shibuya. He thought he was walking the usual corridor, but something was off. The fluorescent lights, he said, had a yellowish tinge. The passage he knew was always lit with clean white light, but here the bulbs were dim and discolored, like something old and forgotten.
At first he figured it was a detour around some construction. Shibuya's always being dug up somewhere. But he kept walking and walking, and there were no signs. You know those green exit arrows they put everywhere? Not a single one. Just walls, stretching on.
The floor wasn't tiled, he said — it was bare concrete, and it felt damp somehow. A coldness that came up through the soles of his shoes. But not the kind of cold that rises from the ground the way it does underground. He said it came from above. He struggled to explain it, but that's what he told me.
Then, after walking for a while, he came to a ticket gate.
An old one. The kind with a horizontal bar you push through manually — the sort that hasn't existed in Shibuya for decades. Standing there alone in the dim light. And at the station attendant's window, there was frosted glass. And through it, he could make out something. The shape of a person.
K said his first thought wasn't fear — it was more like, is this some kind of exhibit? That's how unreal it felt. But then he noticed: there was no one behind him. The voices, the footsteps, all the noise that had surrounded him moments before — gone. This was Shibuya Station. One of the loudest places in the city. And it was perfectly silent.
That was when the fear came.
He turned to go back the way he came, and the corridor stretched straight ahead of him — the same yellow light running all the way to the end. He couldn't tell anymore which direction he'd come from.
And then he heard it.
From beyond the ticket gate. From the other side of that frosted glass.
"Excuse me."
A woman's voice. Just those two words. Excuse me.
He couldn't tell if she was calling out to him or asking for help. He couldn't tell anything. But he heard it clearly. K said he froze where he stood — and the next thing he knew, he was running. He doesn't remember which way. He just found himself back in the familiar corridor, white light, people around him.
Afterward, he looked up the station map. No such passage appears anywhere. Which, I suppose, is only to be expected.
But there's one thing that hasn't left him.
K said the shadow visible through the frosted glass — it was seated. In that small attendant's booth, just sitting there, facing his direction the entire time.
It had called out to him. And it never once stood up.
