This is a story I heard from a woman I know.
I can't say for certain how much of it is true, but apparently this sort of tale has been making the rounds over in the Sakishima area.
The woman in question was in her thirties — a grounded, sensible sort of person. No particular sensitivity to the supernatural, nothing like that. Just an ordinary office worker. It was early autumn of last year, she said. On her way home from work, she stopped in alone at the Cosmo Tower in Sakishima. She'd wanted to take in the night view from the observation deck. Apparently she made a habit of going there now and then, just to clear her head.
It was a weekday evening, so the lobby was already nearly deserted. She stepped into the elevator alone and pressed the button for the observation deck. Up to that point, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
But then.
A little while after it began to rise, the elevator seemed to lose speed — just slightly, she said. Not as though it were stopping, exactly. But it did slow down, and then the doors opened.
It wasn't the observation deck.
It was a corridor.
A single fluorescent tube was lit, flickering weakly, on the verge of going out. The floor was bare concrete, grey. The walls the same. The ceiling was low, and the passage seemed to stretch on without end — no branching left or right, just a straight corridor that appeared to be swallowed up by the darkness ahead.
There was no sound at all, she said.
In a high-rise facing Osaka Bay, you'd expect at least the sound of wind. The low hum of air conditioning, something. But there was nothing. The silence was so complete it ached inside her ears, she said.
She stood there for some time in front of the open doors. She was too frightened to step out, she said later. But elevator doors close on their own if you wait long enough. When they began to slide shut, she stopped them without thinking — reached out and held them open.
And that was when she looked down the corridor.
There was someone standing there.
Too far away to see clearly. But unmistakably a human shape. Standing with their back to her, facing the wall. Just standing there. Not moving. Not doing anything. Simply standing there, facing the wall.
The person's shoulders were trembling, ever so slightly.
Whether from crying, or shivering, or something else entirely — she couldn't tell.
The woman said she felt something strange in that moment. Not fear, exactly — more an overwhelming sense of pity for whoever that was. She couldn't explain why she felt it. But her body knew, she said, with a certainty she couldn't account for, that she must not call out to them.
When she came back to herself, the doors had closed and she was arriving at the observation deck.
She checked her watch. One hour and some minutes had passed. When she stepped out onto the observation floor, the closing announcement was already playing over the speakers.
She looked into it afterward. Apparently there is nothing on the floor where the elevator seemed to stop — nothing that should be there, at any rate. She heard there may be some kind of utility space, but it isn't accessible to the public, and in any case the elevator has no reason to stop on that floor.
But the last thing the woman said, almost to herself, at the end of telling the story — that's what I can't get out of my head.
That person in the corridor, she said.
They had their back to her the whole time. But the moment she held the doors open — she said they had begun to turn their face toward her.
