…This is something I heard from a friend of a friend, so there's no way to verify it — and yet, for some reason, the small details have stayed with me.
You know the electronics store in Namba, yes? That large building on Sennichimae.
Apparently, sometime last autumn, a man went there to browse home appliances. A salaryman in his thirties — let's call him K. Not the type who claims to sense things, not someone with any particular interest in ghost stories. Just an ordinary person.
It was a weekday evening. He'd stopped in on his way home from work, just browsing the camera floor.
After a while, he needed to use the restroom.
I don't know which floor it was, but the toilets were tucked away in a back corner, and he went into one of the stalls.
He'd finished his business, and then he noticed — it was strangely quiet. You know how it is in those stores, the background music, the announcements, there's always something. But it had all just… dropped away, he said. Like someone had cut the sound.
That was when he heard something from the stall next to his.
Sobbing.
A woman's voice. Soft, but unmistakable. A small, hitching sound — hh, hh — like someone trying to hold it in.
At first K assumed someone was feeling unwell. But something felt off. The voice had a quality to it — distant, somehow. Not coming through the partition wall, but rising from somewhere lower down, crawling up from beneath. That was how it felt, he said. And all at once his back went cold.
That alone might have been bearable.
But then K noticed something else.
A smell of burning.
He told himself at first it was his imagination, but it kept growing stronger. Burning — not the ordinary smell of something scorched, but heavier than that, denser. It seeped into the stall around him, slowly filling the air.
K threw open the door.
The moment he stepped outside, the smell was gone. The crying had stopped.
He washed his hands at the sink and caught his reflection in the mirror. His face was drained of all colour. That was when he understood, he said — truly understood — how frightened he had been.
He told a friend about it afterwards, and the friend told him something in return.
That place, the friend said — more than fifty years ago, there was a terrible fire there. Over a hundred people died. A building called the Sennichi Department Store burned, and those who couldn't escape were driven up to the roof with nowhere left to go.
And that wasn't all. Long before that, in the Edo period, the area was known as the Sennichimae execution ground — a place where the bodies of the condemned were buried.
When K heard that, he said, he thought about that restroom again.
The sobbing from the next stall.
When he'd stepped out, that stall's door had been standing open. It had been open the whole time. No one had ever been inside.
…There's one more part to the story.
When K got into the elevator after leaving the restroom, just as the doors were closing — the smell of burning came back, briefly, one last time.
That's all.
That's all — and yet the detail that unsettles me most is this: K went back to the store some time later, and on a whim, he asked one of the staff. That restroom on this floor, he said — has anything ever happened there?
The staff member paused for just a moment before answering.
"…You get used to it," they said.
