Hey, can I tell you something?
Apparently there's a strange stump in Okamoto, over in Setagaya.
It's right alongside the Tomei Expressway, and the road bends in this unnatural way — just at that one spot. They could have run it straight through, but instead it curves out of the way. If you look at a map, it's obvious: the road clearly goes around something. And there, tucked inside that curve, sits an old, enormous stump, all alone.
From what I've heard, there used to be a sacred grove in that area called the Forest of the Sixth Heaven. Most of it's gone now — cleared away in the rezoning — and all that's left is that stump. They say it was the divine tree at the heart of the forest.
Sometime in the Edo period, there was talk of widening the road. Workers involved in the project started getting hurt, one after another — accidents, injuries, all of it without any clear cause. No scaffolding collapsed. Nothing fell. People just... got hurt. It kept happening until eventually the whole project was abandoned.
That much you could write off as an old story. But then, around the time of the Tokyo Olympics, apparently the same thing happened again. When the major rezoning came through and there was talk of finally removing the stump, strange things started happening among the construction workers. One man suddenly lost consciousness on-site, and no one could explain why. Another found himself injured with no memory of how it had happened.
And it wasn't just one person. Several of them. Everyone who got involved.
I can't say for certain any of this is true — but I do know someone who drove through that area in the middle of the night.
It was around one or two in the morning. They were passing through by car. They said it was a still night, no wind, completely quiet.
Just as they were driving past the stump, they caught a glimpse of something outside the window. A shape like a branch — but too long and thin to be a branch — standing upright on top of the stump in the darkness.
Standing. That's the word they used.
They instinctively went to hit the brakes, but their foot wouldn't move. It wasn't cold in the car, but from the calf down to the ankle, a chill spread through them like their legs had been plunged into ice water, and for a moment they couldn't move at all.
Too frightened to look away. Too frightened to keep looking.
Somehow they managed to get the car moving and drove away from there as fast as they could.
But when they thought back on it afterward, they said the scariest part wasn't what the shape was.
It was that it had been facing them.
The stump is still there, they say. The road still bends around it, same as it always has.
And no one, even now, has tried to touch it.
