…Would you mind listening for a moment?
I cannot say with any certainty. Only that, having served in these parts for so many years, certain stories find their way to my ears. In the telling and retelling, they may well have gathered embellishments. And yet, when I hear the same tale — the same details — from entirely separate people… I cannot help but feel that something must be there.
It concerns Misaka Pass.
On that mountain road connecting Matsuyama to Kumakogen, there is a small tunnel. Locally, I am told, it has long been called the Ghost Tunnel. It must have a proper name, but no one uses it. Places like that, as a rule, have their reasons.
Long ago, that pass was a gathering place for street racers. Night after night, engines howling, they would tear through those sharp bends as though competing against one another. And so there were accidents — many of them. More than one or two went through the guardrails and down into the ravine below. Such things slip out sometimes, from the older people in the area.
Today, let me share the one I hear most often.
It was several years ago, they say. I cannot be certain, but it was said to be late autumn, sometime past eleven at night. A man was driving alone, crossing the pass from the direction of Matsuyama toward Kumakogen. Fog had settled in that evening, and the headlights were swallowed by the white haze — visibility was dreadful, he said.
He was approaching the tunnel, when —
A smell reached him inside the car. The smell of the sea. Salt and brine, deep in the mountains, far from any coast. At first, he told himself it was his imagination. The windows were closed. The radio was on. And yet the smell clung to the back of his nose — raw, briny, like the smell of the shore at low tide — and would not leave.
That was when his eyes caught the rearview mirror.
Someone was sitting in the back seat.
A woman, dressed in something pale and thin — a white garment of some kind — her outline soft and indistinct. He told himself at first it was a reflection. Something outside the window, caught in the glass. He tried to believe that, even as he found he could not look away, and went on watching her slowly in the mirror.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, facing straight ahead.
And then, in the next moment, her face turned toward him.
Their eyes met in the mirror. He could not make a sound. Only that feeling — as though the blood in his entire body had gone cold, as though ice water had been poured in through the soles of his feet and rushed up his spine to the top of his skull, all at once.
The woman was smiling. Quietly.
Just the corners of her mouth, lifting ever so slightly. Her eyes were not smiling — he said so later, after some time had passed. She did not look happy. She looked, rather… as though she knew something. That was the expression he described.
The moment he spun around to look — the back seat was empty.
Only the seat itself was soaked through. Wet to the depth of the fabric, evenly, completely. He wiped at it and wiped at it, but it would not dry until morning. That is what I was told.
And there is one more. This came from a different person entirely — someone who had once walked through that tunnel on foot. As they neared the far end, they heard laughter coming from behind them. Not one voice, they said. Several voices — neither clearly male nor clearly female — layered over one another, a muffled, overlapping laughter that seemed to travel along the tunnel walls. They turned around. No one was there. And yet the laughter continued, drifting out from somewhere deep in the darkness behind them.
Even in the daytime, a cold wind moves through that place. Even at the height of summer, the air shifts — just there, just before the tunnel entrance — and turns suddenly chill. I have heard local people say so myself.
If I were to offer one word of advice to anyone traveling that pass… please take care to check the back seat thoroughly before you set out.
Though, from what I have heard, by the time you notice — it is already too late.
