This is something I heard from someone else.
How much of it is true, I really can't say. But I've heard similar stories from several different people now, so I suppose there must be something to it.
Are you familiar with Koihitoge Pass? It's the one you take when you're cutting through from central Hiroshima toward Itsukaichi. The road is narrow, full of sharp bends, and at night the visibility is especially poor. I've always heard it's a place where accidents never seem to stop.
This is a story about a man. Let's call him K.
K was driving through Koihitoge Pass late at night, sometime past one in the morning, near the end of autumn. He'd just come from work and was exhausted. He tried to turn on the radio, but for some reason all he got was static, so he gave up and drove the rest of the way in silence.
Partway up the pass, there's a small stone Jizo by the side of the road. Just sitting there, alone. Sometimes there are flowers left in front of it, sometimes not. K had known about it for years, and said he always found his eyes drifting toward it whenever he passed. But that night was different.
As he was coming up on the Jizo, he suddenly became aware of something from the direction of the passenger seat. Not quite a gaze, not quite a weight — he said he couldn't find the right words for it. Just an abrupt, certain feeling that something was there.
He was too frightened to look. He kept his eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, and tried to drive past. But the feeling didn't go away. If anything, it thickened, slowly, steadily.
Finally, he made himself glance sideways.
There was no one there.
Of course there wasn't. He'd been driving alone. But the seatbelt on the passenger side was fastened.
At first, K assumed he must have buckled it himself without thinking. But when he tried to remember doing it, he couldn't. And more than that — when he reached out and touched the metal clasp, it was bitterly cold. Not the cold of a winter night. This was autumn, and he'd had the heater running the whole time.
Cold as ice, he said.
K pressed down on the accelerator and drove the rest of the way down the pass without stopping. He had no desire to pull over. He never looked in the rearview mirror. He said he was afraid of what he might see reflected there, and simply couldn't bring himself to look.
There's another story I heard, separate from that one.
This one is about a person who walked through the pass in the middle of the night. I don't know why they were on foot — I suppose they had their reasons. As they were walking, they began to hear footsteps behind them. Not the crunch of gravel, but a hard, sharp sound against the asphalt — like leather shoes striking pavement.
They turned around. No one was there.
They started walking again. The footsteps came back.
No matter how many times they stopped and turned, it was always the same. The footsteps simply kept following.
What unsettled them most was that the footsteps matched their own pace exactly. When they walked faster, the steps quickened. When they slowed, the steps slowed with them. Like a shadow given sound.
There was only one moment when the rhythm broke.
When the person stopped — frozen with fear — the footsteps continued on for exactly two more paces.
