This is something I heard from an acquaintance of mine. There's no way to verify any of it, so please take it simply as a rumor that was going around — nothing more than that.
Apparently, there used to be a commercial building near Kichijoji Station called "Echo Building."
Right connected to the station. Just steps from the ticket gates at Kichijoji, of all places. Foot traffic should have been guaranteed — that's just how it works. And yet, for some reason, every tenant that moved in would be gone within six months, a year at most. A new one would come in, and then that one would leave too. Before long, the place was nothing but shuttered storefronts, dim even in the middle of the day. That's what it had become.
The locals had taken to calling it the "ghost building," or so I'm told.
As for why — there is one story that's been passed down to explain it.
When the building was being constructed, and residents were being asked to vacate, there was one old woman who refused to go along with it, right up until the very end. How long she held out, no one seems to know. What is known is that in the end, she set herself on fire and died. She burned herself alive.
…No one appears to have confirmed this. Whether there's a record of it somewhere, I honestly couldn't say. But the story has been quietly handed down among the locals, year after year.
The building went up, tenants moved in, and yet somehow people just didn't come. Shops would fail almost immediately. Every time something like that happened, the story of that old woman would surface again.
Now, this is where things get a little strange.
Somewhere inside that building, there were paper talismans stuck to the wall. A tenant who had moved in discovered them during renovation work. And it wasn't just one. There were several, layered carefully one on top of another, fixed neatly in place.
At first, he assumed it was someone's idea of a prank. But when he tried to peel them off, his hand went terribly cold. This was in the middle of summer, mind you. The air outside was thick and sweltering, and the building itself was no particular relief from the heat. And yet the moment his fingertips touched the talisman, they went cold — a deep, seeping cold, like plunging them into ice water.
He stopped. He left the talismans where they were.
How many months that shop lasted before it closed — that part, my acquaintance wouldn't say. Only that it wasn't long.
After that, Echo Building was torn down and rebuilt. Now it houses Yuzawaya — bright, busy, full of people. There's nothing left of that dim, haunted place. Not a trace.
But here's what my acquaintance mentioned. Even now, in the Yuzawaya that stands there, people will sometimes stop without warning in a certain corner of the store. Mid-step, for no apparent reason, their feet simply halt. They haven't seen anything. They haven't heard anything. They just stop.
And when asked, they say they don't know why they stopped.
…Where exactly the old woman had lived — the place she refused to leave until the very end. No one knows that, apparently.
