This is something I heard secondhand. I can't vouch for any of it.
You know Sunshine 60 in Ikebukuro — that building? The sixty-story one you can see from miles away.
There are whispers, fairly persistent ones, that the land it stands on was once a prison called Sugamo. After the war, Class-A war criminals were held there. Executed there, too.
And on top of that ground, the building now stands.
A friend of a friend, apparently, worked night security at Sunshine 60. An ordinary young man, in his twenties. Walking the rounds after midnight — just part of the job.
One night, something happened.
It was past two in the morning. He was making his way down a corridor, somewhere around the thirtieth-something floor. Rain outside, tapping against the glass. The building was empty. That kind of hour.
At the far end of the corridor, where it dead-ended, someone was standing.
His first thought was a cleaner. But that didn't sit right. No cleaning crew came at this hour. He stopped walking and squinted into the distance.
It was a man in a military uniform.
The old Imperial Army kind. Khaki. Cap and all. But the figure just — stood there. He couldn't even tell if it was facing him. It didn't move. It simply existed, in that spot.
He started to call out, then stopped himself.
When someone asked him why, he said: there had been no footsteps. His own shoes rang out on the linoleum floor with every step. But that figure — it must have been standing there from the beginning — had never made a sound. Not once.
He kept walking toward it, slowly. By the time he got close, it was gone.
Only the air remained, and it was wrong — bitterly cold. Midsummer, the building's climate control running, and still the cold was unreasonable. That much, he said, was real. That much stayed with him.
Not long after, he quit the job. Never said why, apparently.
One more thing — again, something I only heard from someone else.
There's a memorial stone in Higashi-Ikebukuro Chuo Park, right next to the building. You may have seen it. It sits quietly there. In daylight it's just a stone.
But late one night, a man passing by the memorial felt something at his back. He turned around.
Someone was sitting in front of the stone.
Hunched small, curled in on itself. The shape of a person — and yet no head. Or not exactly no head — more that it was bowed so far forward, tilted so far down, that there was simply no face to be seen. Just shoulders. Shaking. Silently, ceaselessly shaking.
The man ran.
When he told someone about it later, the response was almost casual: "Yeah, people say things like that happen there all the time."
There's a story that the building was designed according to feng shui principles, to seal whatever lingers in that ground. Urban legend, most likely. But perhaps it doesn't matter how something is designed — what cannot be sealed will not be sealed.
The ones who were executed are still there. Given no place to return to, no reason to move on — still crouched before that memorial stone, shaking without a sound.
That's the story.
