This is something I heard from an acquaintance — the kind of story that slips away the moment you try to pin it down.
It's about a toilet that used to be at Ueno Station.
The layout has changed since, apparently, but there was once a dim public restroom on Platform 13. Come nightfall, as the last trains drew near, the air around that place felt different from everywhere else. A single fluorescent tube buzzing and flickering. Grout lines gone yellow between the tiles. A damp, clinging smell — not disinfectant, something else entirely, something harder to name.
The one who told me this was a man who used Ueno regularly after night shifts. Calm, composed — somewhere in his thirties. He said it happened more than ten years ago now.
One night, he went into that restroom. It was nearly the last train, the platform almost empty. A row of cubicles, and one door was closed. That alone would mean nothing — except that from beneath the door, he could see not two feet, but four.
Two people inside.
He assumed he understood what kind of place it was and turned to leave — but at that moment, the door of the cubicle next to it swung slowly open. No one came out. He had no desire to look, yet his eyes were pulled there anyway.
A man was standing inside.
Just standing. Looking back at him.
The face was too dim to make out clearly, he said — but it was the man's feet that were wrong. The floor was wet. Not water — something thicker, darker, something viscous spreading out around the man's feet. And still the man didn't move. Just stood there, staring.
He said he practically tumbled out of the restroom and ran the length of the platform, straight through the ticket gates, and didn't stop.
Afterwards, apparently someone looked into the history of that toilet — and what they found wasn't only ghost stories. It had been a known place in certain circles for years. At one point, notices were posted barring entry; security guards were stationed there for a time. Then, quietly, it came back into use. Eventually a renovation closed it for good, and they say the facilities were relocated somewhere else in the station.
But that's not what stays with him, he told me.
Whether the man opened that door.
Or whether he himself had opened it.
And that black substance on the floor — if it was liquid, where had it come from? There was no drain in the floor, he said. None at all.
He still passes through Ueno now and then, and every time, his steps slow down a little — he said this with a quiet laugh.
He was laughing. But his eyes weren't.
And when he spoke about the feet in that cubicle, about what was on the floor —
his voice trembled, just slightly.
