…Would you mind listening for a moment?
Somewhere deep in the mountains of Wakayama, there is said to be a station called Oike Yuen. I cannot speak to it with any certainty, but there are those who say that place carries something about it… something that sets it apart from an ordinary station.
Almost no houses nearby. Nothing but a park built around a large pond — a place where the presence of people grows terribly thin. They say that even in daylight it is too quiet, and come nightfall, all that remains on the platform is the sound of insects and the smell of water rising from the pond. That smell of the pond… the heavy, sodden air that seeps up from muddy depths, from half-rotted grass. The kind that finds its way into your mouth.
It happened one autumn, so I was told. Someone mentioned it was a few years back.
This person had been travelling alone and missed the last train. With the next one still thirty minutes away, there was nothing to be done but sit down on the platform bench and wait. It was just past eleven o'clock at night.
At first, nothing was wrong — that is what they said. They looked at their phone, closed their eyes a little, and simply drifted. Autumn insects were calling. Somewhere in the distance, the faint sound of water shifting in the pond. That was all the night was.
But then, just as they were beginning to doze.
For no particular reason, they opened their eyes.
The tracks were lit up.
Not by a streetlamp. Not by any insect. A pale blue-white light, round, about the size of a human head, was drifting — slowly, slowly — along the railway sleepers. Hovering roughly a metre above the ground, moving as though it carried no weight at all. Floating. Drifting.
At first, they thought it must be some signal for an approaching train. But there was no sign of a train coming. No announcement. No wind. Only that light, easing its way closer and closer from the far end of the platform.
They felt afraid. But their legs would not move.
They sat with both hands on their knees, and simply watched.
As the light drew nearer, they noticed something. At the very core of it… something dark was stirring. A shadow in the shape of a person, faint and bleeding at the edges, wavering at the centre of that glow. The outline was indistinct — and yet unmistakably human. Swaying there.
At that moment, a wind came in off the pond. The smell of rotting grass. There was the taste of mud in their mouth, they said.
And with it came a sound.
…Teke-teke. Teke-teke.
Something dry and hard, striking the ground in rapid succession. Like fingernails. Like bone. Something dragging itself forward between the stones of the track bed, scratching, scratching. With each sound, the stones gave a small, thin cry.
And then they saw what it was.
From the darkness at the edge of the platform, just ahead of the light, something with only an upper body was hauling itself up over the rim, bracing itself on its arms. Nothing from the waist down. Only two arms, pulling it forward along the narrow edge of the platform at a dreadful speed.
The face… they could not see it, they said.
Whether it truly could not be seen, or whether they simply could not bring themselves to look — that, they did not know. Only the long hair hanging down, they said… trailing behind, catching in the gaps between the sleepers.
Each time the hair fell between the stones, it made a dry, rustling sound. That alone came through with terrible clarity.
They tumbled from the bench and ran — all the way out through the ticket gate. They crouched by the roadside outside the station until dawn, they said. Even when the train came, they could not get on.
When morning finally arrived and they looked toward the pond, morning mist was rising from the surface. White and still, as though nothing had ever happened. That, they said, was what unsettled them most of all.
Afterwards, they heard that something had once happened near that pond, long ago. But no one would say clearly what it was. Whenever they tried to ask, people would go quiet for a moment — and then change the subject.
…Whether any of it is true, I cannot say.
Only this: from that night on, they said, they dreamed the same dream every night for some time.
A dream of someone standing at the bottom of black water.
Face turned upward. Looking up toward them.
In the water, and yet the hair was not moving.
Just still. Motionless. Watching.
…When the dreams finally stopped coming — that, I never got to ask.
