But once he’d finished recording the data for about twenty subjects, he started to get the hang of it. He began to enjoy himself and would try to guess in advance how each subject would act.
In the end, two of the subjects’ actions stood out.
One was male—the other was female. Their gestures weren’t particularly notable, but while talking, both of them would sometimes turn their gaze away from the listener, almost like they had noticed something in another part of the room.
They both looked at the same spot, diagonally in front of them and to the right, just outside the camera’s frame. But as far as A could remember, there was nothing there. It was just an empty corner of the room.
Neither seemed to be purposefully turning toward the corner; the action appeared almost subconscious. Sometimes they stopped what they were saying and stared at the spot. It almost seemed to A like they were responding to someone calling their name.
But A had intentionally removed anything that would make noise or otherwise interrupt the data-collection process. So he found their actions very strange.
If it had been only one person, he might have dismissed it as an individual quirk. But if two people were repeatedly gazing in the same exact direction, there might be some discernible cause. With that in mind, he decided to review their questionnaires.
I actually failed to mention something earlier. When A made the questionnaire, he added one item just for fun. It was “I have a sixth sense / I don’t have a sixth sense.”
So, as you’ve probably guessed, out of all fifty people, those two were the only ones to claim they had a sixth sense.
As I mentioned, A had a strong interest in horror and the supernatural, and this piqued his interest. So he asked both of them back individually to follow up. At first, neither wanted to talk about it, but A persisted until they agreed.
For the most part, their stories matched. Both said they had heard a persistent sound as they spoke.
It came from the corner of the room, continuing irregularly, with no discernible source. Thump, thump.
They both immediately realized it was a paranormal phenomenon. They’d lived their whole lives hearing and seeing things others couldn’t, and the noise was just another encounter for them, so they didn’t say anything about it.
But both of them unconsciously reacted to the noise, and A had noticed.
He asked if either of them believed the room was haunted, and they both gave the same answer.
They assumed the specter came not from the room but from the video in the experiment, because the noise would stop when they weren’t talking about the movie.
In addition to the sound, the man reported seeing a black figure.
It moved up and down in the corner of the room in time with the noise, almost like each thump came from the echo of the figure jumping.
The man added, “It’s usually best to ignore them. They tend to cause trouble once they realize you can see them. I wouldn’t probe any further if I were you.”
Hearing a warning from someone who knew about ghosts scared A, and he stopped his inquiry after that. He never watched the video again, either.
But a line had already been crossed.
About a month later, A was in the thick of his graduation research. He was spending every day on campus, working on his thesis late into the night. He lived alone in an apartment two train stations away from the university, so he was staying with a friend who lived closer to campus.
Then one day, he got a phone call from an unknown number. It was the police.
The night before, a neighbor had called them to report a woman on A’s balcony.
The caller lived in a house across from his apartment building, and they could see his balcony from their living room window.
Around nine pm, they looked toward the apartment and saw a woman in a reddish coat standing with both arms in the air on the balcony of a corner unit on the fifth floor—A’s room.
She was facing A’s apartment and periodically jumping up and down.
The caller assumed she was arguing with her boyfriend and he’d locked her out on the balcony, so they didn’t pay much attention to it and went to bed. But when they woke up around three in the morning to use the bathroom and glanced toward the balcony, she was still there, facing A’s apartment and periodically jumping. Astonished, the caller stared for a while, transfixed. That was when they realized there was something strange about the woman.
Her neck would tilt wildly every time she jumped. When she landed, the impact would fling her head around as though she were a baby with undeveloped neck muscles.
By the time the police arrived, she had disappeared, and no one answered when they knocked on A’s door. The next morning, they asked the apartment manager for the resident’s number and called him.
A couple of days later, A got another call, this time from his apartment’s management office. His downstairs neighbor had filed a complaint.
The neighbor said they’d recently started hearing a thudding sound from the ceiling every day after midnight and they wanted him to keep it down. Since the police had already been called a few days before, the office issued him a warning and even threatened to evict him.
A rarely went home after that. Who would, after finding out a ghost had invaded their apartment? He got a few more noise complaints from the management office, but he told them he spent almost no time at home, and they eventually stopped calling.
He was terrified the woman would follow him when he moved for his new job in April, so he asked for help from a writer he knew who happened to specialize in this kind of thing. That was F, who introduced me to him. F asked me for advice, and I arranged to interview A in exchange for information about a temple capable of exorcising the evil spirit.