One month after our reunion at the izakaya, Ozawa sent me an e-mail.
I’d like to talk about that supplementary issue of . Can we meet? It’s for work this time.
I just happened to have an appointment scheduled near his workplace in Jinbocho a few days later, so we decided to get coffee at a café there.
We met in front of the café and headed inside. I went with black coffee, and he got a caffe latte. As soon as we’d placed our orders, he spread out a bunch of papers on the table. They were all copies of various articles.
As I read them, he watched with excited impatience.
The moment I finished, he started talking.
“To get straight to the point, I’d like you to write an article for the magazine. But first, let me tell you what I found.”
Apparently, he’d continued to hole up in the company archives, checking through all the old materials related to the magazine.
But the shelves containing the scores of back issues were totally unorganized. Nothing was arranged by publication date, some issues were missing, and research materials and reader letters were all stuffed haphazardly into cardboard boxes. It was absolute chaos.
At first, he tried to read everything sequentially by publication year, but he abandoned that idea partway through and began simply reading whatever he happened to grab next. He’d planned to read all of it anyway, so there was no need to go through it in order. He could just take notes on the things that caught his attention and sort it all out later.
And as he combed through the heaps of materials, he discovered something.
Currently, Japan has over five hundred paranormal hot spots of various sizes, but only a few garner enough attention for a magazine or some other media outlet to run a story on it.
Among the most famous are Tama Cemetery and Ikoma Tunnel. Hokkaido and Okinawa have some places, too, but publishers prefer to minimize reporting costs, and that includes travel expenses. So they naturally tend to feature spots in Osaka, Tokyo, Fukuoka, and other big urban centers where there are freelance writers the editors know who are reasonably close to the sites in question.
Also, the more people visit a paranormal site, the more rumors about it start circulating. So places that are easy for thrill seekers and the curious to access receive the most notoriety.
Perhaps for that reason, though Ozawa was unfamiliar with such stories, by the time he’d read about ten issues of the magazine, he began to notice certain place names were coming up over and over.
“At first, I just thought, ‘Oh wow, there it is again.’ My parents took me camping around there when I was young. I think that’s why it stood out to me.”
He was talking about an area in the mountains of the Kinki region notorious for paranormal activity, centered around a tunnel, a dam, and a ruined building. The area was quite famous in certain circles, so I was well aware of it.
The three hot spots were all within a three-kilometer radius, and back during the paranormal craze, quite a few groups tried to hit all of them in a single night as a kind of test of courage. Thinking about it made me feel somewhat nostalgic.
However, all the stories associated with those places were just the typical fare. Things like, if you did so-and-so in the tunnel, a floating head would appear, or the ghosts of the people who killed themselves at the dam still haunted the grounds, or a woman’s ghost wandered around in the basement of the ruined building. It was all standard stuff like that, as I recalled. In recent years, the area had gained a solid reputation among thrill seekers as being one of the top paranormal hot spots in the country, but no one in the media wrote about it anymore. It was already old hat.
Even Ozawa, who was quite a bit younger than me, had begun to get the same impression. He kept encountering similar stories to those of other famous haunted spots and was getting a little fed up.
“After reading some more articles, though, I began to wonder if the stories from those three spots were all related, if they could have come from the same root cause.”
Then he pointed to the papers in my hands.
“A True Story! New Developments Regarding a Missing Girl in Nara?, The Truth Behind the Mass-Hysteria Incident at the School Camping Trip, and A Peculiar Comment were all written in different decades. Yet the same name kept popping up in all of them, and that caught my eye. That’s right, I’m talking about the same area around I just mentioned. But none of these stories are associated with any of those paranormal hot spots. They just happened to all occur in . The ruin was still a regular building at the time those students had their camping trip, so I doubt it was considered a paranormal hot spot back then. Even so, all three stories take place in , and the word ‘mountain’ plays a pivotal role in each one. Don’t you find that strange?”
All the other stories associated with this area’s three hot spots were run-of-the mill urban legends, with no obvious connection, so the odd link between these three involving the mountain had stood out to Ozawa.
“Once I noticed it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I put aside the old magazines for a moment and started searching the internet. First, I checked an online map to see if the torii in A Peculiar Comment actually existed. And sure enough, the street view showed a ruined torii and a set of stairs leading to the top of the mountain on the east side of the dam’s lake. From that, I assumed the ‘mountain’ mentioned in the stories was the one to the east of the area that had the dam, ruins, and tunnel. Next, I searched the internet for any similar stories related to a mountain in , and this is what I found.”
With that, he handed me some printouts of online articles and forum posts. He had searched combinations of the keywords , mountain, creepy story, ghost, and incident. The results of those searches surprised me.
“There’s a YouTuber’s live stream that went wrong, reports on suspicious people that have nothing to do with any urban legends or ghost stories, even an article discussing a suspected murder. And all of them are somehow related to this ‘mountain.’”
Considering all the evidence, I had a hard time dismissing it as mere coincidence. Then, after I’d sat for a moment in stunned silence, he presented me with two more documents: a letter in an envelope and a copy of an article from one of the magazine’s back issues. He waited for me to read them before continuing.
“I’d been digging through research materials and notes at the same time as the back issues. At first, I was just browsing, but once I noticed the relationship between the mountain and , I decided to reread them. This letter doesn’t mention the mountain directly, but it’s in there. What caught my attention was that the woman who wrote it first visited some haunted sites, then crossed over a mountain to get to a dam. If we put the mountain at the center, the three hot spots I mentioned earlier are to the west. The mountain belongs to a range running from north to south, so we can eliminate those sides. That means the woman visited additional sites to the east of the mountain, implying there are various other paranormal hot spots scattered around it, aside from the dam, ruin, and tunnel. And what do you know? Two of the notes about suspicious people are from the east side of the mountain, and so is the story about Masshiro-san. The complex is currently called the ghost apartments.”
He showed me all this on an online map as he spoke, running his finger over the pins he’d dropped on each paranormal hot spot and tracing a circle around the mountain.
I had heard about some of the sites to the east.
They included a ruined house and an abandoned apartment complex located near the foot of the mountain that the locals said were haunted. But the three spots to the west were more well known, and only magazines geared toward real aficionados, like the old monthly version of , ever mentioned the sites to the east.
In addition, because the mountain lay on the border of two prefectures, no one ever linked the three western spots in one to the two eastern spots in the other, to form one large area of paranormal activity. But according to Ozawa’s explanation, it was more natural to think of all five sites as a single region surrounding the mountain.
I explained this, and Ozawa nodded.
“I guess ghosts and specters don’t care about arbitrary human boundaries… But now I’m sure of it. The central theme of this supplementary issue will be investigating whether the paranormal activity in this region is linked to the mountain. I’ll pull related stories from back issues and the boxes of research materials to fill it out. It would make me really happy as a new editor if I could bring the readers a fresh insight they’ve never heard before.”
Listening to Ozawa’s idea, I was impressed with the passion he brought to his work. But at the same time, I thought he sounded a little overzealous.
“And that, at last, brings me to the topic at hand. I want you to write a story about this region. You can use any style you want, and there’s no word limit. However, I have a few additional requests. I’d like you to review whatever materials I find and study them with me. Please also share any similar stories you’ve worked on in the past and ask around to see if any of your contacts have more information. I’d like you to write something new based on our findings.”
The compensation he quoted me wasn’t enough to justify the work involved. But swayed by his passion and my own curiosity as a horror fan, I decided to take the job.
“I’ll keep digging through the archives. Right now, we have far fewer articles about the east side, so I’ll try to find anything I can about those sites, regardless of the subject. Right now, we only have Masshiro-san, and that doesn’t have anything to do with the mountain… Hopefully I’ll find other stories with some kind of connection, and those will give us something to consider. I’ll also keep an eye out for any stories about the area around the mountain or the shrine there.”
This is how I came to investigate . As my first step, I decided to reach out to a certain person…