Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

“In the spring of 1913, I settled in the village of Akaji, in the southern Island of Japan, in order to work a colliery. The country in this part is mountainous and quite off the track of any tourists, and the inhabitants remain in a very primitive condition. All the people are either farmers, miners, or the keepers of very small shops, and there is not a single hotel nor even an inn. I stayed at first in one of the rooms of a farm house, and, after a little while, was able to lease an old thatched farm house, standing in a small orange orchard, quite close to the colliery.

“Its owner lived in a little house at the back. My house was one-storied, but very high, the pitch of the thick thatch being very steep. On entering, one found a kitchen with various cooking places, but no chimneys: the smoke curling and losing itself among the huge rafters that supported the roof. The rest of the house was raised, and consisted of four rooms divided from each other by sliding paper-covered screens or fusuma, and with thick padded straw mats or tatami on the floor. I got a table and chair, and put up some book shelves, and made the best room as habitable as possible. This room had a tokonoma, or recess, painted a dark grey; and a scroll, a crystal and a vase of flowers put in it gave the necessary decoration to the severely bare interior. For the first few months I slept in one of the back rooms, but later, when it got very hot, I only used the one room. I had one servant, and as we got up at dawn, we also went to sleep very early, and usually by nine o’clock the house was in darkness and silence. One night I was awakened, and heard talking and laughing in the next room, only separated from me by a thin screen. Someone was telling a story in an animated voice, and his auditor every now and then ejaculated ‘naruhode’ (to be sure) and ‘sodesuka’ (is that so), but the voices were kept low and the laughs were subdued. Just then the kitchen clock struck two. I was annoyed at my servant having friends in at that hour, and in the room next mine, and determining to have it out with him in the morning, I fell asleep. Next morning he absolutely denied that anyone had been in the house, and became very indignant when I insisted on what I had heard.

“Two nights later, I again heard a conversation going on, and reluctantly got out of bed and from under the mosquito curtains to investigate. A low chuckling laugh and then a snatch of song—and I pushed back the sliding fusuma. The room was in darkness, but I had a little electric torch which I used in the colliery, and, pressing its button, the room was brightly lit. Inside the mosquito curtain, Tanaka lay soundly sleeping—no one else was in the room; indeed, but for the futon or mattress covered by the net it was completely bare, and the talking still went on, seeming now to come from the room behind me. I awoke Tanaka, and we went out into the garden. No one was stirring, and the sounds came from inside the house. Away, down the road, three miners were returning from a night shift, and my servant wanted to run and fetch them, but I did not see the object of doing so. The mosquitoes were very bad, and I wanted to get back under the nets, conversations or no conversations, and so we re-entered the house. Silence reigned, and I went back to bed—but not to sleep—for the remainder of that night. Tanaka took the opportunity, while I was at the colliery the next morning, to pack up his few belongings and decamp, leaving a letter saying he could not stay in a house frequented by demons. I got a girl in from the village as a makeshift, and afterwards another servant, but no one would stay in the house after nightfall. I moved my bed into a room at the back, but still used the other room as a living room, and soon became used to the fact that it was haunted. Often, during the day, there were noises coming from near the tokonoma or recess—as though someone was cracking his finger joints, a habit the Japanese have; on several occasions, flowers put in the vase below the hanging scroll were taken out of their vase and arranged lying on a tray. One afternoon I brought my bed into the room, as the autumn was now getting cold, and I had been unwell for some days and wanted the benefit of the afternoon sun. I sent the servant to buy some stamps at the Post Office, a mile away, and stepped into the garden to gather some late dahlias. Looking up I distinctly saw a movement in the room I had left, through the pane of glass let into the paper-covered shoji. Dropping my flowers, I pressed my face against the pane, and saw the bedclothes, which the servant and myself had arranged, only five minutes previously, had been whisked off and were lying on the floor. Twice after this, coats hung on a peg near the tokonoma were found almost immediately lying on the floor at some distance, one having been pulled from its peg with such force as partly to tear it.

“On many nights, when I woke up, I heard talking in the next room, and gradually came to distinguish a man’s voice, sometimes I thought two men’s, and certainly that of a woman and a baby. All the village were now talking of the haunted house, and, now and then, neighbours came in to listen to the mysterious sounds that came, from time to time, from the tokonoma, but they took good care to be gone before sunset.

“Winter had now come, and I fell ill, and as the only really pleasant room in the house was made impossible during the long sleepless nights, I redoubled my endeavour to find another house. A baby’s wailings were very distinct, then it was hushed by its mother, and then long conversations ensued between her and one or two men—sometimes there were little taps, as though a tobacco pipe were being emptied of its ashes, but more often a curious noise was heard which sounded like ‘putter putter.’ About this time, an account appeared in all the Japanese newspapers of a bridge in Tokejo, which was haunted by a woman, and how this spirit had been laid by priestly intervention, and it was suggested that the same might be tried in the present case. I thought it rather a good plan, but, seeing that it was rather expensive, said that the landlord and not his foreign tenant should defray the cost and arrange the matter. But my landlord, who was very unpopular in the village, and with whom I was not on very good terms, would do nothing; and as, just then, another house near the colliery became vacant, I was able to move, and so at last be free of my ghostly visitants. Everyone knew of the reason for my leaving, and the landlord felt sure he would never find another tenant. After the house had been empty for some time, the landlord himself determined to live in it for some months, in order to demonstrate that things were not so bad after all. He, and his wife, and their two grandchildren accordingly moved their things across from their other house, but did not at first occupy the room with the tokonoma. Seeing, however, that their object in being in the house at all would be defeated unless this room was used, they hung some pictures in the recess, placed a bronze flower vase on a carved stand below them, and also moved in a gilt shrine containing an image of Buddha. A few friends were asked in, but all left at sunset. Next morning I heard that there had been considerable disturbance at the house, and that the younger grandson had been taken with convulsions.

“The same day a move was made again to their former abode, the house was closed, and still remains empty. A temple on a hill near by was being repaired, and, on the completion of the work, a priest came to hold a service. The head man of the village took the opportunity of consulting with him, and together they went to see my late landlord. The facts brought to light, many of which were vaguely known in the district, are as follows:—The house had been built about one hundred and fifty years previously by the head of the family, which was then of more consequence than at present, although it still owned considerable property in pine forests and rice fields. A younger brother of the original builder had conspired against his feudal lord and had committed suicide—hara-kiri. It was not known in which room, but probably it was in the principal one. The next tragedy, that was known of, had happened some fifteen years before, when the son-in-law, the father of the two boys already mentioned, was found hanging from a hook near the wooden ceiling of the room with the tokonoma. He had been away for some time in Tokejo, had spent a great deal of money, and, on his return, had quarrelled violently with his wife. She had run out of the house with her children, and had stayed on the hillside all night. Next morning her husband was found as above stated. Some months later, again in the same room, on the eve of the birth of her posthumous child, this woman killed herself by drinking poison, made from the leaves of a shrub still growing in the garden. During the convulsions which preceded her death, the child was born, but dead.

“The priest said there was no doubt that the spirits of these various people, related by family ties, and lives, passed among the same surroundings, and who had all come to a dreadful violent end in the same house, and, probably, the same room, were earthbound, and were in the habit of assembling and conversing in the room where their lives had come to an end. Each addition would strengthen and intensify their bondage, and the priest expressed his surprise that the spirits were not actually visible. There was a good deal of discussion as to the terms for a service and ceremony to free the house from these ghostly tenants and to give them rest, I offered a small sum, but as they were, after all, the relations of the landlord, it was upon him that the bulk of the expense fell, and he refused to provide the necessary funds. His argument was that, even were the spirits ‘laid,’ no one now would rent the house, and so he would not spend any money on it. Whether he also thought that the spirits were as happy holding their ghost-parties round the tokonoma as they would be if they were at rest, he did not say, as such thoughts would be contrary to all Japanese ideas on the subject. Anyway, the house is now closed, the heavy wooden shutters are rolled across the verandahs and bolted, the garden is overgrown and choked with weeds, and the only time when there is human activity about it, is when the orange trees, burdened with fruit, yield their golden harvest.

“G. Salis.”

......

To revert again to my own experiences. I am often sorry, extremely sorry, I was ever brought into contact with the Unknown. As I said in one of the early chapters of this book, I did not go out of my way to seek the superphysical—it came to me. And it has never given me any peace. I feel its presence beside me at all times. In the evening, when I am writing, the curtains that are tightly drawn across the closed windows slowly bulge, the candlestick on the mantel-shelf rattles, a picture on the wall swings out suddenly at me, and, when I go to bed and try to sleep, I frequently hear breathings and far-away whispers. Some of these “presences” no doubt have been with me always—most probably they were with my ancestors—whilst others have attached themselves to me in my nocturnal ramblings.