18 Haunted Places in Japan
Every case file on record in Japan — each with the full legend, the documented sightings spine and the skeptic’s file. Browse the archive below, or open the world map.
Adashino Nenbutsu-ji — The Field of Eight Thousand Stones
A · Saga-Toriimoto, Ukyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan — The temple at Adashino, on the western edge of old Kyoto, where the unmourned were once carried out and left — the tradition says Kōbō Daishi began gathering them in 811; today some eight thousand sto…
Aokigahara — The Sea of Trees
A · Yamanashi, at Mt. Fuji's north base, Japan — A forest so dense compasses misbehave, tied to old ubasute legends — a place Japan treats with reverence, not thrills.…
Hashima Island (Gunkanjima)
A · Nagasaki, Japan — Battleship Island: a concrete mining city of five thousand people packed onto six hectares of rock, abandoned overnight in 1974 and left to rust into the world's most famous ghost island.…
Hotel New Naruto — The Palace on the Skyline
B · Naruto, Tokushima, Japan — A hotel, drive-in and souvenir complex built at the top of the Naruto Skyline road to serve the whirlpool-view traffic of Shikoku's boom years stood derelict above the straits for fifteen years as Tok…
Ichijō Modoribashi — Kyoto's Bridge of Return
B · Kyoto, Japan — The bridge at the old capital's northern edge where a dead father returned for one last embrace in 918 — and where a samurai cut off a demon's arm and Japan's greatest sorcerer hid his twelve spirit f…
Inunaki Tunnel — The Village That Doesn't Exist
B · Miyawaka / Hisayama, Fukuoka, Japan — Japan's most notorious 'closed village' legend: a 440-metre tunnel sealed with concrete, behind which decades of folklore insist a lawless village stands.…
Jōren Falls — The Spider-Woman's Waterfall
B · Yugashima, Izu, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan — The falls beneath Mount Amagi in Izu — a twenty-five-metre ribbon of water in a gorge of wasabi terraces — which Japanese folklore names as the home of the jorōgumo, the binding-widow spider-woman: th…
Kamui-Kotan — The Gorge Where the Demon Waits
B · Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan — Where the Ishikari River forces itself out of the upper basin through a slot of billion-year-old green schist, the Ainu named the place kamuy kotan — the village of the gods — and forbade the wrong ki…
Kiyotaki Tunnel — Kyoto's Cursed Passage
B · Kyoto, Japan — A 1927 mountain tunnel where a mirror-check at night is said to show a woman's face where yours should be.…
Kurama-dera — The Mountain of the Tengu
A · Kurama, Sakyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan — The mountain temple north of Kyoto, founded in 770, whose deity is said to have descended in a fireball from Venus — and whose forests are the home of the tengu, the long-nosed mountain goblins of Jap…
Nakagusuku Hotel — The Hotel the Dead Refused
B · Kitanakagusuku, Okinawa, Japan — The concrete skeleton that stood fifty metres from the walls of Nakagusuku Castle for forty-five years — a 1970s luxury resort begun against the warnings of monks that the hill was a field of graves a…
Oiwa Inari Tamiya Shrine — Japan's First Lady of Ghosts
A · Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan — The shrine that pacifies the spirit of Oiwa — the poisoned wife of the Yotsuya Kaidan, the most performed ghost story in Japan.…
Okiku's Well, Himeji Castle
B · Himeji, Hyogo, Japan — A stone-ringed well inside Himeji Castle's inner citadel, anchor of Japan's most retold kaidan: the maid Okiku, falsely accused over one of ten heirloom plates, killed and dropped down the shaft — whe…
Osorezan — The Mountain of the Dead
A · Mutsu, Aomori, Japan — An active volcano whose crater lake and smoking vents are, in Japanese folk religion, the entrance where the dead gather — staffed by blind itako mediums who speak with them.…
Rokudō Chinno-ji — The Well to Enma's Court
A · Kyoto, Japan — The small Rinzai temple at Rokudō-no-Tsuji — the crossroads where Heian Kyoto met its burial ground — where a courtier is said to have descended nightly by well to serve as secretary to the king of he…
Sarusawa-pond — The Uneme's Last Boat
B · Nara, Japan — The lotus pond below the cloister of Kōfuku-ji in Nara, scene of one of Japanese literature's oldest ghost stories: the Uneme, a court lady cast off by Emperor Kōnin, who rowed out on the water and sa…
Seimei-jinja — The Onmyōji's Well
B · Ichijō, Kamigyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan — The shrine raised in 1007 by imperial order on the estate of Abe no Seimei — the astronomer-onmyōji who served six emperors and became, after his death, Japan's archetypal magician; its well is said t…
Suzugamori — Edo's Southern Gate of Execution
B · Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan — The execution ground the Tokugawa shogunate ran beside the Tōkaidō road out of Edo from 1651 to 1871, where a traditional estimate of one hundred thousand condemned were crucified, burned or sawn — no…