I should have known that when visiting a city with a street dedicated to monsters and spirits, and a hill full of severed ears and noses, I would stay in a haunted hotel room.
You know that icy feeling you get when you walk into an abandoned building. It reeks of its age, like the doors were locked shut as a crypt and you were the first in years to open them. You come across it, suddenly unsettling the dust and the rust. The house exhales mildew as if it were whispering a secret. The silence engulfs you. Walking through Kyoto at night is sort of like that, and has the kind of creepy history that can only accompany an old city.
I figured this out on my first day exploring Kyoto on foot. I always avoid subways on the first few days of a trip, because I’m naturally a walker, and the pace is perfect for exploring. I love to hear passing conversations in languages I don’t understand and read signs and billboards showing faces that don’t look like mine. Most cities in Japan are perfect for exactly this activity.
I was an hour into my long, mapless walk through Kyoto when I noticed that the buildings around me were getting shorter. I passed an invisible threshold that separated downtown from a residential neighborhood. It was a sort of quiet, unsuspecting suburb. The birds had taken up post at the observation decks of tree branches. My footsteps echoed between the buildings.
Ahead of me was a large grassy mound in the center of this neighborhood. It looked like a pile of dirt had been pushed into a lot, about the diameter of a small home, and packed by hand until it formed a rounded lump. It was covered in luscious green grass, vibrantly bright despite the overcast morning.
Curious about this strange little hill in between buildings, I went up and read the sign. Mimizuka. The Hill of Severed Ears and Noses. Without thinking, my feet moved backward and stumbled off the curb.
It was a hill of grass and dirt, indeed, but several hundred years ago, it contained something much more grisly. The Japanese leader, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was known for his brutal nature, and when he invaded China and Korea, he and his soldiers made sure to return with souvenirs. This was a mound created by the severed ears and noses of all those who got in his way.
Creepy history and tales are no shock to me. Coming from Providence, one of the most haunted cities in the U.S., and growing up near the Bridgewater Triangle, ghost stories and urban legends were just a part of life in New England. There were tales of cursed Native American lands, and hitchhiking ghosts who would appear in your car. I grew up on a road with one lonesome street lamp, and when it flickered, it was said that a ghost was waiting under the tunnel of its light. My friends and I sat around campfires with flashlights held under our chins. We narrated our childhood with ghost stories.
When I went to Kyoto, though, the legends became real.
I stood in front of that hill for a long while. Waiting in the stillness of Kyoto, like the city drew in a breath and froze. The birds stopped chirping. The wind settled. My heart froze.
A while later, I was walking to my hotel for an early night in. My stay in Kyoto started out like most other trips, with a train ticket and a loaded suitcase. Six hours of walking left me exhausted, and I had an early morning ahead, when I planned to rent a kimono in the Gion District.
I checked into my hotel and pulled my suitcase into the elevator. In the same way some of us Westerners associate the number 13 with bad luck, the Japanese also have a superstition about the numbers 9 and 4. The word for 9 sounds like pain, and the word for 4 can be pronounced like death in some East Asian cultures. I noticed this superstition in South Korea as well because most elevators skip level 4 (the floors may be 1,2,3,5, for example).
I should have read up on the ghost sightings in Kyoto. I should have been more careful. I shouldn’t have taken a room on the fourth floor of that hotel.
The elevator doors swung open and I stepped into the hallway. There was a sideboard table parallel to the elevator and a glass vase of plastic flowers on top of it. A single telephone with a spiraled cord beside it.
The hotel rooms in Japan are small; usually, there’s just enough space for the bed and about one foot of space so you can roll off the side of the bed and put your feet on the floor. But I remember opening the door to my hotel room and being pleasantly surprised at the space. A wide armchair occupied the corner, and a Queen-sized bed in the center of the room, which was perfect because a friend of mine was going to spend the night.
The next few hours, I settled into the room, had a shower and planned what I’d wear the following morning. My friend also showed up with a few convenience store snacks and beers. We fell asleep watching TV.
Before I tell you any more, I must give two disclaimers. The first is that ghost hauntings (and the belief in them) are subjective. You are, of course, entitled to believe what you’d like from the experience I’m about to describe. Truthfully, I still don’t know what to think of it.
The second is a disclaimer about Eastern and Western differences in hauntings. The Japanese call ghosts yūrei. The yūrei are spirits that are trapped in the living world, similar to my Western understanding of them.
Restless and with unfinished business on Earth, these ghosts are unable to pass into the spiritual realm. Yūrei is the general term for spirit, and to the Japanese, they are malevolent and cause harm to the unfortunate humans in their path.
There is no such thing as Casper the Friendly Ghost in Japan.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night with an immense weight on my chest and my arms pinned to my sides. The bed sheets weren’t on me, and yet it felt like there was a full-body enclosure keeping me in place. I lay there, very still, for minutes. Unable to move. A voice in my head told me not to open my eyes. This was the only thing I had control over in that moment, whether or not I saw what was trapping me to the bed, so I obeyed the voice I heard and kept my eyes shut.
Minutes passed slowly. The TV volume was muted, but I could make out the flashing lights of a late-night TV commercial. The pressure began to peel away. At first, I moved my index finger and felt my nail graze the skin on the thigh. Then my hand twitched. My arms came free from this trap. I opened my eyes.
I stared up at the ceiling. When your body is stuck in an invisible vice, your mind begins to race, thinking of all the ways to escape without knowing how to do a single one. How do you release yourself from a trap that isn’t physically there? Sleep paralysis was a thing of horror movies, not of real life, and so I had no idea what just happened to me. My mind was swollen with questions, so much so that I forgot my friend was also there.
I felt the bed shift under the rising and falling of her chest. She’s still asleep, I thought, she slept through the whole thing. And then I wondered if maybe I, too, had been asleep.
I looked over at her, and in the light of the TV commercial, saw her watching me. Her eyes were wide open, staring at me and at the same time through me. Her pupils were wide and unfocused, like she was in a trance.
I jerked upright, fully expecting my feet to hit the ground (all that space around the bed) and run straight out of that hotel. The bed shuddered from the movement and woke my friend out of her catatonic state. She blinked rapidly and stared around the room, as if searching for a familiar face. Her eyes landed on mine.
“What the hell was that?!” I screamed.
“I opened my eyes for one minute, and when I looked at you, you weren’t you.”
“What do you mean I wasn’t me?”
“I don’t know, I—“ My friend shook her head, as if to get rid of the mental image. “Your face wasn’t yours. You looked like someone else completely. And I forgot the rest.”
“We’re getting a different room.”
We slept thinly that night, with the lights on and our bags still packed. We got up the following morning with groggy, lead-filled heads and an uneasy sense.
We walked to the Gion District in silence, jostled by tourists who drank iced matchas through straws and regarded us with little awareness. The only thing that seemed to know what happened was the city itself. We put on kimonos and snapped photos, and when we came across quiet streets where no other crowds entered, Kyoto whispered its secrets.
