Scissor Woman

The Scissor Woman (or Hasami-onna) is a creepy Japanese story about a group of teenagers who decide to go visit the house of a crazy woman. It is supposed to be haunted, but they are not prepared for what they will find inside.

When I was a child, there was a crazy woman who lived in our neighborhood. She was about 30 years old, her hair was long and unkempt. She used to wander around, laughing and muttering to herself. In her hand, she always had a pair of scissors and she was constantly snapping them in mid-air, as if she was cutting something. The other kids called her “Hasami-onna” or “Scissor Woman”.

The police kept a close eye on her, but they never arrested her. It seems that because she was mild-mannered and didn’t stray far from her house, they didn’t think she posed a danger to anyone.

Somewhere along the way, I heard that she had died or moved away. No one seemed to know for sure. At any rate, her house was abandoned and nobody ever saw her again.

One day, when I was in junior high school, I was having lunch with my friends when they started talking about the “Scissor Woman”. At this stage, she had almost become an urban legend. They had heard rumors that her house was haunted and they wanted to go there as a test of courage. We were all very excited about it.

That night, we gathered together and headed towards the house. It was dark outside and there was an eerie atmosphere about the old, abandoned house. My friend wanted to show the girls how brave he was, so he volunteered to go into the house alone to look around.

Inside, the rooms were strewn with garbage and there were cardboard boxes and plastic bags stacked here and there. Piles of old newspapers were stacked against the walls and broken wooden crates were scattered around. There was barely any room to move.

He picked his way carefully through the rubbish, going from room to room. He was looking for something that he could be bring back as evidence that he had been in the house.

When he went into one of the bedrooms, he opened the closet and something big fell out. My friend got such a shock, he almost screamed.

It was some kind of giant stuffed animal.

However, what freaked him out so much was that its head was absolutely hideous. It was made from the heads of various other small stuffed animals. Dogs, cats, bears, monkeys, frogs etc. They had all been cut up and roughly sewn together in the shape of a giant human head. It looked like some kind of grotesque collage. There were countless small glass eyes all over the head and they all seemed to be staring at him.

My friend was so shaken by the sight of it that he ran away crying. This didn’t impress the girls at all and our test of courage ended in a big fiasco. As if that wasn’t enough, our parents somehow found out that we had been in the house. We were grounded for a week and warned never to trespass on other people’s property.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. A few weeks later, the neighbors complained and the police went to examine the house. In one of the rooms, they discovered the corpse of the Scissor Woman.

She had been there all along, inside the giant stuffed toy that had collapsed on my friend.

The cause of death could not be determined, but she had been dead for years and her corpse was little more than skin and bone. It seems that she made the giant stuffed head herself and sewed herself up inside it. Nobody knows why…