Human Bones

Human Bones is a strange story from Japan about a man who passes through a small village and meeting a weird old woman in an abandoned house.

There was a village in Japan where the population was very small. A lot of people had left the village and many of the houses were abandoned. One snowy day, a traveller came to this village, looking for shelter. He saw what appeared to be an empty house, but when he went inside, he was surprised to find an old woman standing there.

The old woman told him to go up to the first floor and she followed behind him. When he reached the top of the stairs and turned around, she had disappeared. He walked back down the stairs and saw that the old woman was standing in the exact spot she had been when he entered, except now she was holding a sharp sickle in her hand.

The man was very spooked by this ran to the front door, but when he tried to pull it open, he found that it was locked. He turned to find the old woman standing right beside him. She grabbed hold of his arm.

In the darkness he hadn’t noticed how pale she looked. But now that she was up close, he could see that her skin seemed to be rotting. She looked dead.

The old woman squeezed his arm and hissed, “Listen to me! Under this house lie thirteen bodies. Give them peace! If not, I will kill you.”

After she uttered these words, the man began to feel dizzy and clollapsed to the floor.

When he woke up, he had no idea how much time had elapsed. He began to doubt himself. Perhaps he had dreamed the whole thing. He was about to leave when he noticed a mat in the middle of the room, where the old woman had been standing. There was a dark red stain on it.

He pulled back the mat and found it was covering a large hole in the floorboards. Looking into the hole, he saw human bones neatly arranged underneath.

The bones of fourteen bodies were lying there.

“Why did she say thirteen?”, he murmured to himself. Perhaps the fourteenth set of human bones belonged to the old woman.

The traveller went outside and told some of the villagers what had happened. When he brought them back to the empty house, they looked down into the hole and saw the bones. But now, there were only thirteen sets of human bones underneath the floorboards. The old woman’s bones were not there anymore.

Afterwards, the villagers demolished the old house and built a shrine there instead. Inside the shrine, they placed the blood-stained mat, so that people could offer prayers to the dead.

The traveller and the villagers who discovered the dead bodies all died soon after the incident.

This is a scary story I heard from one of my teachers at school. The teacher who told me this story said he was from the same village. I can’t remember the exact name of the village as it was such a long time ago when I heard it. I’m sorry.