Welcome to The Mikan Mailbox, our community’s anonymous post box!
This is a dedicated space for those bite-sized stories of life in Japan that might not warrant a full blog post, but are far too good to keep to ourselves.
Peel back the layers with us as we dive into this month’s submissions!
One time, when I was living in Sydney, I got free tickets to go on a ghost tour in a historic neighbourhood called The Rocks. When I got there, I asked the woman leading the tour what the spookiest thing that had ever happened to her was. She said it didn't happen to her, but to her friend, whom we'll call Patricia.
Patricia had just started renting a house in Sydney and kept hearing strange noises at night and during the day. She thought it was maybe possums or kookaburras. Stuff around her house would occasionally go missing.
One summer morning, the temperature had reached about 38 centigrade. Patricia was sat at her kitchen table eating breakfast when a naked Japanese man fell out of her ceiling. I asked the ghost tour guide what she meant, and she said she didn't really know, but that he just kind of "fell out" of some kind of hatch. He was extremely sweaty to the point of being slippery if you tried to grab hold of him, and he was panting. Patricia asked who he was. He said, "I blow things up." Then, he fainted.
Apparently, he was roommates with the previous tenant and lived in the attic. When the tenant had to move out, he just didn't tell anyone that he was staying, and Patricia never knew she had an attic. At night, he'd occasionally go downstairs to get water or snag a cookie. On really hot days, he took his clothes off to stand the heat, since all the heat in the house rose to the attic and there was no air conditioning up there.
On that morning, it was so hot that he was starting to undergo heat exhaustion, so he crawled to the ceiling hatch and through it in a desperate attempt to get some water. The Japanese man ended up falling through and landing buck-naked in the kitchen.
He didn't speak much English, and he was delirious from the heat, so when Patricia asked who he was, he thought she was asking his occupation. The Japanese man was a pyrotechnician for movie studios, and he had worked on the Mad Max films. That's why he responded with, "I blow things up."
Apparently, Patricia and the naked Japanese man later became best friends despite the awkward first meeting, and eventually he moved back to Tokyo to work for the movie industry there. They still maintain contact, and she even visited him over there. Although I can't verify that any of this actually happened, this story was told to me in the way I've described above.
The attached photo is of the tour guide in Cadman’s Cottage, a historic building in The Rocks, shortly before telling me about the scary naked Japanese man.
My family home is right next to a small graveyard, so when I was growing up, I would always take walks through it. We didn't have any neighbours, just fields for miles and miles, which farmers would come out to on their tractors to till.
One of the local farmers had some family buried there, I think, so he tended to the front of it. The back of the graveyard was left more wild, and there was a large stone tomb there, which had to have been at least 100-150 years old. The tomb was essentially a large stone rectangular box on the bottom with a larger stone box stacked on top. The stones that it was built with were fairly overgrown, stacked, and loose in places, so I never touched it. I always thought the body of whoever was buried there was just in one of the boxes.
One winter day, though, when I was walking through, I passed it again and noticed that one of the stones from the lower box had been thrown off. When I shone my torch down it, I could see stone stairs leading down further than the light could reach.... I contemplated going down, but decided that I preferred living! End of the story; pretty spooky, but I was NOT going to be killed in the spooky tomb.
When I was in university, there was an old mansion that had been converted into classrooms and offices for the school as the campus expanded throughout the decades.
In the 1800s, back when it was a private residence, this weird age-gap couple lived in the building, and the lady ended up dying in the house when she was super young. Allegedly, the building was slightly haunted, and if you went in at night, you could hear or see the lady who died. I did not believe this, but my roommate truly believed in ghosts, and one night they were DETERMINED to find a ghost, so they dragged me to this mansion in the middle of January at like 12 am.
The main floors and attic had no ghosts or anything of a spooky nature, so we decided to break into the basement in hopes of finding something. When we broke the lock, we wandered around in the pitch-black basement because the lights just didn’t work down there. My roommate said it was because of the hauntings. I say it’s because it was 12 a.m. on a Tuesday, during a snowstorm in January.
So we were wandering around in the dark with just our phone flashlights, and we walked into this freezing cold room that just had a coffin in the middle of it. Like deadass, a whole ass coffin just in the basement of this random university building.
My roommate got in it as a joke in the hopes that the coffin’s spirit would possess them. That didn’t happen. Eventually, we decided to head out, and my roommate was bumbed but accepted that maybe ghosts aren’t real. Then, as we were leaving the basement, both my roommate and I heard and felt someone in the room with us. I swear to whatever god is up there, it sounded EXACTLY like someone was walking in, like a heavy dress right next to us. You could hear the fabric swishing and swaying. And it just felt like there was another being in the room. Anyway, we ended up screaming and running straight out of the building, and my roommate peed their pants in the snow, lmao.
A huge thank you to everyone who dropped a note into the mailbox this month!
Got a story of your own? The Mikan Mailbox is always open. Drop your submission for next month’s issue here:
Edited by Vince Madriaga