Context:

The informant is a 23 year old Japanese male. He was born in Nagoya, Japan where he spent the first half of his life. When he was 13, he came to the United States to attend high school and has been living in California ever since. The informant currently resides in Inglewood, CA and works in animation.

There is a certain tunnel in Japan, I forget where it is, but it goes through a mountain and it’s haunted. There is a story that gets told a lot of a man driving his car and on his way to the tunnel. And he know about the tunnel, he knows that people say that it’s haunted. He’s not someone who really believes in ghost stories and therefore he proceeds. He’s halfway in and nothing has happened. 

So he thinks to himself:

Of course, all those ghost stories were fake. There’s no such thing as spirits.

And as soon as he thinks that, he hears a lot of banging on the side of his car! And he’s terrified. And his car stops. The thumping stops as well. He tries to start his car and turn it around for about 10 minutes, and there is nothing. He is absolutely terrified. But after 10 minutes, his car starts again and he is able to keep going. Later on, he goes to a gas station, and in Japan, gas station attendants fill up your car. The gas station attendant is wiping down the body of the car (they also clean your car), and he tells the man: 

Sir, you have a lot of handprints on your car.

The guy gets out himself and he notices that there are millions of handprints all around his car, and is shaken. The attendant is cleaning, and wants to make sure that it’s spotless, says to the man.

You have one handprint that I cannot get to, because it is inside your car…

And that’s the end of the story.

Analysis:

This is your typical ghost story; they can be found in nearly every culture. Some of them revolve around a certain person, specific time, and/or place. This ghost story is very location specific. They can be based on real life events, for example the informant said that they think that the tunnel was once surrounded by a city, but the citizens may have died in some tragic way, though they weren’t sure themselves. It is difficult to find the root of truth in a ghost story, because they are so eagerly shared, be that around campfires, sleepovers, power outages, etc., that people change the story every time they tell it to make it even scarier. The informant did not remember where exactly this tunnel is located, possibly because over time, that detail was omitted so that the story would be applied to multiple tunnels, therefore more easily frightening the listeners.