Tag Archives: Horror Story

Hanako-San

Text:

Interviewee: Hanako-San’s story is an urban legend in Japan, widely spread among children. While I believe it began spreading among people in the mid-20th century, it has been passed down to this day.

Hanako-San is a young girl who wears a red skirt or dress. According to this tale, when you go to a lavatory at night, Hanako-San will haunt you when you are using it.

If you knock a closed toilet stall door three times, Hanako-San will appear. In some versions, it has been told that after Hanako-San’s appearing, if you look up, there will be a ghost looking at you. In other versions of the story, a hand—Hanako-San’s hand, will appear, and Hanako-San will kill you.

There are some versions of the story that have a good ending. For instance, in one version of the tale, when Hanako-San appears, she will play game with you. And this is typically a good ending.

Interviewer: Why is Hanako-San there (in the lavatory)? Any suspicions?

Interviewee: There are sayings about how Hanako-San became a ghost. Some people say she was threatened, frightened, and bullied, and so she hid in a school’s lavatory and died there. Some others say that Hanako-San’s death was caused by air raids in World War II, which makes sense given when the story was first told.

Context:

My interviewee learned Hanako-San’s story when listening to a Chinese podcast. The host of that podcast specializes in Japanese horror stories. My interviewee thinks of this story as a “typical childhood ghost story.” She also uses this legend as a way to learn about Japanese culture and society—their history (such as WWII being alluded to in this legend) and ideologies, etc.

Analysis:

  • Psychoanalytic interpretation: This urban legend can be interpreted using psychoanalytic theory. At its core, this legend functions as an externalization of repressed anxieties in Japanese society: fears that the Japanese society couldn’t openly confront, such as child mortality, wartime trauma, and school bullying.
  • Spatial symbolism: Toilet rooms are typically very small and confined. Their confinement targets people’s fear and mirrors their repressed anxiety.
  • Social issues / Wartime origin: Though this is only one variation of the story, the wartime origin (Hanako-San dying of WWII air raids) connects to Japan’s generational, collective trauma and guilt (this legend was first spread around 1950, not long after WWII). This embodies people’s way of processing this war, as well as the historical violence.

Horror Story of an Old Woman

An old woman’s daughter became pregnant out of wedlock and when the child was born, the old woman dipped her daughter’s newborn into boiling water. Sometime later, the old woman became paralyzed and could only move her eyes. The day she died, it was foggy and dark and animals would bark and make noise. As the woman was about to die, the window opened and a chicken came in. She wanted it to go away and her son began to shoot at the chicken. As the shot hit the chicken, the woman died.

These kinds of gory stories about death were popular to tell according to my mom, especially since they involved some kind of karmic element and gruesome end to the villain of the story.

The story was a bit confusing to me and it sounds as if the old woman became the chicken itself but I’m confused as to why and what that had to do with the old woman killing her infant grandson. Definitely freaked me out a little.

Legend: Jack The Ripper

When my informant O was younger, their older brother told them a Creepypasta (term for horror-related legends) legend about Jack the Ripper. He told them how Jack would come to your window every night and he would test you by scratching on your window. If he didn’t scratch your window it meant you were safe, but if he did, it meant that you were a possible target. Unfortunately, O had a tree close by her bedroom window, so sometimes the branches of the tree would graze her window late at night, causing an eerie scratching sound which terrified them. O said that they would get panic attacks and often had trouble sleeping thinking that Jack was going to get them in their sleep. One night O’s panic attack got so bad that they started crying and screaming and their dad ran in, worried about what had caused their reaction. After they explained the situation to their dad, he scolded O’s brother for scaring them and he cut down the branches near O’s bedroom window that very night.

I also have an older sibling who is ten years older than me so I have had my fair share of horror stories that my older sister has told me growing up. She would also try to convince me that I was adopted when I was younger because I don’t really look like either of my parents by telling me that my birth certificate was fake. I can definitely relate to O because I have had so many experiences that are similar to the story she told me. My sister is a really big horror fan, so she watched and read a lot of horror stories. She would always try to scare me by telling me scary stories and legends about our hometown and I remember many late nights of running to my mom’s bedroom because I was too scared to sleep in my room as a kid.

Ozok

Nationality: American
Age: 62
Occupation: Accountant
Residence: Maryland
Performance Date: April 18, 2022
Primary Language: English

Background:

The informant grew up in Chicago in the 1960s. There was an abandoned elevator for trash called a “dumbwaiter.” It was used by residents to send their trash down to the basement before the informant lived there. It went out of use when residents began carrying their own trash down themselves. The informant’s older brother would scare her with stories of a crazed man, named Ozok, who lived in the abandoned dumbwaiter and carried an axe through the halls of the building at night.

Context:

This piece was related to me over a Zoom call with the informant, discussing her childhood in Chicago.

Main Piece:

E: No one used the dumbwaiter when I was living there. It used to be used to send trash down apparently, but eventually people just learned it was easier to their own damn trash out themselves (laughs). But the trash room was in the basement, and the dumbwaiter and the basement were mostly abandoned. There was a legend that a spirit used to live in the abandoned dumbwaiter. The story was that there was some sort of crazy man named Ozop… no Ozok, I think it was. But the story was that Ozok lived in the dumbwaiter and the basement, and he used to carry an axe when he walked the halls of the apartment building at night.

Me: All the kids in the apartment building believed this?

E: I don’t know about all of the kids, but my siblings and I certainly did. Our oldest brother told us that Ozok lived in the dumbwaiter and the basement and haunted the building. He took me down to the basement one time during the day and showed me an axe leaned up against the wall as proof. I don’t think I slept for a week after that! My parents allowed us to believe it and even told us when we were being too rambunctious at night that we better get to sleep before Ozok came down our hall. I had these wild visions of what he looked like. My younger siblings and I would talk about it. We thought he looked like something out of that movie, the old vampire one…

Me: Nosferatu?

E: Yes! I conjured up some image of the vampire from Nosferatu in my head. That movie was the scariest thing I had ever seen as a little kid, and I thought there was a crazed vampire living in my own apartment building!

Thoughts:

The tale of some deformed creature haunting a residency is a legend as old as time. It is a theme well known to all, and it naturally takes on its own variations as people author their own variations of ghost stories and hauntings. In this case, the informant’s older brother authored a variation of a crazed man, Ozok, who haunted the halls of the informant’s apartment building. Children, as my informant was at the time, are particularly susceptible to the tales intent on scaring. The informant’s older brother applied much of a classic ghost tale’s motifs to Ozok and their environment. He pointed to the axe as evidence of Ozok’s existence, and claimed that Ozok inhabited the abandoned dumbwaiter and basement, just as a ghost or creature of the night might live in the attic of a haunted house. Folk beliefs regarding ghosts have existed for centuries. The legend of Ozok living in an abandoned dumbwaiter and basement was simply a new variation of an age-old legend.

The Elevator Story

Nationality: South Korean
Age: 30
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 2003
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Main Piece/Story:

A young woman is returning home after a busy day of work at night. She managed to avoid the worst of the rain but she had to run a bit to get to her apartment. Slightly exhausted, and with even slighter foot pain, she pressed the button to call the elevator and waited around. The elevator doors opened, she stepped in, but before she could press her floor, she heard some fast-paced steps. “Hold the door!” rang out a young man’s voice and she pressed the button to allow the boy into the elevator. “Thank you so much”, he said, grateful.

“What floor are you on? I’ll get the button for you” said the man panting for breath.

“Oh, it’s the 10th, how kind of you” replied the girl.

“No way! I live on the 9th!” said the man, in a surprised tone.

The two engaged in short casual conversation, how work was killing her feet, etc. The girl noticed that the boy had some pretty looks to him and was teetering on the edge of asking if he was free anytime soon. She was puzzled at how she never met him before especially when they lived a floor apart. The elevator reached the 9th floor and the man stepped out.

“Goodbye!” said the man. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again…”

“…really soon”

As soon as he muttered those words, the man turned around. The pleasant and reserved visage now was grinning ear to ear with a wide, eerie smile, his eyes bloodshot. In his hands was a bloodied kitchen knife and he dashed up the stairs as the elevator doors closed.

Background:

My informant is my brother who told me this story when we lived in South Korea which was around 18 years ago and clearly it was effective in its fright factor if it stuck with me for this long despite my entire family not being particularly good with horror stories. He states that he read it online and was particularly spooked and began spreading the story around by himself.

Context:

My brother retold me the story for good measure during the time I asked him to share folk stories with me when I brought up how I remembered this one in particular because of how it frightened me when I was younger.

My Thoughts:

While not a memorate, the paranoia instilled by this story can affect any regular person who frequents the use of an elevator, as it has spread from my brother, to me, and hopefully to anyone reading. The greatest way to experience this story is through Korean message boards and blogs where people have drawn comics to illustrate this story and the final panels become animated to properly convey the shock factor. Unfortunately most of my access to these sort of sites are through my brother and I haven’t been able to find them. In this way, it would be difficult to assign any one person as the author to this story as someone who makes the scariest comic could become its sole owner just by being the one who owns the version of the comic that is most shared across the variations. Among other types of real life horror stories about dying in an steel cage of death called an elevator, I was convinced pretty early in my life that I was just way better off taking the stairs and get some exercise while doing so. It’s effective in the Asian apartment context as it is an incredibly common sight in South Korea so it works off its mundane set-up for something horrifying. The point of the story is to lull the readers into a false sense of security with superfluous little additions to the setting detail when really, the most important part is the end. I think there was a string of elevator murders in Japan around the early-mid 2000s, which is where the story might have originated.