Strange stories with Wakako Masuda

Yellow raincoat

This is a story from when I had just started elementary school. On my way to school, which I was still getting used to, there was a rather large river. Everyday I crossed the bridge over the river to get to the elementary school. 

One morning we were on our way to school as a group when we found something creepy in the river. Under the bridge, a little off the middle of the river, I saw something yellow! When I looked closely, I saw that it looked like a child wearing a yellow raincoat. It was lying on its back. 

To my surprise, what looked like a child was a skeleton...

As I stared at it, the head of the school group asked me what was going on.

"There's a kid in a raincoat over there..." I explained to him, but no one else could find it and I just got suspicious faces.

When I looked into the river again, there was only gently flowing water. 

The river wasn't very deep, only knee-level for a child. It was one of the most common playgrounds, surrounded by gravel and water plants. Maybe I was looking at it wrong... I thought so, and that was the end of the day.

This kind of thing happened to me quite often, so the people around me just ignored it. In the summer, when I was beginning to forget about such events...

While I was playing in the park with my friends during my first summer vacation, the sound of a rumbling ambulance echoed around the area. All the adults gathered in one place making some kind of noise. It seemed something had happened at the river on the way to school.

What could it be? When I tried to approach the river out of curiosity, I was chased away to the park by a stranger who said,

"Don't come here children!"

The other children were dumbfounded, looking at the adults from a distance. When I asked what happened, the adults looked pale and would say, "It's nothing." and kept their mouths shut.

I was still a little girl, and I wondered about it, but was so taken by a new game that I forgot all about it! 

A little over a month had passed since then. An incident occurred.

I was on my way home from my friend's house, when I came to the river on the path to school. 

"AHH!" came a shrill cry of pain.

There was a woman sitting on the road and a child's bicycle with blood all over it. In the centre of the crowd of adults, I caught a glimpse of something. It was a child wearing a yellow raincoat.

I stood there in a daze, unable to comprehend what had happened. Before I knew it, one of my neighbours was driving me home. I was so shocked that I couldn't sleep for a while.

After some time, I heard from a classmate who had a brother in junior high. He told me the details about the child in the raincoat. 

He was a boy, and he was on his way to the river to play. No one knows why he wanted to go to the river, because he was told his father and brother had died in that river. It was less than two months ago. The father died together with the brother when they tried to save him from drowning in knee-deep water. 

The boy in the raincoat was his brother. For some reason, he went to the river that day.

Unfortunately, the boy also passed away on that same day. The mother who lost her family in one short period of time. She was so heartbroken that she went back to her hometown...

Since then, whenever I pass by that river I always remember that incident.

I wonder what it was that I saw.