Creepy Japan urban legend

8.himuro mansion

Scare Yourself Silly: The Curious Case of the Himuro Mansion

If you're anything like me, you love a good ghost story—the weirder, the better. Have you heard this one yet?

In a forest just beyond the city of Tokyo, Japan, there is a house. It's an impressive property, with several outbuildings surrounding the main living space and a wide expanse of land; but though it's vacant, you won't find it in any real estate listings. It's known as the Himuro Mansion, and the things the walls of that house have seen are enough to keep any property hunter far, far away.

The Himuro Mansion said to have been the location of one of the most gruesome murders in Japanese history. Seven people were allegedly found murdered as part of an occult ritual gone wrong. Not that occult rituals can really ever said to go "right." The ritual was allegedly intended as a method of keeping the evil of the world at bay; it involved raising a woman in secret to prevent her from forming any attachments to other people, then tying her limbs to oxen and essentially drawing and quartering her.

Sometime within the last 80 years, though, the young woman chosen for this "honor" managed to meet a young man and fall in love with him. Because she grew attached to someone, she was no longer viable for participation in the ritual; this means, of course, that the family responsible for carrying the whole thing out—the Himuro family—failed, dishonoring themselves in the process. The family's patriarch then killed each member of the family with a traditional sword—probably a katana, though possibly a tanto or wakizashi—feeling that such a death was better than to suffer the evil they failed to stop.

Since then, numerous have emerged of odd occurrences happening in and around the house. Blood spatters appear on the walls; photographs taken of a particular window reveal the image of a ghostly girl; and perhaps most disturbingly, the dead bodies of would-be explorers have allegedly been found on the property with rope marks around their wrists. I'm not sure how much I believe these reports, but even so. Not a happy place, the Himuro Mansion.

Here's the thing, though: As far as I can tell, it doesn't actually exist.

The Himuro Mansion Haunting

According to urban legend, lying just beyond the city of Tokyo is one of the most haunted locations in all of Japan. The exact location of the Himuro Mansion (or Himikyru Mansion as it is sometimes known) is widely unknown but the legend puts the mansion in a rocky region just beyond the city limits of Tokyo.

The mansion is said to have been home to one of the most gruesome murders in modern Japanese history. Local lore has it that for generations, the Himuro family had participated in a strange, twisted Shinto ritual known as "The Strangling Ritual" in order to seal off bad karma from within the Earth, every half century or so.

The most popular version of the tale states that bad karma would emerge each December (other versions simply say "toward the end of the year") from a portal on the Mansion's grounds. In order to prevent this, a maiden was chosen at birth by the master of the household and isolated from the outside world in order to prevent her from developing any ties to the outside world, which would in turn, jeopardize the effect of the ritual.

On the day of the Strangling Ritual, the maiden was bound by ropes on her ankles, wrists, and neck. The ropes were attached to teams of oxen or horses to rip her limbs from her body, quartering her. The ropes used to bind her appendages would then be soaked in her blood and laid over the gateway of the portal. They believed that this would seal off the portal for another half century until the ritual had to be repeated.

During the last recorded Strangling Ritual it is said that the maiden had fallen in love with a man who tried to save her from the ritual. This created both a physical and psychic "tie" to the Earth (akin to how a modern day medium forms an ethereal bond with a caller who gets a phone psychic reading).