19 CREEPIEST Places in Japan Tourists Should NEVER Visit

Explore 19 creepy, haunted, and mysterious places in Japan that tourists should avoid, from human remains to ghostly legends.

Key Takeaways

Many haunted or creepy sites in Japan have a mix of folklore, myth, and historical mystery.
Some locations involve human remains with uncertain origins, raising ethical and historical questions.
Urban legends often arise from practical decisions, such as building tunnels under graveyards.
Japanese culture has unique ghost stories tied to specific places, often involving tragic sacrifices.
Tourists should be aware that some popular sites have dark or unsettling histories behind them.

What the video covers

The video explores 19 haunted or eerie locations in Japan that tourists should avoid or approach with caution.
It begins with Toyama Park in Tokyo, where human bones were found during construction, possibly linked to wartime atrocities but unproven.
Senda Tunnel in Shibuya was built under a graveyard, spawning ghost stories from drivers despite no recorded deaths.
Okiku's Well at Himi Castle is tied to a famous ghost story about a servant girl counting plates before her death.
Blood Pond Hell in Beppu is a steaming red hot spring, linked to Buddhist hell imagery but scientifically explained by minerals.
The Slope to the Land of the Dead in Shimane is tied to ancient Japanese mythology about the underworld and death.
Matsue Castle allegedly contains a human pillar, a girl buried alive to stabilize the structure, with local legends of haunting.
The Matsue Ohashi Bridge story involves a man sacrificed alive in the riverbed to stabilize the bridge's pillars.
Other locations include Japan’s largest cemetery Okunoin on Mount Koya, execution grounds in Tokyo, and a mound of severed noses in Kyoto.
The video blends folklore, historical facts, and local legends to reveal unsettling sites rarely highlighted in tourist guides.

Chapters

What is the significance of the bones found near Toyama Park?

Human bones were discovered in 1989 near Toyama Park, possibly from over 62 individuals mostly from outside Japan. While some activists link them to Unit 731, no conclusive evidence exists, and the remains are now housed in a memorial.

Why is Senda Tunnel considered haunted?

Senda Tunnel was built under a graveyard during Tokyo's 1964 Olympics preparations. Drivers report ghostly sightings like a woman in the rearview mirror and unexplained noises, though no deaths or crimes are recorded there.

What is the story behind Okiku's Well?

Okiku's Well is tied to a legend about a servant girl who was killed and thrown into the well after being falsely accused of losing a valuable plate. Her ghost is said to count plates at night, a story that became popular around the time the castle opened to the public.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

There's a Reddit thread where Japan travelers trade haunted places, and one commenter laughed off Toyama Park in Tokyo. The only thing haunting it, he wrote, is drunk college students. But on July 22nd, 1989, construction workers digging right beside that park hit human bones,

Speaker A

skulls, some with holes and cuts in them from [music], at least 62 different people. To this day, nobody can say for certain whose they are. That same thread is full of places like this, the kind that end up on a tourist's list

Speaker A

by accident. These are 19 of them. Number 19, the bones behind Toyama Park. The land next to the park was being cleared for a national health institute.

Speaker A

Before the war, it belonged to the Imperial Japanese Army's medical college. A 1992 anthropological study found the remains came from at least 62 bodies, possibly more than 100, mostly adults from parts of Asia outside Japan.

Speaker A

The holes and cuts in the skulls were made after death. Now, this is where you have to be careful. [music] Activists have argued for decades that the bones are linked to Unit 731, the army unit that ran human experiments in occupied

Speaker A

China. That 1992 study did not find evidence of the link. So the honest version is this. Nobody has proven where these people came from, and nobody has finished the job of finding out. In 2002, the remains were placed inside a

Speaker A

memorial ashuary in Shinjuku. And that's where they are now. The Redditor might still be right about the students.

Speaker A

They're just walking past a site where the question of who those people were is still open. That was one comment in the thread. The next one sent people driving under a graveyard.

Speaker A

Number 18, the tunnel under the cemetery. Senda Tunnel sits a short walk from the national stadium in Shibuya.

Speaker A

When Tokyo was racing to get ready for the 1964 Olympics, the planners needed a road here, and the graves of Senuan Temple were in the way. Moving a cemetery takes time, and they didn't have any. [music] So they left the

Speaker A

graves where they were and dug the tunnel straight underneath. It opened in 1964 right before the games. What do people say happens down there? Almost every story told about this place comes from drivers. A long-haired woman in the

Speaker A

rearview mirror who isn't in the back seat. Handprints on the car windows after the drive-thru. A bang on the roof with [music] no dent to show for it. One ghost story site that looked into it found no deaths or crimes recorded

Speaker A

inside the tunnel at [music] all. The whole reputation rests on one decision made in a hurry. And for plenty of Tokyo taxi drivers, [music] that's enough. The next place on the list you've probably already got on your itinerary.

Speaker A

Number 17, the well at Himi Castle. If you're doing Himi Castle as a day trip from Osaka [music] and the person who started that Reddit thread was, you'll walk right past it. A small round stone well inside the [music] castle grounds

Speaker A

called Okiku's well. The story goes back to a servant named Okiku who was put in charge of 10 valuable plates. One went missing. So where did it go? In the most common telling, a samurai named Aoyama Tessan [music]

Speaker A

hid it himself to trap her because she'd turned him down. When she still refused him, he had her killed and thrown [music] into the well. Then the counting started. Every night a woman's voice came up out of the water. One plate, two

Speaker A

plates, all the way to nine, and then crying because the 10th was never there. Someone in the thread swore you can still hear her on quiet [music] nights. Here's the part the tour groups skip.

Speaker A

Old Edeto period records call this the Tsuru Tory well. It seems to have picked up Okiku's [music] ghost a little over a hundred years ago around the time the castle opened [music] to the public. So, this well may

Speaker A

have been cast in the role the way you'd cast an actor. Either way, it's the one the tourists lean over. The thread's original poster also had a spare day in Beu. And Beu has a place that looks like

Speaker A

the story is [music] true. Number 16, Blood Pond Hell. Beu on the southern island of Kyushu is famous for [music] its jigoku, its hells, steaming pools of water and mud, far too [music] hot to touch. The oldest of them is

Speaker A

Chino Jigoku. The water is a thick dark [music] red, and the steam coming off it is tinted red, too. It sits at around 78° C, and people have been writing about it for more than 1,300 years. The name means blood pond hell, like the

Speaker A

ones in old Buddhist paintings of the afterlife. [music] So, why is it red? The science is almost boring. Iron oxide and magnesium oxide in the clay pushed up from underground. The locals even turned that red clay into a skin

Speaker A

ointment, and you can buy it at the gift shop. But stand at the rail with red steam rolling over you, and it's easy to see why people looked at [music] this pond and decided they'd found a way down. Up in Shimani, the next place goes

Speaker A

a step further. Japan's oldest book says this slope really does lead to the dead.

Speaker A

And today it has a signpost. Number 15, The Slope to the Land of the Dead. Japan's oldest book, The Kojiki, finished in 712, tells a story about two gods, Aizanagi and Izanami. [music] Izanami dies and goes down to Yomi, the

Speaker A

underworld. Izanagi follows her, lights a flame, and sees that her body is rotting. He runs. She sends the creatures of Yomi after him.

Speaker A

[music] And at the bottom of a slope called Yamotu Hiasaka, he rolls a boulder across the entrance and seals it. From the other side of that rock, she makes him a promise. She'll kill 1,000 people every day. He answers that he'll bring

Speaker A

1,500 [music] into the world every day. That's how Japanese myth explains why people die.

Speaker A

And here's the strange part. You can go and stand at that rock. The Kojiki puts this slope in the old province of Izumo.

Speaker A

And in 1940, a stone marker went up in Hagashi Zumo on the edge of Matsuer in Shimani saying, "This is the spot.

Speaker A

There's a big rock, a quiet path through the trees, and not much else." The person who recommended it said Japanese [music] visitors describe it as desolate with a haunted feel. It's a boulder in a forest. And according to the oldest

Speaker A

story in the country, it's the only thing holding the dead back. Matsuer has more than one door like this. The next two are in the middle of town, and one of them has a girl inside.

Speaker A

Number 14, the castle with a girl in its walls. Matsui Castle was finished in the early 1600s. And the story in Matsu is that it was built on a person. Japan has a word for this. Hitobashira, a human

Speaker A

pillar, someone buried alive under a castle, a bridge, or a dam as an offering so the structure would stand.

Speaker A

In Matsoule, the legend says the stone walls kept collapsing during construction. So, the builders took a young woman who loved to dance and sealed her into the foundations. Nobody wrote down her name. She's only remembered as the maiden of Matsui. So

Speaker A

what happened once she was sealed in? Once the castle was finished, the story goes, girls were forbidden to dance in the streets of the town because whenever they did, the hill underneath would shake and the castle would tremble from

Speaker A

top to bottom. Is there a body under Matsuer Castle? Nothing in the record proves it, but the town has kept telling the story for four centuries. And a short walk away, it tells another one.

Speaker A

And this time, the victim has a name. Number 13, the man who wore the wrong trousers. In 1608, the builders of the first Matsuer Ohashi Bridge had a problem. The riverbed was so soft that every pillar they set either sank or

Speaker A

washed away. So, according to the legend the writer Lafcadio Hearn recorded, they made a rule. The first man to cross the bridge wearing a hakama without a machi would be sacrificed. Someone [music] had to be first. That man was Gens from

Speaker A

Saikamachi Street. [music] He was buried alive in the riverbed under the middle pillar. And for 300 years, people called it Genske's pillar. There's a memorial to him at the bridge today in a little park named after him. And this [music]

Speaker A

is the detail I can't get.

Speaker A

is the detail I can't get past. Matsuer has an old habit of always drinking two cups of tea because the story says Ginske turned down a second cup that morning, left early, and became the first man across. When a new bridge went

Speaker A

up in 1891, a rumor spread that it needed [music] a new victim, and people from the countryside were afraid to come into town. So remember that next time a [music] travel guide tells you a bridge has a nice view. From Shimanete, [music]

Speaker A

the thread jumped to Kyoto, which has its own way down to the dead. This one was a commute.

Speaker A

Number 12, the [music] well-worn man. Man took to work in hell. Rakudo Chinoji is a small temple in Kyoto's Higashiyama district. [music] Founded in 836.

Speaker A

A thousand years ago, this neighborhood was the edge of Torabeno, one of the open air cremation grounds of the old capital. People called the spot Rokudo Noji, the crossroads of the six realms where this world meets the next. And

Speaker A

behind the main hall, there's a well who was going down it. The legend is about Ono No Takamura, a court official and poet [music] from the 800s. By day, he worked for the emperor. By night, [music] the story goes, he climbed down

Speaker A

this well into the underworld to help Enma, the king of hell, judge the dead.

Speaker A

In the morning, he climbed back out and went to work. And the way back out in 2011, a second [music] old well turned up on the property next door, and people started calling it the exit. You can see

Speaker A

the [music] first one through a window beside the main hall. And every August during Oon, people line up here to ring a bell called [music] the Mukai Gang to call their dead relatives home for the summer. Not far from here, there are

Speaker A

temples where the [music] dead are over your head. Number 11, the ceilings with footprints in them. In 1600, a samurai named Tori Motoatada held Fushimi Castle for Tokugawa Yayyasu with about 2,000 men against [music] an army of around

Speaker A

40,000. He knew he couldn't win. He stayed [music] anyway. When the castle finally fell, Tori and about 370 of his men took their own lives inside [music] rather than be captured. And what happened to the floor they died on is the reason they're still

Speaker A

[music] around today. Their blood soaked so deep into the wooden floorboards that it never came out. Years later, the castle was taken apart and those boards [music] were saved and put up as ceilings in temples around Kyoto.

Speaker A

They're called [music] Chitenjo, blood ceilings. And you can still see them. Genkoan, Yoganin, [music] Hosanin, up in Ohara, Kosoji, down in Uji. And up close, they're hard to miss. Look up and the [music] dark stains turn into footprints and the outlines of hands. A

Speaker A

traveler who'd been to Kosoji wrote that the footprints are marked [music] out in white chalk so you can find them. So, you're standing in a quiet temple with a camera, and right above your head are the last steps of men who died 400 years

Speaker A

ago. Keep that picture [music] in mind. A temple you paid to walk into with the dead on the ceiling. It keeps coming back on this list. And the next place has more of them in one spot than anywhere else in Japan.

Speaker A

Number 10, the biggest graveyard in [music] Japan. On Mount Koya, south of Osaka, there's a path almost 2 km long through giant old cedars, and it's lined with more than 200,000 graves. This is Okonoin, the largest cemetery in Japan.

Speaker A

At the end of the path is the mausoleum of Kobo [music] Daiishi, the monk who founded Shinggon Buddhism. Except his followers don't believe he died. They believe he's been sitting in eternal meditation since the year 835, [music] waiting for the Buddha of the future,

Speaker A

and monks still bring him meals twice a day. And at night, it changes. Somebody in the Reddit [music] thread stayed at a temple here and walked the cemetery at night and said the stone lanterns made it properly spooky. Another commenter

Speaker A

said, "The main path feels like a cemetery [music] version of Las Vegas, full of company memorials. And honestly, they have a point. One of them was put up by a pest control company for all the termites [music] they've killed. But the

Speaker A

best story from that thread is about the bells. That same night, walkers saw monks with bells on their walking sticks the next morning and asked if the bells were to keep away spirits. The monks said, "No, they were for the bears."

Speaker A

And that cemetery has two smaller spots that are much worse than [music] bears. Number nine, the well that tells you when you'll die. About halfway along that path, near a small bridge called Naka No Hashi, there's a shrine to the

Speaker A

sweating Jizo. [music] And right beside it, a tiny well called Sugatami Noido. The rule is simple. Lean over and look at the water. If you [music] see your reflection, you're fine. If you don't, the legend says you'll be dead within 3

Speaker A

years. Would you look? One commenter in the thread said they [music] didn't have the courage to look. The person who started the thread said they wouldn't look either. A little further along, there's a short run of stone steps

Speaker A

called Kakuban Zaka, [music] and it has its own rule. Trip on those steps, and you've got 3 years left. Some people just call it the three-year slope. Has anyone actually looked in and seen nothing? A guest house on the mountain

Speaker A

jokes that most reflections come out clear and they haven't lost a guest yet. That's a comforting thing to read right up until you're the one leaning over the water. If you're planning [music] a trip to Japan and this is the side of it you

Speaker A

actually want to see, [music] subscribe. Hollow Japan digs up the history under places like these. [music] And this video only covers what one thread knew about.

Speaker A

Number eight, the flooded tunnel in Nigata. Out on the Sea of Japan coast under Mount Yahiko, [music] there's an old road over the maze pass.

Speaker A

Its tunnel, the maze tunnel, was finished in 1934 when a new road opened. The old one was abandoned, and the [music] tunnel went with it. Now, water pools inside and the walls are cracked from [music] damp and age. It came up in

Speaker A

the thread from someone who said it had been on the YouTube channel abroad in Japan. The story about what's inside is a [music] sad one. The Japanese haunted spot sites are very specific about it.

Speaker A

The ghost of a pregnant woman who comes toward people in the dark asking for [music] her baby back. There's no record of who she was supposed to be and I couldn't find one. But this is a tunnel you'd have to walk into on foot at night

Speaker A

with water on the floor to hear her and not many people are willing to try. The next [music] tunnel is still open and you can drive straight through it.

Speaker A

Number seven, the ghost tunnel on the old railway [music] in Fukui between Imajjo and Suruga. There's a chain of old railway [music] tunnels from 1996 when steam trains crossed these mountains. The longest is Yamanaka Tunnel, [music] a straight brick tube

Speaker A

well over a kilometer long. The train stopped using it decades [music] ago, and now it's a road. One lane and no room for two cars to [music] pass.

Speaker A

Locals call these the ghost tunnels. The stories say a woman [music] in a red dress stands somewhere in the middle and people hear crying. But the history is darker than the ghost. According to a feature in the Japanese magazine Bonhun,

Speaker A

chalera spread through the workers camp while [music] the tunnel was being built and close to 70 workers died. So when people say they hear voices down there, those 70 men are the ones worth remembering. Japan registered the tunnel

Speaker A

as a cultural property in [music] 2016. And by the north entrance, there's a dead-end side tunnel where old trains used [music] to reverse out. It doesn't go anywhere. people walk into it anyway.

Speaker A

The next ghost on the list is [music] so famous that the actors who play her go and ask her permission first.

Speaker A

Number six, the shrine actors [music] are afraid to skip. In Yotssuya in Shinjuku down a quiet back street, [music] there's a small shrine called Oiwa Inari Tamily. It belongs to the most famous ghost in Japan, Owa from the

Speaker A

[music] Kabuki play Yotssuya Kaiden. First staged in 1825. In the play, her husband has her poisoned, her face [music] is disfigured, her hair comes out in clumps, and she dies cursing his name.

Speaker A

Then she destroys everyone around him. And her story kept spreading. It's been adapted for the stage and the screen dozens [music] of times. And there's a custom that goes with it. Before a production of Yotssuya Kaiden, the cast

Speaker A

and director pay their respects to Owa at her shrine or at her grave. [music] And the story is that productions that skip it get accidents and injuries. Now, here's the twist. The real Owa died in 1636 [music] and the account at the shrine describes

Speaker A

her as a devoted wife. None of the things in the play happened to her.

Speaker A

[music] A playwright borrowed her name almost 200 years after she died. So, every actor who bows at this shrine [music] is apologizing to a woman who, as far as anyone can tell, was never angry at anybody. The next [music] place

Speaker A

is backed by the record, and it's right beside one of Tokyo's busiest roads. Number five, the execution ground by the highway. Down in Shinagawa, next to a main road, there's a little triangle of land with a temple [music] and some old

Speaker A

stones. For 220 years, from 1651 to 1871, [music] this was the Suzugamorei execution ground. It was placed on the Tokaido road right [music] at the entrance to Edeto, so every traveler walking into the city passed it.

Speaker A

Criminals, rebels, and Christians were [music] put to death here. One common estimate is around 100,000 people [music] and some put it higher and what they used is still sitting by the road.

Speaker A

[music] Two of the stones are still there. One is the base of the post where people were [music] burned alive. The other held the cross for crucifixions.

Speaker A

There's also an old well where it said the heads [music] were washed. Daikoji the temple next door was built to pray for them. A few of the names became Kabuki legends, [music] but most of them, the temple says, were people

Speaker A

nobody remembers. It was put [music] there so travelers would see it on the way in. Tourists still walk past it on the [music] old Tokaido today, most of them without knowing.

Speaker A

Tokyo had another one of these on the other side of the city, and that one [music] ended up changing Japanese medicine. Number four, the execution ground that [music] became a textbook.

Speaker A

Take the train to Minami Senju in northern Tokyo. Cross [music] the street from the station and you're at Kosu Kapora. This was the other big [music] execution ground of Edeto. Most of it is buried under the railway tracks now and

Speaker A

what's left sits behind two temples, Echoan [music] and Enmei. Eniji has a stone Buddha more than 3 m tall [music] put up in 1741.

Speaker A

People call it the Kubikiri Jizo, [music] the beheading Jizo. And for a lot of the condemned, it was the last thing they saw. Bodies here were often left in shallow graves and animals [music] dug them up. But in the spring

Speaker A

of 1771, a doctor named Sugita Genpaku came to Kosukapara with a Dutch [music] anatomy book. He watched the body of an executed old woman being cut open and compared what he saw to the drawings.

Speaker A

The Dutch book was right, and [music] the Chinese medical texts he'd trained on were wrong. He spent the next 3 years translating [music] it. It came out in 1774 as the Kite Thai Shincho and it's usually told as the moment [music]

Speaker A

Western medicine really arrived in Japan. That moment started with the body of a woman [music] nobody wrote down the name of. There's a plaque about it at Echoan put up in 1922.

Speaker A

The next place is back in Keyoto and the dead it holds came from another country.

Speaker A

Number three, the mound full of noses. Back in Kyoto near Toyokuni Shrine, there's a grassy mound with a stone tower on top. It's called Mimizuka, the ear mound. It was first called Hanuzuka, the nose mound. And [music] the name was

Speaker A

changed a few decades later because people thought that sounded too cruel. So why noses? [music] In the 1590s, Toyotomy Hideoshi invaded Korea twice.

Speaker A

Samurai were rewarded based on proof of their kills, and heads [music] were too much to ship home. So, soldiers cut off noses instead. From soldiers and from civilians, [music] they were packed in barrels of brine and sent back across

Speaker A

the sea. How many are in there? The mound was dedicated [music] in 1597, and it holds the noses of at least 38,000 Koreans with tens of thousands of Chinese troops. On top of that, few Japanese visitors have heard of it,

Speaker A

while Korean tour groups come here specifically to pay their respects. The mound sits right next to a children's playground. And just down the road is Toyokuni Shrine, where the man who ordered all of this is [music] honored.

Speaker A

Every place so far is a grave people can visit. The next one is a grave the government itself has learned not to touch.

Speaker A

Number two, the head. [music] Nobody moves. In Otamachi, in the middle of Tokyo's business district, [music] squeezed between office towers, there's a small plot with a stone monument. This is the Masakado Kubazooka, the burial mound for the head of Tyra [music] No

Speaker A

Masakado. He was a samurai who rebelled against the imperial court in the 900s [music] and was killed. And the legend says his severed head flew all the way back to this spot. [music] And the modern trouble around this spot started

Speaker A

with an earthquake. After the great KTO earthquake in 1923, the Ministry of Finance put a temporary building on top of the mound. Within about 2 years, 14 people connected to the ministry were reportedly dead, including [music] the finance minister, Hayami Seiji. And that

Speaker A

was only the first time the building came down and a memorial service was held in 1940. Lightning struck the government district and the fire took out the finance ministry building next to the mound. After the war, the American occupation wanted the land

Speaker A

cleared. And the story goes that a bulldozer tipped over and killed its driver. [music] The plan was dropped. To be fair, newspapers at the time reported those ministry deaths without mentioning any curse. But the mound is still there,

Speaker A

surrounded by some of the biggest companies in Japan. And a hundred years later, [music] nobody has moved it. The last place on this list is in Osaka, and nobody there was scared at all. That turned out to be the problem.

Speaker A

Number one, the shopping street built on a graveyard. The traveler who asked the question had a spare day in Osaka.

Speaker A

[music] If you do too, you'll almost certainly end up in Namba in the Neon around Sichimai. After the siege of Osaka in 1615 [music] this area became a huge city graveyard with an execution ground and a cremation site right [music] beside it. For more

Speaker A

than 250 years, this is where Osaka brought its dead [music] and its condemned. When the execution ground closed and the graves were moved out to Abeno in the Magi era, [music] nobody wanted to buy the land. It had been a

Speaker A

field of ashes. So, how do you sell a graveyard? The city of Osaka paid people to [music] take it and it called the payment an ash disposal fee. It worked.

Speaker A

Senichimay became an entertainment district. A Kabuki theater went up and later the building was turned into the Senichi Department Store. [music] And that department store is where the land's history caught up with it. On Saturday night, May [music] 13th, 1972,

Speaker A

a fire broke out on the third floor. The smoke climbed into a packed cabaret on the top floor. [music] The emergency exits were locked and the elevators had lost power. 118 people died. Outside of war and earthquakes. No fire in [music]

Speaker A

Japan since at least 1925 has killed more. What's on that spot now? There's a big camera electronic store there today, and [music] tourists walk in every day to buy cameras. And that's what ties all 19 of these together. Every one of them

Speaker A

is somewhere a tourist can walk right up to under bridges and castle walls, [music] on temple ceilings, beneath tunnels and shops, and on the tourist map. The haunting [music] is under the ground you're already planning to walk on. And if you want the places the last

Speaker A

Reddit thread warned about, that video is on screen now.

Topics:Japan haunted placescreepy locations JapanJapanese ghost storiesToyama Park bonesSenda Tunnel ghostsOkiku's WellBlood Pond Hell BeppuJapanese folklorehaunted castles JapanJapanese urban legends

Get More with the SozAI App

Transcribe recordings, audio files, and YouTube videos — with AI summaries and speaker detection. 30 minutes free.

App Store Google Play

Or transcribe another YouTube video here →

Free tools: TXT to SRT · SRT Validator · Merge SRT · Subtitle to Text · All tools