The Japan Times
There be ghosts in this office
By MARK SCHREIBER
Spa! (Aug. 15-22)

Spirits, ghouls and spooks don't only limit their haunts to ancient
execution sites, derelict buildings and crime scenes. As Spa! reports in
its midsummer double issue, even places of business have been the scene
of weird happenings. Take this account, related by a sales clerk at a
Tokyo mall.
"It was about 8 p.m., and I was powdering my nose in the ladies room,"
she tells Spa! "I saw a man's face reflected in the mirror; but when I
whirled around, nobody was there. When store security checked the
security video, no one else was in it except me! But I was absolutely
certain I'd seen him: He was in his late 20s and not bad looking, but
had a kind of greenish pallor and his hair was a mess.

"Then, about three weeks later, our store apprehended a shoplifter, who
I recognized as the guy who I'd seen in the mirror! He was taken to the
police station and they contacted his father. I said to the father,
'Your son had been in our store not long before,' but the man insisted
that was impossible. 'My son has been institutionalized, and this is the
first time in three months he's been allowed out.' "
Weird smile
"In front of the police station the father went to flag a taxi, and the
son spoke to me for the first time. 'It was nice seeing you again,' he
said, with this weird smile. It gave me such a shock I was afraid to be
alone for a while after that."

And speaking of being alone . . .
"Last September," recalls a salesman named Takahashi, "I was burning the
midnight oil on a price quotation due the next morning. About 1:30 a.m.
I began to doze off. I suppose about 10 minutes passed when suddenly I
felt like I was being bound hand and foot. And I also sensed somebody
was there, seated at the desk opposite mine. But nobody could have
entered the building at that hour.
"Anyway, the bindings gradually loosened. But I smelled a burning
cigarette, and when I looked in the ashtray on the desk, sure enough,
there was a cigarette butt in it. Believe me, I got out of there in a
hurry. The next morning, when I mentioned what had happened, nobody had
a clue. They just chewed me out for not completing the job on time."

Jingling sounds
A certain Mr. Oyama, a civil servant in Kyushu, also experienced a
creepy encounter while working overtime.
"I began hearing these spooky jingling sounds," he tells Spa!. "I
decided to call it a night, so I boarded the elevator on the seventh
floor, and pressed the button for the basement's first floor to get to
the after-hours exit.

"But the elevator shot past that floor and went to the basement's second
floor. And when I tried to go back up one floor, it took me all the way
to the 13th. Although no one was there, I kept hearing the jingling
noises. Muttering prayers, I pushed B1 again and this time got out."

In the recent past, several people had jumped to their deaths from the
building's upper stories. Was the elevator -- or the spirits moving it
-- trying to deliver Oyama to a similar fate?