Spooked
Hosted by Glynn Washington
Max has got a crash pad in Yokohama with just one rule. Don’t fall asleep in the living room.
3,680 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
She begged me not to tell her secret. I smiled and called her friend.
But after I had spread her tale,
I found that witches make amends.
You've crossed over to Spooked. Stay true.
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In my twenties, I moved to Japan. And it's super hard to find a place to live in Kyoto, but after searching and searching, what I think is my lucky day off a backside urban alley, this lady agrees to rent her spot to the likes of me.
It's not a modern apartment, kind of decrepit, but I'm thrilled. It's a grown-up place, so I must be a grown-up man having a grown-up life.
She warns me about the neighbour. Tells me, "He's not gonna like you." "But that's okay?" "I'm from Detroit City. That does not faze me."
Well, to say he doesn't like me doesn't capture the loathing.
The contempt, the bile this old, old man has for me. Several times a day, I walk past the alley and I see him. Building. Pouring his energy into this thing.
And I don't know what it is. Sometimes it looks like a statue. Or a fountain, a totem. Maybe a cage. It grows, it morphs, menaces, twists. There's concrete, there's wood, feathers. Like a outward manifestation of inner hatred.
I try to rush by it fast. Don't want any trouble. But the old man has that super hearing, spidey senses, his turns. Eyes furious, face twisted, finger pointing at me. Or pointing at my companion. Or my groceries, or my shoes, or my being. Always, the same one-word comment. "Gore."
Which, if you look in a dictionary. "Gore" just means "this." But in practice. "Gore" can be the foulest curse, the most vile comment. Or kindly put, question. It can mean anything. But he means. "I am from hell, and to hell he wishes me to return." "Gore."
Every single day, the threat, the abuse. "Gore."
Even as this monstrosity grows in size. Menaces, rocks and tiles and faces of angry gods sheared from stolen statues. He spits his "Gore."
I try to ignore it. I do, but this one day. I don't know why, but this one day, I'm tired. Coming back to my own apartment that I pay the rent for. And here he comes. Indicates the whole of me. "Gore." And I've had it.
So I point to his little swamp project. Gora!
He's all taken aback, so he hits me again. Gora! No, no, no, no, no. I'm not done. Gora! Gora! Gora! Gora! Gora! Gora! Gora! Gora! We're shouting back and forth, screaming the exact same thing to each other. Finally, I retreat into my house. So I can do it all again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the day after that. Gora! Gora! Gora! I never see him smile. Until the day I'm moving out. Gora! In victory. Like his battle is won.
And it has been decades, decades, since I've gone back to that place. But last year, I do. Wander down that side street, walk through that little gap in the alley, find my door. Out of curiosity, a knock.
And the lady comes out. Sutashimasu! Suasen! I tell her I used to live here a long time ago. She laughs, we talk. And she asks me a question, tentatively. Toto... If you lived here back then, she says, trying to hide a pocket of dread, maybe you can tell me about that?
She gestures. She doesn't turn toward it. She almost hides from it, but I see it, wild, overgrown, his thing, reeking of madness, still burning with malice. I know for sure. This man has long since left this earth.
But his echo remains.
Gora! Sutash!
Now, it's 2003, and Max D'Onizio is traveling to Japan. See, Max just loves the Japanese language and culture. He's actually been studying East Asian civilizations for 10 years now. But this time around, he's going to the city of Yokohama, where he plans to do some research on local history and meet up with his friend Jeff.
Spoiled.
Arriving in Japan, I just love it. I can't believe I'm here again. I took the express train from Narita Airport to Tokyo. I'm a train fan, so this is really exciting.
I am looking left and right, and I'm seeing houses go by. I'm seeing people on bicycles. We're getting closer and closer to Yokohama. I can see something called the Minato Mirai, which is the city center. There's a skyscraper. I can see the Ferris wheel off in the distance. I can see the harbor. I'm really excited to get out there.
We arrive at Yokohama Station.
The neighborhood itself is quite old compared to some of the newer areas.
The buildings are definitely older. Some of them are about maybe 70 years old.
The apartment is several stories high, five or six.
I find the elevator go up and the elevator itself is a little bit rickety and old. I know Jeff's apartment number, so I knock on the door and Jeff answers.
When I walk in, there's a small area where I take off my shoes and then I step up into the apartment.
The living area is quite nice. I think it's maybe 12 to Tommy Matt's big. So it has a television. It has a little couch. And then there's a kotatsu in the middle of the living room. A kotatsu is a, think of a low table that has a heater in the center. You put a blanket on top of it and you can pull yourself underneath. It's a piece of winter furniture. It's lovely. It's great. I'm looking forward to using it. My idea is to stay with Jeff for four days.
So I start telling him about some of my plans. Hey Jeff, I'm thinking about this, so when you're done with school, we can go out for drinks, go see friends. And he says, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm going to go visit my girlfriend in Izuzu. I'm going to leave. The apartment is going to be yours.
This is a bit of a surprise to me because I expected him to be there. He starts telling me how the logistics of my stay are gonna work, and then he asks me to go downstairs to the first floor and knock on the landlady's door to pick up the spare keys.
So I take the rickety elevator back to the first floor, found the landlady's apartment, and I knocked. This older woman comes to the door. And so I'm speaking my most polite Japanese. I introduce myself. This landlady looks at me. She goes to get the key. She asks again, something like, "Where am I staying?" And I say, "In Jeff's apartment." And then she says, "Ah, ano heya dana." "Oh, that room."
The way she said "that room" puzzled me. What is it about that room? Why not say Jeff's apartment? She gives me the key, and I assured her that I would not be a bother, and I go back up to Jeff's place.
That's when I get the bulk of the house rules. "Clean up after yourself." "Don't eat all my stuff. If you eat all my stuff, make sure you replace it." And then Jeff tells me one very odd rule. "Do not sleep in the living room."
"When you go to bed, sleep in the bedroom."
I say, "Why?" And he says, "Don't worry about it, but just do me a favor and sleep in the bedroom."
And so I think of, "Oh, you know, maybe there's cockroaches or something." It's an old building. You might expect for that to occur. I'm gonna sleep in the bedroom. No problem. So he says goodbye, makes his way out, and so the place is now mine.
My first day at Yokohama is I'm trying to get over a jet lag. I'm unpacking, making this space my own, and then I go out and explore a little bit.
I go back to Minato Mirai. I wanted to see the tall building. Later on, I find a bar that looks pretty good. I had a few drinks. And then, I wanted to be sure I had enough snacks, because I'm going to watch some TV. So I went to a convenience store, bought a few curry donuts. They have curry sauce inside. It's delicious! Gogo no kocha, which is afternoon tea, the milk tea. There are all these sort of crunchy soy snacks that have a sauce base on top of them. They're called senbei. They have the most pleasing crunch...
...that you've ever crunched.
I got up to Jeff's apartment, put out my array of snacks, turned on the television, and after a while, went up, go into the bedroom, lay out the futon. And that was a perfect way to end the evening.
So it's the third night. I had gone for karaoke. There is one Japanese song I always like to sing. In English, it's called "Sukiyaki."
Jeff is in Izuzu with his girlfriend. So, so I sing by myself. That's fine. People do that too. They practice.
I'm back. I have snacks in hand. The TV's on. And this night, it is cold. And when I get cold, my joints start to hurt.
I slide under the kotatsu and I pull the blanket up to my neck.
The heat is gorgeous. I feel my whole body now warming up.
Evening progresses, snacking happens, and I get to that point where I need to sleep.
This night, I said to myself, "It's so cold." "I'm not going through this whole liturgy of going up, taking a bath, getting back into the cold. "I'm just going to stay here." So I turn off the television. I pulled the cord to turn off the light. And so, I go to sleep in the living room.
It was probably 1 or 2 in the morning. I wake up. It's dark in the room. I can't see really well. And I'm keenly aware that I can't move my body.
I can only move my head and I can blink my eyes, but nothing else.
I'm feeling very scared, but I think to myself, "Oh, is this sleep paralysis?" But this had a completely different air about it. I felt intense fear.
And I could hear something as well.
And it's a soft, soft sound.
It's a zuru zuru sound. It's a rubbing sound.
And it starts to grow louder, but just incrementally.
I'm trying to sort of turn my head to find where is this sound coming from.
I look left, I don't see anything. Turn my head to the right, and my eyes are struggling as I'm looking down that little short hallway that leads to the bedroom.
And I happen to see a pair of feet.
They were in these traditional socks that are called tabi. It's a sock that has the big toe separated from the others.
And these feet are walking towards me.
What I'm hearing is the sound of silk as it runs and moves across a tatami mat.
Slowly. I'm terrified.
As the feet are approaching closer and closer, I'm now able to look up. And what do I see is that the feet belong to a woman who is wearing a traditional kimono.
I couldn't see the face, it was too dark.
She's coming closer and closer, and she's walking towards my head.
It was just bone chilling terrifying.
It was a kind of terror that I've really never known in my life.
I could feel my heart starting to pound in my chest. I'm thinking to myself, please, I don't want to see her face.
So I'm trying to close my eyes, but I don't want to because I need to figure out what's happening. Who is this intruder?
And she walks closer.
And then she stops.
She stops right by my right ear.
And then I see one of her feet lift up.
To my surprise, she doesn't bend down to show me her face.
She steps over my head.
This person is walking over me. And as her other foot makes its journey over my head, I can see that the kimono is sort of brocaded. There were sort of horizontal bands of some kind of pattern.
I could also see that she had hair. It was long.
She's not looking back at me.
She turns to walk out of the living room.
She's turning into the kitchen. She goes into the bathroom.
And then suddenly, I can move. I'm actually free.
And so I sit there, kind of wondering to myself, what has just happened? I grab the string, turn it back on to full light. I push the kotatsu away off of me. I get up and I kind of run into the kitchen. And there's nobody there. It's just me.
The door to the toilet is open. And I asked myself, did I leave it open or didn't I? I can't remember. Is this person gonna come back? What's just happened? And then, in all this panic, I asked myself, is this what Jeff meant?
And so I spend the rest of that night finishing off my snacks and watching really, really late, early morning Japanese television.
The next morning, I'm getting all my stuff together, packing up all my clothes. I'm not gonna spend another night in a room where I might encounter that thing again.
I call some friends in Tokyo and I say, "If this is okay, can I come crash at your place?" Thankfully, they say yes. And then I call Jeff. I ask him kind of bluntly and point blank. "So you've told me that I shouldn't sleep in the living room." Jeff interrupts me. "Oh, you slept in the living room? That means you've met her." There it was. He knew about this person, this thing that happened to me. Her? Who is her? Who is she? What is this person? What is she?
And Jeff basically tells me, "I don't know." When I got the apartment, the landlady told me not to sleep in the living room. And after a while, that's what I did and saw the exact same thing.
Even though I'm shaken up and a little bit perturbed, I calm myself down. And I tell him, "I'll call him later." And I hang up the phone. So the dictates of society require me to check in with the landlady to return that key in person. So I go to her door. I knock. She answers.
I tell her I've come to return the keys to Jeff's apartment. And she invites me inside for tea. I thought, why not? I mean, this is an opportunity to maybe practice my Japanese and try and get a little more information. She invited me to sit at a table and then she she made tea for me. We start talking a little bit. I'm asking questions about the apartment, you know, her life. She tells me about how the neighborhood has sort of, over time, degraded. And that also unbeknownst to me, there were nearby large centers where crime families had taken over some of the buildings.
And by crime families, I meant the Yakuza. She's talking about local history, and I find all this very interesting, but you know, I really kind of want to know more about the room. And I sort of say, you know, would you would you mind if I asked you a question? And I confessed to her that I slept in the living room. And I asked, you know, could she share anything with me? I didn't ask, was it a ghost? I didn't ask, was it an intruder? I just asked her if she would share something. There's this little bit of a pause.
And she begins to tell me a story of a young woman who had left the countryside about 30 years ago to try and come to Yokohama to make herself a better life. Apparently, according to what I understood of the story, she didn't have much of an education, and so she found herself working in some of the local bars and nightclubs as a hostess. She was approached by some of the young gang members who propositioned her, and she refused.
And because she was working for a place owned by the Yakuza, she wasn't able to find work. Things got so financially bad for her that, out of maybe fear or desperation, she apparently died by suicide in that apartment.
They found her in the bathroom.
The landlady tells me that whoever sleeps in the living room is destined to meet her ghost.
She does not cause any harm. All she does is try to get them to come to the bathroom.
I'm feeling goosebumps kinda come up.
I'm thinking this is a pretty unbelievable story. And yet, here I am, thousands of miles from home, talking with a woman I've never met, explaining to her that I've just seen a ghost. And I think Jeff corroborated what I saw. It had to be true.
It's a tragic story, and of course, I feel quite poorly for that poor woman who had to suffer so much. But in the moment, I just wanna let it go.
So when I feel that, you know, I think I got as much information as I could, it's time to make my excuses to leave. The most I could do was to say thank you for allowing me to stay.
That was almost 17 years ago, so it's been a long time since I've been back.
Maybe one day, I'll be able to go back to Japan, and I'll be able to see some of the sights that I really love.
I don't often think about the woman I encountered that night, because I get cold thinking about it.
But when I do, I do pray that her spirit has found some peace. But you can be sure, I am never stepping anywhere near that apartment again.
Thank you Max D'Anizio for sharing your story with The Spooked. That story was scouted by Dan Yashinsky. The original score was by Laleen Sejuzd. It was produced by Eric Yanez.
Now, if you have a story that you need to share, let me know. Maybe it's about a dog that's not really a dog, or a pen that seems to write of its own accord, or telephone calls from someplace they shouldn't be coming from. Do you know any stories like that? Do you know someone who does? We are on a quest. Holler at your boy [email protected] because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener.
The road to Spook Studios runs through shadow and light, through time and space, only to intersect deep beneath KQED in San Francisco. Don't seek to find it, because it seeks to find you. We've got the special incantation from Spook Legal that reads, "No Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Spooked." The union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIL Local 51, and... Spooked is brought to you by the team that loves their neighbors
as they love themselves, except for Mark Ristich. His neighbors are hereby warned.
There's David Kim, Zoe Frigno, Anne Ford, Eric Yanez, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Soye Chu, Evan Stern, Eves Jeffcoat, Eshel Lopez, Jack Darrow, Doug Stewart. The Spook theme song is by Pat Mercedes Miller.
I'm from Washington. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, I returned to Japan last year after a long absence. And I love Japan. Went to school there. Had my first adult job there. It's where I started to grow into myself, where I've met some of my best friends, the best people. And I want to visit one person. Taiko. I'm excited. It's been too long, way too long. And we planned to meet up at her favorite restaurant. So I take the train, rush over to the spot. And there Taiko is. I'm over the moon to see her. But I hear this scream. And look, who was walking in next to me?
It's Amy.
Another dear friend. Also an American who studied and worked in Japan the same time I did, but who lives in Chicago. Huh? We both look at each other and shout at the same time. What are you doing here? What are you doing here? And I'm like, I didn't need to come. And she's like, well, I needed to come. And the person we both came to see Taiko, she's just sitting there, happy to visit with us both. But wholly unimpressed by this cosmic coincidence.
Sometimes, she says, the ribbon pulls you back.
And I can't get it out of my head, all of us sitting together decades later, grinning at each other. What ribbon did this? How does any of this work? Are these ribbons only in Japan? Or am I just missing them back home?
Whatever.
I can wait.
For now, I just enjoy myself. Enjoy this time. It feels special. It feels magical.
They are both glowing like lanterns.
And I wonder.
I wonder if I'm glowing too.
Never ever. Never ever. Ever. Ever. Never ever. Ever. Never. Never. Turn out. Turn out. The lights. The lights.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated