Ghost Stories From Japan Episode 49 : Never beckon a non-living person

The house I lived in when I was little had a cemetery in the back.

And for some reason it was cool in the summer, which I found eerie as a child.

My mother once said, "before you went to elementary school, when I was about to take your picture on the front porch , you suddenly turned around and beckoned something with saying "everybody come in !", and I felt so scared".

She said that the picture she took at that time was a so-called ghost picture, on which there was a hand next to my face.

We rushed to the temple to have an exorcism.

Since then, I've been said that, when I took the picture, I should not beckon anyone except a living person.

Perhaps I was seeing something back then ?

I had no idea of such power, but I was always careful, because I was told so many times.

But at the end of my second year in high school, when I went to Okinawa on a school trip, I took an extraordinary picture.

We went to Okinawa for 4 days and 3 nights, and visited Himeyuri Tower and Shurijo Castle.

On the plane during that school trip, I said to my friend next to me casually,
"when I used to take a picture, I beckoned to no one and got a ghost picture."

My friend remembered that story, and wherever he went, he would jokingly beckon to no one and say, "I'm going to take a picture, everybody come on !," and then took pictures.

I told him to stop, but he just laughed and said, "there's nothing in the picture !", and did not stop.

And then other classmates who were watching them were also doing it for the fun of it.

The inn where we stayed that day was a guest house, and it looked like it had been there for many years.

The rooms were tatami-floored, and there was a garden outside the hallway, so there was an atmosphere that something might come out at night.

In the middle of the night, some boys came to the girls' room and started telling scary stories.

Then my friend, to whom I had first told the story of the beckoning, suggested that we do it again.

I stopped him, of course, but everyone got excited because they couldn't go outside to test their courage.

He set the timer on his camera with the garden in the background, and said, "come here, I'm going to take a picture !", and beckoned toward the garden, just as the shutter clicked.

Then suddenly, with a bang noise, the lights in the room went out.

When we hurriedly turned on the light, we found only my friend who had beckoned was not there, and when we looked for him, we found him collapsed in the garden.

He seemed to have completely passed out, and we hurriedly called the school nurse, but he did not wake up, so he was rushed to the hospital.

The next day, my homeroom teacher asked us what had happened, so we told her everything.

And the innkeeper said, "I bet he got punishment."

When we asked him what kind of punishment he got, he didn't answer.

He added, "if you keep playing tricks, they will tell you not to do it like that."

I thought that was true, too.

It seemed my friend woke up the next day, but he got a huge bruise in the shape of a human hand on the middle of his chest.

He said he had a feeling that someone had pushed him as hard as he could, and his body flew off with great force.

Maybe "something" that was angry with my friend who was amused at that time did it to punish my friend.

And things did not end there.

When I got home, I developed and looked at the pictures I had taken on the school trip, and found that there were strange things in all of them.

There was faces and hand-like objects on my shoulders, and one photo had more than one leg in it.

When we talked about it at school, it seemed that all the pictures which everyone took had those things in them.

In particular, the pictures taken when he beckoned seemed to be the worst.

Their faces were missing, they looked twisted and twisted...they were all just terrible photos.

The photographer who accompanied us at the school's request also seemed to have captured such things in his photos.

And the homeroom teacher warned us again, because the other classes had nothing, only our class had this situation.

So the whole of my class had to undergo an exorcism.

I guess some things got angry because we were joking around and did this.

We were reminded once again, that we should never "beckon a non-living person."