“Whenever I went to the toilet, that gorilla was always looking at me.” You mean gorilla… in a toilet?

Today, we will delve into a weird and mysterious Kaidan story from Sakura Fukatsu.

This story is originally from Sakura Fukatsu. She is a Kaidan storyteller who has shown up recently since a couple years ago.

The story was from one of her schoolmates when she was in her university. So from here, I will use “I” as Sakura herself.

“What made you scared when you were a child?” That’s the question that I have always asked since my days at university.

Personally, I was scared of many things.

I was scared of ghosts and monsters. And when I heard a frog crying on a summer night, I said to my mum like, “I’m scared that I hear someone’s voice coming out of the darkness”.

When I ate watermelons and other fruits, I was scared because I believed what my grandma told me: “If you swallow the seeds, they will sprout from your stomach.”

So, in any case, I was afraid of all kinds of things.

Talking a little bit more about my background. I was born in Ibaraki Prefecture, but I moved to  Kyoto as I got into a university there. Then I thought it would be interesting to find out if there were any regional differences, so I started to like asking people that question.

This was in the wintertime when I was probably around 20, more or less. My uni friends invited me to a hotpot party at their place.

Turned out it was just a bunch of girls, and we were all having a good time chatting about some random topics for the night. 

Then suddenly, I came up with that question. I asked them: “You know, when you were little, were you particularly scared of something?”

Things got a lot more exciting than I had expected.

One girl said, “Oh yeah, I was scared of clowns” and another said, “Oh, I was scared of Kuchisake Onna”, which is a lady with a split mouth, one of the most famous urban legends in Japan.

There was another girl called Saya. And she said…

“In my case, I was scared of the toilet.”

As a general response, everyone replied like, “Oh yes, I know what you mean. Sometimes I was scared of going there alone at night”, and “The story of Hanako-san is scary, isn’t it?”

But Saya said, “No, it’s not like that. It’s a different type of story”.

↓Check out these articles for the details of Kuchisake

She then told us this story.

Saya’s parents’ house was in Niigata Prefecture, which is located in the northern part of Japan, and her family ran a company at home.

The house was a three-storey building with the company’s office on the first floor and the living space on the second and third floors. This story happened in the house when she was a little girl.

She continued. “The house has toilets on the first and second floor. I didn’t have any problem with the one on the second floor. But I was scared to go to the first-floor toilet.”

“You know when I opened the door of the first-floor toilet and went in alone. Then there was a toilet bowl in front and a ventilation fan above it. The fan had several blades, and through the gap, there’s always a gorilla staring at me.”

“Wait, what? A gorilla? Gorilla like that animal gorilla?”

We were seriously listening to Saya’s story up to the point where we were surprised by the sudden appearance of the gorilla.

“What do you mean, ah gorilla?” while we were getting more puzzled, she said…

‘Yeah, it was a gorilla. He had a back face and black fingers and was looking at me through the fan with his black fingers, inserting the gap between blades. It’s terrifying.”

“Since it was like that, whenever I went to the toilet, that gorilla was always looking at me. So whenever I went there, I just switched on the fan right away. When the fun started working, the gorilla was gone. That’s how I used to go to the toilet every time.”

She said she had tried to tell her mother and sister about it many times, but they always just dismissed it as “you must have a bad dream”.

What did we do after she finished her story? We actually laughed a bit.

“A wild gorilla in Japan? Especially in a cold region like Niigata? That doesn’t make sense.” One of the girls even imitated a gorilla and slapped her chest. 

In the meantime, Saya started to get a bit mild and joined us for this, and we all spent the rest of the night giggling and laughing at this story.

A few weeks later, I received a call from Saya at night.

Once I picked up, she started like this, sounding a bit tensed: “Sakura, I’m scared of my parents’ house now.”

I wondered what was wrong and asked her in detail.

At that time, Saya had gone back to her parents’ house for the first time in a while. When talking to her family, she suddenly remembered speaking about the gorilla at the pot party the other night.

So she asked her mum. “Hey, mum. You know, when I was about five years old, do you remember that I was seeing a gorilla in the toilet on the first floor?”

And her mum, you know, she seemed to have forgotten that story. “A Gorilla? What are you talking about?”

“I told you! A gorilla in the toilet, through the ventilation fan, with his black face and fingers between the blades, staring at me. Don’t you remember I used to tell this story so many times?”

But her mum’s reaction was similar to ours at the pot party. The mum said, “That’s hilarious.” And laughed too.

“You said the gorilla was looking with a black face and black fingers there like…”

Then she stopped in the middle and said, “Oh, that’s umm…” The mother’s face got pale.

Saya asked her mum, “Mum, what’s wrong?”

But she didn’t answer and seemed to be thinking about something with her arms crossed.

“Hey, just tell me what’s going on!”

When she asked her mum in a stronger tone, she opened her mouth heavily: “Actually, you know, there’s something I didn’t tell you about. It’s just because I didn’t think it was necessary…”

Her mum’s story was like this.

Their house was built about 20 years ago. But before this house, there was a huge traditional Japanese house where three families lived on the property. The price of the land was quite high at the time because of the good location and the land area size.

One day, there was a fire. And it burnt down the entire house and… All the families there. After that, the land was cleared, and no one would buy it afterward. 

“With these circumstances, apparently, the price of the land was getting very low. So papa and I thought, ‘Maybe we could buy it’ because we wouldn’t care about this kind of…you know. Then we bought this land and built this house.”

“So what you saw in the toilet when you were little… Saya. You might have thought it was a gorilla, but maybe it wasn’t…”

I’m sure you all could guess that now. The thing she used to see in the toilet with the black face and fingers…

Saya said at the end of the call to me.

“Sakura, maybe what I saw back then was a person who got burnt black.”

Here is one thing.

I would like you all to think back once more to the things that frightened you when you were young. If there is something that you didn’t care about back then, but now you feel odd or bizarre… There may be a terrible truth behind that, and you are just not aware of it…

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