A Haunted Samurai Scroll Comes Alive on Live TV!
A Scroll of a Severed Samurai Head Suddenly Glares at the Camera!
For well over 500 years Japan has celebrated Obon, also termed Japan’s “Festival of the Dead”, a Buddhist custom in which the spirits of one’s ancestors are honored. Obon is celebrated during the hot days of mid-August, and people usually return to their ancestral homes to visit and pray at the graves of their ancestors. It is also believed the ancestors will then follow one home to temporarily reside in the alter in the traditional family home for a few days before returning to the afterworld.
In the hot, humid summer days, it has also long been a Japanese tradition to enjoy ghost stories and haunted house attractions in the hopes a few chills will make one feel a little cooler. In the Edo period, haunted house styled attractions were popular, as were ghost story telling parties called Hyaku-monogatari Kaidan-kai (百物語怪談会). Believed to have begun as a way for samurai to entertain themselves and show their bravery, it soon filtered down to the common people, who would gather together in a room well-lit by a hundred candles. A ghost story would be recited, and at the end of each thriller, a candle would be extinguished. This would go on with the room slowly becoming darker, and the stories even more frightening. It was a great way to pass a steaming summer’s night and feel the chills. Many of the more memorable ghost stories became popular Kabuki performances staged in the summer months.
Naturally, modern television usually gets in on the annual act with a range of ghostly dramas and the ever popular “documentaries” showcasing strange stories of hauntings, traditional Japanese yokai spirits and other frightening tales.
In August of 1976, one such Japanese nationwide daytime live TV show was reporting on a set of rather unusual antique hanging scrolls depicting decapitated samurai heads. One was mounted skewered on a bamboo pole, the other, simply a head. According to the report, the scrolls were apparently painted using real human blood. The story went that the scrolls had once been privately owned, and because of its gruesome theme, were kept in a drawer in the family home...BUT,...the scrolls would "rattle" in the drawer, and so the frightened owners took them to a temple in Aomori Prefecture for a purification rituals and for future safekeeping.
During the live TV broadcast, the borrowed scrolls were hung on the wall behind the reporter. When first shown up close, it was obvious that the head had been painted with its eyes closed, however, during the live show, the TV station suddenly received a huge number of telephone calls from viewers claiming the eyes had opened during the broadcast. The number of calls prompted the producers to look back on the tapes,...and sure enough, the video showed quite clearly the eyes apparently open at one stage and staring directly at the camera!
I recently saw the video. It's true. Have a look for yourself at the old television tapes, linked here, then read on….
Pretty scary right? There is a similar story in which a pencil sketch on card by a famed artist of a young girl was seen to have winked at the camera. (I saw that on TV here around 20 years ago, but couldn’t find a link to it.) By my own reckoning, that one appears to have been the dark, heavy graphite of the eye reflecting the lighting, and thus appearing to wink as the camera panned across it. This severed head scroll however, shocked the nation. So much so that the original TV tapes were also taken to a temple for purification and storage. Although no one knows for certain, it has been suggested that perhaps a fly buzzing around the TV studio may have landed on the scroll in such a position as to look like an eye. That or the spirit of the head really did come to life.
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No sign of Banksy?