Female ‘ghost’ follows man as he rides taxi in Japan

A spine-tingling footage of a “Sadako” entering a cab with a passenger in a remote Japanese town has “entertained” social media users. Sadako is the main character in Japanese novels and film and television adaptations who appears as a young woman whose face is hidden under her long dark hair, and wears a white dress.

SCREENGRAB from YouTube

In the disturbing CCTV footage, a man is seen striding onto a taxicab at a transport stop. But when he pulls the door to hop in, a black female image is spotted stalking the man. As the video zooms in, the long-haired lady spirit is seen wearing a long-sleeved blouse and a skirt.

The footage was uploaded by several channels on YouTube, racking up thousands of views.

SCREENGRAB from YouTube

SCREENGRAB from YouTube

Many YouTube users repudiated the clip as fake, theorizing that the “ghost” was similar to what people see in Japanese horror flicks, a lady with “long dark hair and the head tilted downwards.” Other viewers made fun of the video, saying he lady ghost was probably “infatuated” with the man.

Japanese cab drivers are not alien to encountering gallivanting “passengers.”

According to reports from Daily Mail and The Telegraph, taxi drivers who were working in Ishinomaki, a peaceful town devastated by the magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011, admitted to picking up and taking fares from “ghost” customers who mysteriously disappeared.

Yuri Kudo, a sociology student from Tohoku Gakuin University, narrated highlights of her interviews with taxi drivers during her fieldwork for a thesis.

One cab driver narrated that few months after the deadly  2011 tsunami, he met a woman who rode in his taxi near Ishinomaki Station. She instructed him to go to the Minamihama district, a devastated area.

The driver recalled that the woman asked herself, “Have I died?” When he turned to respond to her, his taxi was empty.

Kudo told the news site in January this year, “Young people feel strong chagrin [at their deaths] when they cannot meet the people they love. As they want to convey their bitterness, they may have chosen taxis … as a medium to do so.”

A total of 15,893 people perished in the earthquake while 2,572 were reported missing.  Gianna Francesca Catolico