Kisaragi Station (きさらぎ駅)

In the small hours of January 8th, 2004, a woman calling herself Hasumi began posting to the occult board of 2channel. She had remained on a Enshu Railway train, she wrote, as station after station she should have recognized slipped past — and not one other passenger stirred.

The station where she finally arrived bore the name Kisaragi. The platform sign said so plainly. There were no houses, no lights of any settlement — only mountains, open grassland, and the dark. It lay somewhere beyond the Isabuki Tunnel, a tunnel that has no right to exist, in a place that appears on no map. No matter how many times one traces the Enshu Railway line, no such station is there to be found.

From somewhere in the darkness came the sound of festival drums. An old man with one leg spoke to her — and then, between one moment and the next, was simply gone. When she asked the name of the nearest station, she was told it was Hina; but the distance and the direction felt subtly, wrongly off. Her mobile phone still had a signal. No one came to help.

At last a car appeared on the road. Hasumi got in. Her posts stopped immediately after. Nothing has been heard of her since.

Reports of what are now called "otherworld stations" have continued to multiply in the years that followed. The name shifts — Kisaragi Station, Demon Station, and other variations — but the essential experience does not: a train drifts free of its ordinary line and delivers its passenger to a terminus from which there is no return.

Even tonight, someone who fell asleep past the last train may be standing motionless before an unfamiliar platform sign. The station lights burn thin and pale. From somewhere in the distance, a sound is drawing slowly, steadily closer.