Does anyone here know what a vault toilet—or pit latrine—is? Back when I was a kid, they were still fairly common, but now that flush toilets are the norm, younger people might have never even seen one. The official term is a "vault toilet," but when I was little, the thing scared the absolute hell out of me.

It was a Japanese-style squat toilet with a huge hole at the bottom—where water would drain in a modern toilet—where you did your business. As a child, I always fought off two distinct terrors whenever I used it: the fear that I might fall into the pit, and the dread that a hand might reach up out of the hole (lol). I loved visiting my mother’s parents, but I dreaded that toilet. Beyond the terror of the hole itself, the heavy stench of ammonia hanging in the air was another reason I hated it.

Anyway, enough intro. This story was passed down by my paternal aunt. She married into a farming family in T Prefecture, and this happened in her neighborhood.

My aunt has two daughters. Back when the older daughter was fifteen and the younger was twelve, a Peeping Tom started frequenting the neighborhood's outhouses. The older daughter, Satomi, was one of his victims. One night while relieving herself in the bathroom, she felt someone watching her. When she looked toward the window, her eyes met a man's.

Satomi had a good idea of who he was and suspected a neighbor named Yoichi. Yoichi was a quiet high school sophomore two years older than her who didn't usually stand out. Before long, rumors spread through the neighborhood that Yoichi was indeed the culprit, just as Satomi suspected. But Yoichi’s family was powerful and influential in the area, so no one could make accusations lightly. Instead, the men from the targeted households organized night patrols.

About two weeks after the patrols started, the creep was finally caught red-handed one night. A peeper appeared at a house four doors down from my aunt’s. The daughter of the house was in the bathroom when she heard a noise outside. Pretending to use the toilet, she waited and watched. Sure enough, a man’s face appeared at the window, and she screamed for her father.

Her father rushed outside, shouting to alert the neighbors that the peeper was there. His shouts reached the night patrol, who managed to corner and catch the culprit. As almost everyone expected, it was Yoichi. Shortly after, hearing the uproar, Yoichi's parents came running to the scene.

The victims' families declared to Yoichi's parents that they were handing him over to the police. His father begged them, "Please, anything but that! Think of Yoichi's future. Don't involve the police!" Still furious, the neighbors unleashed their anger on the parents. Perhaps because of their influence, Yoichi's parents were quite arrogant and widely disliked. Yoichi’s father offered to settle the matter with money, setting two conditions:

• Keep the police out of it, promising Yoichi would never do anything so stupid again. • Accept hush money and never speak a word of this to anyone.

Since this was Yoichi’s first offense, and because the hush money was a substantial sum no one could easily turn down, not a single person, including my aunt, rejected the offer.

Things remained peaceful for a while after that, until Yoichi's father suddenly came storming into one of the victimized homes, yelling. He was furious that the rumors were still spreading despite having paid off everyone to stay quiet.

“You can’t put a lock on people’s mouths.”

As the old saying goes, word of the peeping incident spread anyway. Unable to contain his rage, Yoichi's father began hunting for whoever spilled the secret. The neighbors, however, felt insulted that he blamed them for leaks of unknown origin, completely ignoring the fact that Yoichi was the root of the problem. Both sides had their arguments, but it quickly turned into an ugly feud.

In the end, it was never clear who said what, but as the scandal escalated, Yoichi stopped going to school altogether. He was attending one of the top prep schools in the prefecture, though rumor had it he was already struggling with his studies. Still, his parents were enraged, convinced the neighbors who spread the rumors were entirely to blame.

As tensions with the neighbors deepened, another peeping incident occurred. The residents jumped to the conclusion that Yoichi was the culprit, sparking an uproar to turn him over to the police this time. His parents desperately shielded their only son, but the neighbors' wrath could not be contained. Even residents untouched by the peeping joined the commotion, driving the situation out of control. Amidst all this, Yoichi vanished.

The neighbors talked callously, saying things like, "He ran away because he's guilty," or "His parents are hiding him somewhere." His parents filed a missing persons report and searched frantically for him. But not a single neighbor helped with the search.

Three days after he went missing, Yoichi's cold body was found downstream in a nearby river. Police ruled it a suicide after finding his belongings on a bridge upstream and seeing no evidence of foul play. Yoichi's suicide made the newspapers, but any mention of the peeping was completely buried—people said it was a favor to his father, who had clout with the police. While his parents insisted the neighbors were to blame, rumors circulated that his suicide note mentioned the painful weight of his parents' excessive expectations, his father's harsh pressure regarding his education, and how being berated as a disgrace over the peeping incident had finally triggered it all.

No one knew the full truth, but Yoichi's death was supposed to bring an end to the whole ordeal...

However, circumstances changed drastically. Shortly after Yoichi's death, peeping incidents broke out once again. The first victim was a young woman living diagonally across from my aunt, who raised an alarm in the middle of the night claiming a man had peeked at her. From then on, peeping incidents occurred frequently in the area. Rumors swirled: Was there another culprit all along even while Yoichi was alive? The men resumed their patrols, but they couldn't catch the culprit at all.

Then, late one night, it happened at the Kawada residence next door to my aunt. Satomi bolted awake at the sound of a scream from next door. When she went to wake her younger sister, Kimiko, who was sleeping in the adjacent room, Kimiko was already awake, startled by the same scream.

“Somebody help me!”

It was old Mrs. Kawada's voice. Hearing it, they rushed downstairs to wake their parents. My uncle and aunt hurried over to the Kawada house. Kimiko and Satomi were too terrified to stay home alone, so they tagged along.

Mrs. Kawada lived alone, having lost her husband early on. At first, my aunt's family thought it was a burglary targeting an elderly woman living by herself.

“Mrs. Kawada! Is something wrong?”

my uncle shouted loudly.

“Eee... eee...”

A faint whimpering came from the old woman. Although the front door was locked, sensing an emergency, my uncle broke down the door and went inside. Hearing the noise, other neighbors also rushed out into the night. My uncle took the lead, cautiously moving through the house. At the far end of a long, dark hallway, a dim light flickered, and they saw Mrs. Kawada slumped against the wall.

“Mrs. Kawada! Are you alright?”

At my uncle's voice, the old woman pointed trembling fingers toward the light, her mouth moving soundlessly. Her legs had completely given out. In the direction she pointed lay the bathroom.

The bare lightbulb swayed eerily. My uncle peeked slowly into the dim entrance of the bathroom, but nothing was there. Relieved, he called out to Mrs. Kawada.

“Mrs. Kawada, there’s nothing there. Were you having a nightmare?” “Aaaagh... there... right there!” “There? But I don’t see...”

Just as my uncle turned back around, his two daughters shrieked in horror.

There it was, inside the dark hole of the squat toilet in the gloomy bathroom.

“From inside the toilet hole, what looked like a pair of human eyes was peering up at them.”

All four of them screamed. From the dark depths of the pit, the eyes rolled frantically around. Hearing their screams, neighboring residents burst into the house, but by then, the owner of those eyes was no longer inside the toilet.

“Could she have been half-asleep and misseen it?”

Some neighbors were skeptical, but the fact that five people—including old Mrs. Kawada—had witnessed it, along with what actually happened to her, proved otherwise. Pale with terror, Mrs. Kawada quietly recounted what had occurred.

She had woken up in the middle of the night to use the toilet. She turned on the light, squatted over the opening, and reached for her underwear when she felt a strange presence moving inside the toilet pit. As she stared down in suspicion, two eyeballs floated up out of the dark. Not only that, but a black hand reached up from inside the toilet and grabbed her left ankle. Shrieking, she scrambled out of the bathroom on all fours, her legs collapsing beneath her just as my aunt's family arrived.

Corroborating her story, there were clear marks on her ankle where something had grabbed her—a distinct handprint smeared with human waste.

After that, bizarre occurrences continued across the neighborhood. In one house, groans echoed from inside the toilet pit; in another, a dark human shadow was spotted near the latrine. Many of the reports lacked credibility, and my aunt admitted no one knew how much of it was real.

As these incidents mounted, the neighborhood became consumed by rumors that it was the work of Yoichi's vengeful spirit. Unable to bear both the suicide of their only son and the dreadful rumors, Yoichi's parents sold their grand mansion and moved far away.

Months and years passed, and as flush toilets began to spread, the people in that area rushed to install them ahead of everyone else. Once the toilets were converted to flush systems, those strange, inexplicable phenomena mysteriously stopped. In the end, no one ever found out who the peeper after Yoichi's death really was. Whether it was truly a ghost, a sick prank, or a copycat... to this day, the truth remains entirely unknown.

At the end of her story, my aunt remarked, “Even if it was Yoichi’s ghost... where did he go once the toilets were gone? It feels like that poor boy never had a place to belong anywhere.”

No one knows if Yoichi's lingering regrets were ever truly washed away.