■ CHARACTERS A -> Radio Host B -> Assistant C -> Guest (Comedian)

A: Since today is our summer paranormal special, we’ve brought in the comedian C-san! C: Hey, everybody! C here! B: Ahaha! A: Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule just for this segment! C: Tell me about it! What kind of gig is it where I get called in solely for the ghost story section?! B: Bahahaha! C: Girl, all you’re doing is laughing! B: Hey, it’s funny! C: What is?! A: Now, C-san, you’re so immensely popular as a solo act right now that we see you on TV every single day, but before you became a comedian, you worked as an assistant director at a production company, right? C: That’s right. When I was young, I was an AD. B: Huh! A: What made you transition into comedy? C: I’d always idolized the TV industry. You know the comedy duo Tunnels, right? I really worshipped their show *Nama-Dara*. So I joined a production company wanting to make fun shows myself, but obviously a total rookie wasn't gonna get to help produce right off the bat. So I worked as an AD, but ADs are just glorified gophers. It was a brutal environment, total modern slavery, haha. I worked my tail off, but the pay was awful. I realized I couldn't go on like that, so I looked for another job, but couldn't find a thing. Well, I didn't have much higher education either, so I ended up just enrolling in Yoshimoto's comedy school. B: And now you’re a one-hit wonder! C: Who are you calling a one-hit wonder?! A: Ahaha (laughs). So, you came to the studio today to share a paranormal experience from your AD days, right? C: That's right. I've got a few of 'em. B: I wanna hear! A: Were you sensitive to spirits to begin with? C: Back in elementary school, I saw a fireball, stuff like that. B: Huh!

C: Also, I got sleep paralysis a lot. My parents' house was near a temple. I was plagued by sleep paralysis all the time. It was a rundown old house, and I always felt someone watching me. When I was sleeping, I’d hear voices and stuff. B: I’d hate living in a house like that~! C: Well, hate it or not, it was like that for as long as I could remember, so I thought it was normal. Though whenever friends came over to stay, they’d never come back a second time, haha. Found out later the house was on a spirit pathway, haha. A: Well, I can’t really blame your friends. Anyway, enough with the intro—let’s hear your story. C: Alright, first up is one of those old-school segments where they’d send a pop idol into a haunted spot. You guys ever watch those? A: Oh yeah, totally! C: You know how in those shows, the idol would start feeling sick or freaked out? Most of that was fake. B: Is it okay for you to spill that? (laughs) C: Statute of limitations has expired, my friend! But once in a while, you’d hit a location that was 100% legit. A: Ooh! C: Here's what I went through: back in the day, there was this female idol, let's call her O. The plan was for her to walk alone with a camera into a haunted tunnel and come back out. B: Absolutely not, no way! C: O was terrified right from the start. We brought along this older guy who was supposed to be a psychic. He handed her a set of prayer beads and said, "If these snap, get out immediately." So, half in tears, O headed toward the tunnel. A: Right. C: Then, right as she reached the mouth of the tunnel, she burst into tears, going, "I can't do it!" and came running back. But the director couldn't use that footage, so he forcibly nudged her to keep going. Sobbing uncontrollably, O slowly crept into the tunnel. It was about a hundred meters long, but when she hit the halfway mark, she suddenly broke into a full sprint toward the *far* end. B: Creepy! C: We waited for her, but she didn't come back out. We called her name, no answer. Left with no choice, we were about to go in and get her when the old psychic guy blurted out, "No, no, stop!" When we asked what was wrong, he said, "A whole crowd of spirits is staring right at us. We gotta run!" But the director and staff argued, saying we couldn't just leave O behind. Just as we were arguing, we saw O running back toward us. The old psychic completely panicked, haha. He yelled, "No! She's done for!" then jumped off the shoot bus and ran away. A: Was it really that bad? C: When O came running up, her eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was running in this bizarre, contorted way. We managed to tackle and hold her down, but she was thrashing around like crazy. She had strength you’d never expect from a young woman. She even kicked me right in the face and broke one of my teeth! B: And then? C: We somehow got her calmed down, but O passed out for a while. When she woke up, she said she had zero memory of it. All she remembered was going into the tunnel, getting to the middle, and the prayer beads suddenly snapping and flying everywhere. When she turned around to head back, she saw a man standing behind her. So she ran toward the other end, but everything after that was a complete blank. A: And what happened to O after that? C: I'm not really sure, but I heard she quit her agency right after. So I don't know what became of her. B: Whoa!

C: Alright, here’s another one. You remember those old TV shows about missing persons? A: Oh, yeah! C: This was in... T Prefecture, I think? There was this story about a wife who suddenly went missing. Her husband woke up, and she was just gone. B: Uh-huh. C: He searched for a whole day, but couldn't find her, so he filed a missing persons report with the police. But despite all the searching, they came up empty. It made quite a splash back then—people were calling it a housewife's spirit abduction. Eventually, the story reached our show. We did our basic background check, but the wife had a great reputation; there wasn't a single rumor about an affair, secret debt, or anything like that. Most missing person cases turn out to be someone fleeing for those reasons, but there was none of that here, and her relationship with her husband was totally fine. She literally just vanished into thin air from her own home in the middle of the night. The police even investigated the possibility of a kidnapping, but found zero evidence, so the mystery just deepened. A: Wow, a case like that actually happened. C: It caused a huge stir—why would she vanish, leaving her purse with her wallet inside, along with her husband and kids? This was back before everyone had cell phones, so they really couldn't trace her steps at all. So, the show decided to approach it by having a psychic perform a spiritual reading. A: Oh, I remember those kinds of segments! C: Yeah, so our production company tried to hire this TV-savvy psychic we used all the time, but their schedule was full. We thought, well, to keep things fresh, why not bring in a psychic from overseas? So we brought over this old lady psychic from America. B: An old lady, haha! C: The pitch was that she was an FBI-preferred psychic who had solved tons of tough cases! Though in reality, she’d probably just assisted in a couple of investigations, haha. A: They used that phrase all the time back then! C: Exactly, haha. So we went to the house with an interpreter. We’d given her a brief overview beforehand, but the director said we didn't tell her a single detailed fact because she claimed it would interfere with her reading. B: Huh! C: The household was just the husband and two elementary-school-aged boys. We started filming in an interview format, having them talk about her disappearance and what the wife was like. Filming went on smoothly. The old psychic lady just listened to the content of the conversation through the interpreter the whole time. As we neared the end of the shoot, we set up a scene where the husband and kids would deliver a message to the missing wife and mother. The husband and the boys were pleading for her to come home through tears. Man, there wasn't a dry eye on set. Even I cried! B: C-san, it’s gross when a guy with your face cries, haha! C: Who are you calling gross?! Anyone would cry! Hearing the kids say "Mom, please come home" totally broke me. Then came the moment for the psychic to do her reading. Up until then, she’d just been nodding along to the interpreter, so all of us staff were worried—is this old lady gonna be okay? The director was even whispering that maybe we should've gone with a different psychic. Though I was thinking, *Hey, you're the one who hired her!* (laughs) Anyway, when she started the reading, she closed her eyes and held the wife's photo. After about two or three minutes... the TV suddenly turned on out of nowhere. I looked around thinking a crew member had bumped into it or stepped on the remote, but everyone just shook their heads. Then the old lady started groaning, "Ugggggh," and the lights in the room went out. A: Eek! C: Then the TV screen turned into static. It was just the old lady's groaning and the sound of the static filling the room—everyone present froze in complete silence. Before I knew it, almost everyone was staring at the TV. On the screen, amidst the static, a faint image of a large pond or lake started to appear. B: Okay, that’s actually terrifying! C: The husband asked the director, "Is this some kind of special effect?" but the director just whispered back, "No, it's not." C: I was standing behind the audio guy, and he muttered, "I hear a strange voice..." Honestly, I was terrified out of my mind. Then, on the TV screen where the lake was, a silhouette of a person started to form, and the kids started crying, saying they were scared. B: ... C: The old lady kept groaning, weird shadows were appearing on the TV, the lights wouldn't turn on—it was a total horror movie set. Then the figure on the TV shifted into a clear silhouette of a woman. A: Yeah. C: The groaning old lady went dead silent. She walked straight up to the husband, opened her eyes, and said just one sentence...

"It's so cold... in the water..."

A&B: KYAAAAAH! C: And she said it in Japanese. B: Oh hell no! That’s way too scary! C: Then the TV cut out with a *pop* and went pitch black. The lights came back on right after, but when I looked at the husband, his face was pale as a ghost. The two kids were shivering and crying, clinging to each other. A: That’s way too terrifying. B: Wait, could the old lady speak Japanese?! C: Nope, not a single word. Whenever she talked to the interpreter, it was all in English. Yet out of nowhere, she just casually spoke fluent Japanese: "It's so cold in the water"! A: So what happened after that?

C: The old lady just walked out of the house in complete silence. The interpreter and a female staff member ran after her, while the rest of us left behind had our hands full trying to calm the husband down. He was furious, screaming, "What is the meaning of this?!" He grabbed the director by the collar, yelling, "Are you saying I killed my wife?!" All we could do was bow down and keep saying, "We're so sorry! We're so sorry!" It ended with him barking at us to get out. B: So... was the husband the killer in the end? C: Nobody knows. Word was the police suspected him, too. But even if he *was* the killer, footage of an occult phenomenon like that isn't gonna hold up as evidence in court. The show tried to locate that lake or pond, but we never figured out where it was. I never heard anything about the husband getting arrested later either, so who knows what really happened? That shoot was just way too real, so in the end, none of the footage was ever broadcasted. A: Man, C-san, that is legit terrifying. C: Out of all the stories I've got, that one's probably the scariest. B: Honestly, C-san's face while telling the story was the scariest part. C: Okay, that's enough out of you! A: Our guest today was C-san. Thank you so much! See you all next week~