Stories Fables Ghostly Tales

In Japan, if you are sentenced to death, you are not told when. Not the year. Not the month. Not the night before. The guards come in the morning, and it happens within hours, and your family finds out afterwards.
Iwao Hakamada woke up like that for forty-six years. He was innocent.
In 1966, four members of a family were stabbed to death in Shizuoka Prefecture and their house was set on fire. Hakamada — a former professional boxer working at the miso factory next door — was arrested and interrogated for twenty-three days, the legal maximum, with no right to a lawyer in the room. On day twenty he confessed. He retracted it immediately and never stopped retracting it for the next fifty-eight years.
At trial, prosecutors produced forty-five signed confession documents. The court ruled forty-four of them inadmissible — and convicted him anyway, on the one left over. One of the three judges believed he was innocent, was outvoted two to one, and was then required to write the death sentence himself. He resigned from the bench and said nothing for forty years.
Then, fourteen months after the murders, five items of bloodstained clothing surfaced in a vat of fermenting miso.
In September 2024, at eighty-eight years old, Iwao Hakamada was acquitted. The judge found that investigators had put the blood on the clothes and planted them.
SOURCES

ADPAN (Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network) — case record: the 23-day detention, interrogation hours, and the 45 confession documents

The Japan Times, 2008 — Judge Norimichi Kumamoto’s account of the deliberation and his dissent

The Japan Times, 2014 — “Epic miscarriage of justice”

CNN, September 2024 — acquittal coverage and Judge Kunii Koshi’s finding on fabricated evidence

Innocence Project — DNA testing on the miso-tank clothing, 2008–2012

NPR and CBC, September 2024 — acquittal reporting and Hideko Hakamada’s campaign

Banchō Sarayashiki — the kabuki play, in continuous performance since the eighteenth century; and Hokusai’s print of Okiku from his Hyaku Monogatari series

EARLY DROP: Escape Double Bill: Finger of Doom & The Adaptive Ultimate
You're getting this one early, because the Tale Teller is packing a bag. I'm heading over east for an event this weekend, so rather than leave you waiting, I've lit the candle a few days ahead of schedule.
This week I've been in the restoration workshop with two episodes from Escape, CBS's great high-adventure anthology. Both have been repaired and cleaned up, crackle tamed and voices brought forward, so they sound as close to that 1949 broadcast as I can get them.
What's in today's episode:
A man vanishes without a trace, and a dying woman becomes something that cannot die.
Finger of Doom: Cornell Woolrich, master of noir dread, delivers one of his disappearance stories. Harry Bartell stars and narrates in this lean, haunting adaptation.
The Adaptive Ultimate: Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 science-fiction tale. A young woman with nothing left to lose is given an experimental serum. It saves her life, and then it keeps going.
These two aired just a week apart in March 1949, and they make a lovely, unsettling pair: one about a person disappearing, one about a person who becomes far too present.
Thank you to my Oud Night Tea Titan, White Tea Warlords and Earl Grey Enforcers. You're the reason these old voices get a second life!!!
I'll be back from over east with stories to tell next weekend however and back to the normal cadence!
Until then, keep the candle lit.
— The Tale Teller

Halloween Special Part 1 of 4.
Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore. On Halloween night 2021, a man in a Joker costume boarded a packed Tokyo train. For eight seconds, nobody moved.
On 31 October 2021, a man in a purple suit and a green shirt boarded a crowded Keio Line express heading into Shinjuku. Nobody looked twice. It was the biggest costume night of the year, on a train full of people going to the Shibuya Halloween crowds, and a man in a good costume was the most ordinary thing in that carriage.
He was carrying a thirty-centimetre knife and a bottle of lighter fluid. Both of them read as props.
For something between five and ten seconds after the first attack, a carriage full of adults watched and did nothing. Some of them were briefly amused, because their reading of what they were looking at was a Halloween stunt. They were not cowards and they were not slow. On that night, in that city, that was the reasonable conclusion.
This episode pairs that train with the Hyakki Yagyo, the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. On certain nights in the old capital, the yokai came down out of the hills and walked the main streets in a great celebrating procession. The court diviners calculated which nights. Noblemen moved their appointments around it. And the rule was absolute: anyone who looked at the parade did not survive it.
We took the one night of the year when you cannot tell a person from a monster, and we made the inability to tell the difference into the entertainment.
Seventeen people were injured on a locked, moving, burning carriage. Nobody died. That is not luck, and the reason why is sitting inside a thousand-year-old ghost story about a man who met the Night Parade head-on, did nothing right, and walked away because of something somebody sewed into his collar when he was a baby and never told him about.
CONTAINS: knife violence, arson, and reference to a suicidal motive. No graphic injury detail. Listener discretion advised.
CHAPTERS

The Lighting

The Collar

The Biggest Night

Eight O'Clock

What Was In The Collar

There is an old Japanese game. A hundred candles are lit in a windowless room, and every story told puts one out. Nobody agrees what arrives when the last one dies, only that you should not be there to see it...
Eighty candles left...
Stories Fables Ghostly Tales is a Japanese true crime and folklore podcast hosted by the Tale Teller, all rights reserved. Every episode pairs a real criminal case with the myth that shares its structure.
Episode 1 out of the 4 will be free for all listeners to access, a HUGE thank you to all the supporters that support me to keep doing this, you make it possible. Remaining episodes will be subject to early drop for supporters.

The last night — and the one I nearly didn't write...
Mørketid ends tonight. Sweden.
Fair warning on this one...
This episode is about children. The bäckahästen drowns them and the Myling is one that was left in the woods to die, and while I've kept the detail out, it's there for the whole half-hour. If that's a hard subject for you, take this one at your own pace or skip it — the series works without it and I'd rather you were alright than completist.
What I worked out while writing it...
The bäckahästen is a white horse standing in a summer meadow. A child climbs on. Nothing happens, so a second climbs on behind them. And there's room. However many climb on, there is room, because the back gets longer — never suddenly, just, each time, space for one more. And a child being helped onto a horse isn't measuring the horse.
Then it walks — walks, not gallops — into the water.
Sweden has close to a hundred thousand lakes and children drowned in the summer in numbers we'd find unbearable now. And I don't think this story is a warning to children at all. It's far too appealing for that, and it clearly didn't work.
It's for the parents. It's a story in which it wasn't the water and nobody looked up too late and nothing could have been done, because a beautiful white horse chose them.
And the myling...
A child left in the woods, which waits by the road and cries and asks to be carried to the churchyard so it can be buried properly. It gets heavier the closer you get to the gate — so the last two hundred yards are worse than the whole mile before them. If you make it, it rests. If you put it down, it kills you.
I kept trying to work out why it gets heavier, and the answer isn't cruelty. It's that the nearer you get, the more it becomes a child, and the more the entire weight of what was done — and of a village that knew exactly what had happened and asked nothing — is on one person's back at once, in the dark, in sight of the wall.
What the four nights turned out to be about...
I didn't plan this and I only saw it writing the last Turn. Every one of these countries is dark for a third of the year. Every one had people living six miles from the next house with no light and no help.
And what all four of them built wasn't a set of monsters. It was a set of instructions. Say the name out loud. Turn your coat inside out. Don't laugh at her. Watch what's in her hand. Don't put it down.
Small, stubborn, faintly ridiculous things that a frightened person can actually do.
That's what folklore is, I think. Not an explanation of the dark. A list of things to do while you're in it.
Next week...
Back to Japan True Crime. Back to the hundred candles. Back to the other kind of dark — the kind people do to each other.
Thank you for four nights my librarians of the dark... 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️

Night three of Mørketid is out. Norway.
She Carries a Rake...
A craft decision I want to explain...
The draug should have been the finale. He's the better monster by any obvious measure — a drowned fisherman in oilskins with a mass of seaweed where his head should be, sailing half a boat against the wind, screaming out on the water where there is nobody. That's a closing image.
I put him second, and gave the ending to an old woman walking up a path.
Here's why. Everything in these four episodes has a countermeasure. Say the Näkki's name. Turn your coat inside out. Be polite to the Huldra and keep your luck. Stay off the water. Every horror in this series comes with something small and stubborn you can do about it — that's the whole argument the finale makes.
Pesta has nothing. She isn't cruel and she isn't kind and she cannot be bargained with and nothing you did brought her. In 1349 the plague came into Bergen on a ship and Norway lost somewhere between half and two thirds of its people in about eighteen months, and because Norway is a country of valleys reachable by one path each, it didn't sweep. It walked. At the speed of a person, because it was carried by people.
So you knew it was coming. You'd had word. It had been three valleys over, and then two, and then the next one.
And what they made out of that is the most efficient piece of horror I've ever come across. She carries either a rake or a broom. A rake has gaps — things slip between the tines, and some of you live. A broom has none.
And you can see her on the path, a long way down, for about an hour. And the only thing you are doing for that entire hour is trying to work out what's in her hand.
If you want to go deeper...
Theodor Kittelsen painted Pesta over and over in the 1890s and those images are what most Norwegians still picture. Worth looking up before you listen. It's the flatness of her face that does it — she isn't malicious. She's just arriving.
Next Episode...
Sweden. And that one was the hardest of the four to write, so fair warning.
The candle stays lit. 🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️