Stories Fables Ghostly Tales

On 17 October 1992, a sixteen-year-old exchange student from Nagoya put on a white suit, picked up a camera and went to a Halloween party in Louisiana. He knocked on the wrong door.

A man came out of the carport with a .44 Magnum and shouted one word: "Freeze." Yoshihiro Hattori, two months into his English, kept walking towards him and said, "We're here for the party." He was shot once in the chest and died within minutes. A jury acquitted the homeowner of manslaughter in about three hours.
Yoshi's parents answered with a petition signed by more than one and a half million people in Japan, and a fund that still brings American teenagers to live in Japan every year. Last October, someone left ten million yen wrapped in newspaper on their garden table, with a note asking that it go to the fund.
This Halloween Special episode pairs his story with the Namahage, the masked gods who come banging on doors in northern Japan every New Year's Eve, carrying knives and roaring for the crying children, and are welcomed in with sake. The ritual only works if the person behind the door recognises what's coming up the path.
So I'll put it to you mates: a stranger is moving fast towards your door at night, carrying something you can't make out. You have two seconds. What do you need to see?
This is Candle 019 of Hyakumonogatari: one hundred Japanese true crime cases, each paired with the myth that shares its shape. Hosted by the Tale Teller.
Explicit Content Note: Discusses the shooting death of a teenager.
Every episode, the full archive and ways to support the show: storiesfablesghostlytales.com
SOURCES
• Sakigake Shimpo, 2026: the anonymous ¥10 million gift to the YOSHI Fund
• Jiji Press, Oct 2022: 30th anniversary, classmates and the petition
• NextShark: the trial, verdict and civil judgment
• Tales from the Underworld: trial testimony and civil case details
• Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism: Namahage Museum interpretation text
• Nippon.com: "Supernatural Visitors in Wintry Northern Japan"
Thank you so much for your support and love!

At a quarter to six on a December morning in 2013, the president of Japan’s best-loved dumpling chain was shot four times in the dark, outside his own headquarters in Kyoto. No witness. No footage of the shooting. Nobody seen leaving.
For nine years the case had no face. Then police found one: a cigarette butt near the scene carrying the DNA of a senior yakuza figure, already in prison for a different shooting.
On 16 October 2026, the court acquitted him. It accepted the DNA was his, but ruled it couldn’t exclude that someone else had left that cigarette there. The killer of the Gyoza King has never been identified.
This episode pairs the case with the Mujina, the faceless ghost of Kii-no-kuni-zaka. A man flees a woman with no face, runs up a dark slope to the only light he can see, and finds the stranger holding it has no face either. The first blank face is the one you run from. The second is the one you ran to.
So I’ll put it to you: you’re the judge. A known gangster, a DNA match, a family that’s waited thirteen years, and one doubt about a cigarette. Do you acquit?
This is Candle 018 of Hyakumonogatari: one hundred Japanese true crime cases, each paired with the myth that shares its shape. Hosted by the Tale Teller.
Content note: discusses a fatal shooting and organised crime. The man charged was acquitted, and this episode treats him as innocent.
Every episode, the full archive and ways to support the show: storiesfablesghostlytales.com
Want episodes early? Search Stories Fables Ghostly Tales on Patreon.
SOURCES

Tokyo Reporter, Oct 2026: the acquittal

The Star / Kyodo, 16 Oct 2026: verdict, evidence and defence argument

Bunshun, Oct 2026: the court’s reasoning on the cigarette butt

NHK, Oct 2026: the family’s call for an appeal

Alo Japan, Oct 2026: arrest (2022) and trial (2025)

Bengo4.com: the 2016 third-party committee report

Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan (1904): “Mujina”

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.