【Japanese Horror】The Hundred Horror Tales — Episode 13: The God That Left | Haunted Kaidan Tales
Listen to the Full Episode
Listen to the horror story with narration and sound on Spotify.
Episode 13 – “The God That Left| Haunted Kaidan Tales” (Full Text)
Prefer reading? Here’s the complete text of Episode13.
The Hundred Horror Tales — Episode 13: The God That Left
–– Fwoosh…
When the small flame went out, the air in the tatami room sank ever so slightly.
No one spoke for a while; everyone was still wrapped in the lingering silence of the previous tale.
Outside, the chorus of summer cicadas still hissed faintly, clinging to the edge of hearing.
A thin breeze slipped through the slightly opened shoji door, and the candle flame quivered.
“…Hmm.”
A low, muffled voice broke the hush.
It was Seikichi.
“Kids these days sure know how to cry their way outta fear.”
Aoi puffed her cheeks in protest at his teasing tone.
“…But you know,” he went on, resting both hands on his knees, eyes fixed ahead,
“there was something like that once— not in a sandbox, but at the end of an old path outside the village.”
Sōma narrowed his eyes.
“Something happened there?”
“Aye. Back when I was a boy.
At the end of that path was an open patch of land— just empty ground, or so people thought.
But the elders said it was the edge of the gods’ road, and no one was supposed to step beyond it.”
“A forbidden ground?” Sōma asked quietly.
Seikichi nodded slowly.
“Indeed. They marked it with white shide— folded paper strips hung from a rope.
They’d sway in the wind without a sound, showing the boundary between here and there.”
“Shide… those paper things, right?” Aoi whispered.
“Aye. They divide the sacred from the living world.
But one year… one of those shide fell on its own.
No wind, no rain— a still night, and plop, it was down.”
He gazed off into the distance, his voice lowering.
“That’s when strange things began to happen in the village.”
Sōma’s expression tightened.
“My grandfather used to say:
‘When a shide falls, it means the god has left that place.
And what comes in after… isn’t always a god.’”
No one spoke.
Only the insects outside deepened the quiet.
“Well,” Seikichi finally murmured, “it’s an old story.
Maybe it’s got nothin’ to do with you young ones now.”
Yet his eyes remained fixed on something unseen—
as if he could still make out the faint line of that long-forgotten boundary in the dark.
Some kids never went near that place.
But brats like us—well, “keep out” signs only made us more curious.
“Why’s that spot the only one we can’t go into?”
“They say it’s the gods’ road, but it’s just an overgrown field.”
That’s how we’d laugh about it.
Then one day, Taka-nii, the oldest among us, said,
“Let’s check what’s past the rope.
If the god’s gone, then it ain’t sacred anymore, right?”
The shide had fallen, and only the shimenawa rope swayed in the wind.
No one ever tied a fallen strip back up.
In our village, once a boundary comes undone, it must stay undone—
after that, it’s nothing but ordinary ground.
…Or so we were told.
Whether it really became “ordinary” or not,
we didn’t know back then.
The four of us—me, Taka-nii, Minoru, and Yūji—pushed through the tall grass and stepped inside.
At first, it was just… strangely quiet.
No insects.
No wind.
It felt like every bit of sound had been sucked out of the place.
We snickered as we walked deeper—
and that’s when we found it, at the base of a lone cedar tree.
A hanging shide.
It dangled from a branch by a single knot.
The white paper was damp and heavy,
and the height was all wrong—
too deliberate, like someone had hung it there by hand.
Beneath it sat a single blackened stone.
An offering?
No… it looked more like a weight—
a thing meant to hold something in place.
“What do you think happens if you pull it down?”
Taka-nii grinned.
“Someone must’ve tied it back up. It’s just paper, right?”
He reached for it without hesitation.
“Stop it, man!” Minoru hissed, grabbing his arm—
but Taka-nii didn’t stop.
Then—
“…nnngh…”
The branch bent.
Just a little.
No wind.
No animals.
Nothing around us was moving—
except the shide.
It swayed… silently, like a wind chime with no sound.
“What… what was that…?”
Yūji staggered back.
Taka-nii’s fingertips were just inches away from the strip when—
Snap!
The knot burst apart, and the shide fell.
Slowly, slicing through the still air, drifting downward…
And beneath it—
the black stone gave a sudden, unmistakable clatter.
“Let’s go back.”
When I said that, none of us joked around anymore.
The smell of grass suddenly felt too strong, and it was hard to breathe.
All the insects that had been chirping so loudly earlier… had vanished.
We pushed through the grass in silence, retracing the path we’d come.
Only Taka-nii kept glancing back over his shoulder.
“…Must’ve been the wind,” he muttered—
so quietly that no one really heard him.
That was when the strange things began.
First, Minoru came down with a fever.
For three days and nights, he kept mumbling in delirium:
“the tree’s watching,”
“the paper fell,”
over and over.
Even after his fever broke, he still looked scared out of his wits.
Yūji went silent.
At school, he barely talked.
He acted like he’d heard something he wasn’t supposed to hear…
and couldn’t forget it.
…And me?
I can’t say nothing happened.
At night, even at home, I kept feeling like someone was watching me.
Every time I walked down the hallway, a shiver crawled up my back,
and I’d turn around without meaning to.
In my dreams, I’d be standing alone in some place I didn’t recognize—
and when I looked up,
white paper swayed from a branch above me.
Even so, the days passed without anything “real” happening to me.
But then—
it happened to Taka-nii.
He acted fine at first, going to school like normal.
But one day, I noticed he’d started carrying a stone in his uniform pocket.
A small, blackened stone.
…It looked exactly like the one we’d seen under the shide.
“Taka-nii, what’s that?” I asked.
“Just picked it up,” he said, brushing it off.
But a few days later, he suddenly collapsed.
He gasped for air, clawing at his throat, writhing on the ground…
and they rushed him to the hospital.
The doctor said it looked like an asthma attack.
But he’d never had asthma.
Even then, he wouldn’t talk about what he saw, or felt.
He just kept gripping that stone—
tight, like letting go would be worse.
I was terrified by then, so I told my grandfather everything.
And he—
for the first time I can remember—raised his voice at me.
“Shide are there to keep the god from leaving.
If one has fallen… that place is already open.”
“But Taka-nii was the one who brought the stone home, not me—”
“Listen, Seikichi.”
Grandpa’s voice was low, but his eyes were sharp.
“When a sacred boundary collapses, it doesn’t matter who carries what.
Everyone who was there becomes a marker.
To the ones on the other side, you’re all easy to find.”
That night, when I went to check the front door—
there, lying neatly on the ground,
was a single folded strip of white paper.
A shide.
No doubt about it.
That night.
I couldn’t sleep.
There was no wind beyond the shoji door—
and yet I kept hearing it:
rustle… rustle…
The faint sound of paper brushing against something, clinging to my ears with no sign of stopping.
I pulled the futon over my head, trembling,
but the sound didn’t fade.
If anything, it drew closer—
as if whatever was making it was now swaying right beside my pillow.
I forced myself to look.
Up on the dark ceiling beam—
a single strip of white paper was hanging there.
No breeze, no movement in the room.
And still it swayed…
slowly… mockingly…
casting its shadow down on me.
In that instant, my grandfather’s words echoed in my mind:
“Everyone becomes a marker.”
I couldn’t look away.
I knew I shouldn’t look—
knew I should turn my eyes away—
but something in that strip held me fast, like my gaze was caught in a web.
And then, from behind the shadow of the shide—
I saw it.
Another face.
Peering out at me from the darkness.
Before I knew it, I was screaming.
My grandfather rushed into the room and scattered salt in all four directions.
The white strip of paper vanished—
its shadow disappearing with it.
After that night, nothing strange happened in our house.
But the face I saw…
that was something only I witnessed.
Taka-nii never came back from the hospital.
His family packed up and left the village soon after.
Minoru and Yūji—
neither of them ever spoke about that place again.
It was as if they knew…
that saying its name might open the boundary once more.
…Even now, I think about it.
That shide didn’t just fall that day.
It was called down.
Summoned.
“ When a shide falls, it means the god has left. ”
Grandpa’s words still echo in my ears.
—If someday, somewhere, you see a white strip of paper swaying when there’s no wind…
there’s no god underneath it anymore.
What’s there…
is something else entirely.
Finishing his tale, Seikichi leaned forward and gently blew out the candle.
—Fwoosh…
The flame trembled,
and the room sank into a deeper darkness.
Next Episode
New episode drops on Saturday, November 29 .
📖 View All Episodes
Work in Progress
✍️ About & Follow
The Hundred Horror Tales is an original Japanese horror anthology inspired by the tradition of Hyaku Monogatari.
Five storytellers gather around flickering candles to share chilling tales—urban legends, ghost stories, folklore, daily fears, and real encounters.
Can you endure until the last flame goes out?
Follow for more:
• Twitter: @KaidanTales
• YouTube: @HK_Tales
If you felt something… or noticed something, we’d be grateful if you quietly left a comment below.
Click here to leave a comment!This story was brought to you by Haunted Kaidan Tales.
Welcome to a world of Japanese ghost stories and eerie folklore.
Feel free to explore more chilling tales at your own pace.
Some stories were meant to be forgotten—
and yet, they still whisper to those who listen…