【Japanese Horror】The Hundred Horror Tales — Episode 15: The Thing in the Headlights | Haunted Kaidan Tales
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Episode 15 – “The Thing in the Headlights| Haunted Kaidan Tales” (Full Text)
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Episode 15: The Thing in the Headlights
“Whoa, that was heavy.”
Uncle Shūji exaggerated a shrug and laughed.
“Hey, Aoi. Bet you’re too scared to go to the bathroom now, huh?”
“Sh-shut up! I’m fine!”
Aoi puffed out her cheeks, but her eyes darted away just a little.
Aunt Miwa smacked her brother lightly on the shoulder.
“Don’t ruin the mood, Shū-chan.”
Still, a faint smile tugged at her lips—as if she, too, needed a way to release the tension.
Shūji glanced at the dying candle flame.
“All right… guess it’s my turn then.”
He leaned back and began.
“This one’s from when I was in my twenties. Back when my friends and I used to race through the mountain roads at night.”
Sōma leaned forward.
“A haunted spot?”
“Something like that.
Any place people said ‘someone appeared,’ we just had to check it out—by bike, by car, whatever.
Yeah… we were idiots.”
Shūji gave a self-deprecating chuckle.
“That night, we took a narrow road deep in the mountains. No streetlights.
Just trees on both sides and our headlights to rely on…”
He lifted a finger and slowly waved it side to side.
“Then the light hit something standing in the middle of the road.”
Aoi gasped.
“A-a person?”
“At first, yeah, that’s what I thought. A white figure, standing there with its back to us.
I slammed the brakes—then…”
He paused, a mischievous grin flickering across his face.
“The next second, it was gone. No trace. Just… gone.”
Sōma frowned. “Not a trick of the light?”
“Wish it was. My buddy in the passenger seat saw it too.
He yelled, ‘What the hell—where’d it go!?’ and we both froze.”
The light of the candle caught Shūji’s face as it hardened.
“Later I found out—people crash there all the time.
Always the same curve… and always at night.”
No one said a word. The flame crackled softly,
and Shūji’s voice, once playful, turned cold.
“The moment it vanished, Taka—the guy in my passenger seat—shouted,
‘Dude, that was a person! It had to be a person, right!?’
But the road was a straight, narrow mountain path.
There was nowhere to run.
Guardrails on both sides, a steep drop, and thick woods.
If someone had jumped into the trees, we should’ve at least heard branches snapping.
But instead… nothing.
Just this dead, suffocating silence.”
Shūji stared at his fingers, lit faintly by the candle.
“All I could hear was the sound of the brakes cooling down and the engine idling.
My ears felt plugged—like the whole world had suddenly muted itself.”
Aoi shivered.
“It’s like… a movie…”
“We started panicking for real.
‘What if we hit them?’
When something disappears from your headlights that fast, your first thought is that they fell under the car.”
Shūji paused, letting the moment settle.
“So we jumped out with a flashlight and checked underneath.
…Nothing.
No body, no blood, no shoe, not even a scrap of fabric.”
Sōma frowned.
“No trace at all…?”
“Yeah.
And Taka—he was on the verge of tears.
‘Shūji, man, this place is seriously bad news! We gotta get out of here!’
I tried to laugh it off—‘Relax, it was probably just a deer or something.’
But…”
His voice dropped.
“My heart was racing.
A deer doesn’t stand on two legs.
And it sure as hell doesn’t stand there like a person with its back turned toward you.”
Aoi squeaked quietly, and Miwa pulled her close.
“…So yeah. I couldn’t stay there any longer.
I jumped back in the car, floored the gas, and headed down the road.
If we made it out of the mountain, we’d hit the highway.
That’s what I thought, but—”
Shūji glanced at the candle flame, his brow tightening.
“—the headlights lit up something else.
Again.”
“…It was the same figure,” Shūji said quietly, his voice dropping as the candlelight brushed across his face.
“The exact same back. Same pale clothes. Same hunched shoulders.
If the first one was a mistake, fine.
But this… this was the same damn thing.”
Before he could even think to brake, the car was already heading straight toward it.
But the distance didn’t change.
“No matter how far we drove, it stayed right there, at the edge of the headlights.
Not closer. Not farther.
Like it was glued to a fixed point on the road… like a signpost that wouldn’t move.”
Sweat trickled down his forehead.
The engine’s rumble and the vibration of the tires felt unnaturally loud,
and behind them stretched a silence sharp enough to hurt his ears.
“I floored it.
But the distance stayed exactly the same.
…It felt like we were being forced to chase that back forever.”
And then, a sickening detail clicked into place.
“I realized… it didn’t have feet.”
His voice hardened.
Below the knees, the figure dissolved into the darkness.
No shadow touching the asphalt.
Just hanging there—floating.
His throat dried out. His hands slipped on the steering wheel, slick with sweat.
“There was nowhere to go.
We couldn’t stop.
We couldn’t turn back.
All we could do was keep driving.”
The candle cracked softly.
Shūji fell silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a low voice:
“…And then.
The next moment, it turned around.”
“…It didn’t have a face.”
Shūji’s voice was dry—almost cracking.
The thing in the headlights still had a human shape.
But where its face should have been, there was nothing.
No eyes. No nose. No mouth.
Just a smooth, pale surface reflecting the light with a slick, unnatural shine.
“I tried to scream, but nothing came out.
My throat felt blocked—like someone had shoved a stone inside it.
All I could do was gasp.”
A blade of cold traced down his spine.
The air in the car froze, thick and unmoving.
Even the engine noise sounded far away, fading into the background.
His hands slipped on the steering wheel as the strength drained from them.
“And then…”
He swallowed hard.
“…that thing smiled.”
A black slit tore open across the blank face—
right where a mouth shouldn’t be.
It widened, stretching toward the ears,
a warped crescent that could only be seen as a grin.
“There weren’t any teeth.
Just darkness.
But somehow… it was smiling.”
The candle flame trembled, and the whole room seemed to chill.
“When I came to… it was gone.”
Shūji spoke quietly, almost to himself.
“The moment after that smile, the headlights were just shining on an empty road.
We screamed the whole way down that mountain and didn’t stop until we hit the highway.”
He hasn’t gone back to that place since.
But the rumors still reach him.
“They say whenever there’s an accident on that same curve,
there’s always a white handprint left on the windshield.”
Shūji fell silent, then gave a faint, humorless smile.
“…Well, I’m not going to check.
I’ve seen enough of that grin to last me a lifetime.”
He leaned forward and blew out the candle.
──fwuuh…
The final flame died, and the room drowned in complete darkness.
No one spoke.
Only the sound of their own heartbeats echoed loud in the hollow black.
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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
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