【Japanese Horror】The Hundred Horror Tales — Episode 28: The Girl No One Knows | Haunted Kaidan Tales
Listen to the Full Episode
Listen to the horror story with narration and sound on Spotify.
Episode 28 – “The Girl No One Knows| Haunted Kaidan Tales” (Full Text)
Prefer reading? Here’s the complete text of Episode28.
Episode 28 — The Girl No One Knows
After one flame went out,
a heavy silence settled over the room.
Sōma’s story hadn’t been a clear haunting.
It was something more uncertain—
that in places where people gather,
something unseen might begin to accumulate.
Everyone found themselves thinking of familiar places.
School.
Work.
Home.
Places where the same faces gathered every day.
And if something really did build up there—
“Hey.”
It was Aoi who broke the silence.
Still hugging her knees,
she leaned forward just a little.
“You know… something strange happened at my school.”
Sōma looked up.
“Strange?”
“Yeah. At first, we were all laughing about it, but…”
Aoi took a slow breath.
Then, she began.
“At first, I honestly thought it was just a joke.
After the sports festival,
a group photo of our whole class was put up on the bulletin board.
We all gathered around it,
pointing and laughing—
‘Hey, your eyes are closed!’
‘What’s with that face?’
That kind of thing.
And then—
Mana suddenly said,
‘Wait… who’s that?’
She was pointing at the far right of the photo.
At the very edge.
A little apart from everyone else,
there was a girl standing there.
She was wearing the same uniform as us.
Her hair was long, past her shoulders.
Black.
But her face—
you couldn’t see it clearly.
It was blurred.
Like the focus had slipped.
Her eyes, her nose—
none of it was distinct.
At first, we all laughed.
‘Isn’t that like a ghost photo?’
‘No way, stop it!’
I laughed too.
I mean… scary stories are kind of fun, right?
But—
she was standing properly.
She had a shadow.
Her feet were on the ground.
Her size, her distance—
everything matched the rest of us.
Only her face was blurred.
Someone said,
‘Maybe she’s from another class?’
But no one recognized her.
We didn’t have any transfer students.
No one was absent that day.
Everyone was there.
And yet—
no one remembered her.
Not her name.
Not her voice.
Not even where she would’ve sat.
That’s when I started to feel something was off.
It wasn’t exactly fear—
It was more like…
something I should’ve been able to remember,
but couldn’t.
Like—
she was supposed to be there,
and yet, she wasn’t someone we knew.”
“At that time, nothing really came of it.
The teacher just said,
‘It’s probably nothing,’
and the photo stayed on the bulletin board.
Little by little, everyone stopped caring.
We’d just catch a glimpse of it when we walked past.
Even the kids who said it was scary
forgot about it pretty quickly.
I tried not to think about it either.
But then—
after some time passed,
the day of our first pool class came.
After the lesson,
we lined up as a class and took another photo.
The water was still a bit cold,
so everyone was laughing and shouting,
‘It’s freezing!’ while we got into position.
The teacher said,
‘Okay, look this way,’
and took the picture.
At the time,
I didn’t think anything of it.
A few days later,
that photo was put up on the bulletin board.
We gathered around it again,
laughing—
‘That face looks weird!’
‘You blinked again!’
And then—
suddenly, someone went quiet.
I followed their gaze
to the right edge of the photo.
—and there she was.
She was there again.
In almost the same spot as before.
At the very edge,
just slightly apart from everyone else.
Among all of us in our swimsuits,
only she looked… dim.
Her long hair.
And her face—
still impossible to make out.
Blurred.
She was clearly standing there,
and yet you couldn’t see her eyes,
or her mouth.
‘No way…’
someone whispered.
A chill ran down my back.
Because this—
this wasn’t a coincidence anymore.
It was the same girl
from the sports festival photo.
The clothes were different.
The setting was different.
But the feeling—
was the same.
Standing at the edge,
slightly looking down.
‘It’s the same, right?’
We compared it with the earlier photo.
Even then, it was hard to say
if it was exactly the same person.
But—
it felt like the same presence.
No one laughed anymore.
‘Let’s check the other photos,’
someone said.
So we asked the teacher,
and looked at the pictures from our spring field trip.
And then—
…she was in all of them.
In the field trip photos.
In the classroom pictures.
In every photo taken after that.
Always at the edge.
Always slightly apart.
Her face always blurred.
I felt a cold shiver run through me.
Because that meant—
she had been there for a while.
Not just once.
Not just by accident.
And yet—
no one had ever heard her voice.
No one remembered sitting next to her.
No one remembered facing her
during lunch.
And still—
she was always there,
inside the photos.
As if—
being captured in them
was the only thing she was meant to do.”
“After that, we asked the teacher.
‘Who is this girl?’ we said.
The teacher looked at the photo
and tilted their head slightly.
‘Hmm… maybe it’s someone from another class who got in the shot.’
That could’ve been the end of it.
But—
we asked other classes too.
‘Do you know this girl?’
No one did.
It didn’t take long to realize
she wasn’t from any class in our grade.
She wasn’t a transfer student.
She wasn’t someone who was absent.
And still—
the teacher didn’t say anything more.
‘Don’t think too much about it,’ they said.
So everyone pretended to accept that answer.
But the photos didn’t change.
In the next one—
she was there again.
Little by little,
it became a rumor in our class.
‘That girl… she has to be a ghost, right?’
‘Maybe she’s somewhere in the school.’
Some kids got scared.
There were even kids
who couldn’t walk past the bulletin board anymore.
It spread beyond school, too.
Apparently, some parents came to talk to the teacher the next week.
‘Is everything really okay?’ they asked.
The teacher looked troubled.
At that moment,
I felt something strange.
Because—
that girl hadn’t done anything.
She was just there.
Just appearing in the photos.
And yet—
people said she was scary.
They said she was creepy.
In the end,
the school decided to consult a local shrine.
After school,
they held a small purification ritual
at the corner of the schoolyard.
We watched from a distance.
White paper streamers swayed in the air.
We could hear something like a chant.
The photos from the bulletin board
were taken down
and sealed in an envelope.
After that day—
she stopped appearing
in any new photos.
‘See? It really was a ghost.’
‘They got rid of it.’
Everyone felt relieved.
I did too—
just a little.
But then—
some time later,
we took a photo in the classroom
for a project.
Before it was put up on the board,
the teacher showed us a few of the pictures.
For some reason,
I looked at the right edge.
There was no figure this time.
But—
in the corner,
there was something black.
It wasn’t a shadow from the floor.
It wasn’t the leg of a desk.
It was thin.
Long.
Like—
strands of hair.
And at that moment, I thought—
she hadn’t disappeared.
She had just… hidden.
She simply stopped standing there
like before.
But maybe—
she was still close to us.”
“At first, I thought it was just my imagination.
That black shadow—
if you looked closely,
it could’ve just been the leg of a desk,
or maybe just the way the light hit the photo.
So I didn’t say anything.
But—
the next day,
when I looked at the photo again on the bulletin board—
…it had changed.
The day before,
there had only been a thin, black line
in the lower right corner.
Just a little.
But now—
it was longer.
Stretching upward,
as if it were reaching over the leg of a desk.
Like something
was peeking out from there.
I stepped closer
and looked at the photo.
Even when I touched it,
it was just paper.
But the shadow—
was still there.
And then—
a chill ran through me.
Because the end of that shadow—
felt like it was pointing
toward where I was standing.
It didn’t have a clear shape.
But—
the girl who used to stand at the edge—
it felt like
she had moved
just a little closer to me.
Suddenly, I got scared
and stepped away from the photo.
But later that day—
after school, during cleaning time—
I looked at it one more time.
And the shadow—
had stretched
right behind my shoulder.”
“So…”
Aoi pressed her lips together slightly.
“It didn’t disappear…
it just stopped standing there like before.”
Her voice wasn’t trying to scare anyone.
She truly believed what she was saying.
A quiet silence spread through the room.
Sōma said nothing,
just watching her.
Shūji and Miwa didn’t joke either.
Everyone was thinking of the same thing—
the unknown girl
standing at the edge of those photos.
At first, it had been a joke.
They had laughed,
calling it a ghost photo.
But then—
she appeared again and again.
Adults got involved.
A ritual was performed.
And even then—
it remained,
just in a different form.
Could that really be dismissed
as coincidence?
“Maybe…
she’s still close to us.”
Aoi said it one last time, quietly.
Then, she looked at the candle in front of her.
The flame wavered,
growing just slightly thinner.
Aoi took a breath—
and gently blew it out.
The flame trembled, stretched, shrank—
and then, it vanished.
A thin trail of smoke
rose slowly into the air.
With one less light,
the shadows in the room deepened.
No one turned around.
Everyone somehow knew—
it was better not to.
For just a moment,
it felt like there was
one more shadow
at the edge of the tatami.
But no one
said a word about it.”
Next Episode
New episode drops on Saturday March 28.
📖 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…