Hey guys, I'm your host Tara A. Devlin, and welcome to another episode of Kowabana,

true Japanese scary stories from around the internet.

This one is a very special episode, because it's our 50th.

We held a vote recently on coabana.net to pick which story would appear on this episode,

and I'm happy to announce that Kinkisaki Pandora won.

This story was posted in 2009 and tells the story of a group of young friends who visit an abandoned house they've been warned to stay away from.

Of course, that just makes them even more curious, but as the history of the house unfolds, they soon realized that they're

way in over their heads, and not all of them are going to make it out unscathed.

You can find this particular story in Koabana Origins, as it has been consistently rated

as one of the best stories to come out of Ni-chan over the years

by Japanese readers.

But, let's get right to it.

This one's called Kinkisaki Pandora.

This is a story passed down in my hometown about something called Kinkisaki. We don't know exactly how to read the Chinese characters associated with the word though,

so we just call it Pandora.

I was born and raised in a small, sleepy countryside town, in the middle of nowhere.

It was a lonely town, without many places to play, but there was one place in particular that stood out,

on a road that sat between endless rice fields on the outskirts of town, there was a single

vacant house.

Nobody had lived in it for a long time.

And even in our little countryside village, it was old, worn, crumbling, and ancient. If that was all, then it would just be like

any other old vacant house. But it wasn't. There was something peculiar about this particular place.

...