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

true Japanese scary stories from around the internet.

Before we kick this week's episode off, I'd

like to remind everyone that we have a store full of exclusive Japanese horror art. You can

grab shirts, mugs, stickers, hats, and much more, all at kohabana. store. That's kawabana.com.

We're adding new designs all the time, so do check it out.

Well, we've passed the Big 100.

I hope you enjoyed that extra long episode.

This week, we're looking at another of my favorite subjects, creepy old customs.

The countryside of Japan apparently has a whole bunch of these, so this week we're going to share

a few of them with you. First up, is a tale of a terrifying mountain and a custom that went

horribly, horribly wrong. This one's called Tempopo-summer. My hometown has a strange custom.

There's this mountain that's only about 200 metres above sea level, so it's not very big,

but the entire mountain is surrounded by old sacred rope.

Not only are women not allowed in, but most of the time men aren't allowed in either.

But still, every now and then, some kid gets ahead of themselves and goes through the sacred

rope to enter the mountain anyway.

Apparently one of my older brother's friends did this once, and once the village chief

and his cohorts caught wind of this, they dragged the guy to a nearby temple, and for three days

and three nights, he wasn't even allowed to sleep. He was violently assaulted the whole time.

Having heard that, naturally we never even went close to the mountain,

and for us village kids, that mountain was the scariest thing of all. And yet, once every few years

...