The Joker On The Halloween Train

Halloween Special Part 1 of 4.

Japanese true crime and Japanese folklore. On Halloween night 2021, a man in a Joker costume boarded a packed Tokyo train. For eight seconds, nobody moved.

On 31 October 2021, a man in a purple suit and a green shirt boarded a crowded Keio Line express heading into Shinjuku. Nobody looked twice. It was the biggest costume night of the year, on a train full of people going to the Shibuya Halloween crowds, and a man in a good costume was the most ordinary thing in that carriage.

He was carrying a thirty-centimetre knife and a bottle of lighter fluid. Both of them read as props.

For something between five and ten seconds after the first attack, a carriage full of adults watched and did nothing. Some of them were briefly amused, because their reading of what they were looking at was a Halloween stunt. They were not cowards and they were not slow. On that night, in that city, that was the reasonable conclusion.

This episode pairs that train with the Hyakki Yagyo, the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. On certain nights in the old capital, the yokai came down out of the hills and walked the main streets in a great celebrating procession. The court diviners calculated which nights. Noblemen moved their appointments around it. And the rule was absolute: anyone who looked at the parade did not survive it.

We took the one night of the year when you cannot tell a person from a monster, and we made the inability to tell the difference into the entertainment.

Seventeen people were injured on a locked, moving, burning carriage. Nobody died. That is not luck, and the reason why is sitting inside a thousand-year-old ghost story about a man who met the Night Parade head-on, did nothing right, and walked away because of something somebody sewed into his collar when he was a baby and never told him about.

CONTAINS: knife violence, arson, and reference to a suicidal motive. No graphic injury detail. Listener discretion advised.

CHAPTERS

1. The Lighting

2. The Collar

3. The Biggest Night

4. Eight O'Clock

5. What Was In The Collar

There is an old Japanese game. A hundred candles are lit in a windowless room, and every story told puts one out. Nobody agrees what arrives when the last one dies, only that you should not be there to see it...

Eighty candles left...

Stories Fables Ghostly Tales is a Japanese true crime and folklore podcast hosted by the Tale Teller, all rights reserved. Every episode pairs a real criminal case with the myth that shares its structure.

Episode 1 out of the 4 will be free for all listeners to access, a HUGE thank you to all the supporters that support me to keep doing this, you make it possible. Remaining episodes will be subject to early drop for supporters.