Don't Sleep with Your Legs Uncovered

(Translated by Saya)

*WARNING* THIS STORY IS SAID TO BE CURSED

This is a story that really happened to my mother's friend.

"Finally, today is the last day! Why do I have to sleep all covered from head to toe in such a hot weather? "
A man grumbled to himself as he lay on the bed. I will call the man as Yoshioka (pseudonym) for convenience.
Why did he have to do such a thing?
He had a very good reason for doing so.

About a week ago, his friends called Kawahara (pseudonym) and Sasaki (pseudonym) came to visit him in his apartment.
They were having a random conversation about their school, when Kawahara suddenly said,
"Shall I tell you a creepy story?"
It was at the height of summer, so the other two agreed to it saying "I hope it will make us feel a little cooler." **

Then Kawahara started telling them the following story.
"Once upon a time, there lived an old couple.
The wife had bad legs and she was confined to bed most of the time.
The husband was the one who mostly looked after her.



One day, the husband went out, saying he had some urgent affairs to attend to.
But he took a long time and the wife began to worry.
She decided to check on him by calling the number of the place he said he would go.
That was, however, a bad decision.
The telephone was downstairs, and so to reach it she needed to lean heavily on the stair railing to go down the stairs because of her bad legs.
And while going down, her foot slipped and she ended up tumbling down the stairs.
When the husband finally returned home he found her prostrate by the stairs, in a dire condition.
The husband called the ambulance straight away, but because of her leg disease and of being left in that condition for hours, the wife died."

"This is the end of the story, for now" he said.
"But what happened to the husband?" Sasaki asked Kawahara.
"Who knows? I can't possibly tell you."
Yoshioka said, "Why not? It's not scary at all. And what do you mean by 'for now'?"

Kawahara replied, "listen, after hearing this story, you must sleep with your feet completely covered for a week. If you break the rule, you will be struck by a disaster."
However, Yoshioka couldn't believe the story at all, and they decided to meet a week from that day at a near-by cafe.

One week later, Yoshioka woke up to the sounds of knocking on the door.
It was Kawahara.
"What is it?"
Kawahara said, "Sasaki is dead."
"You must be joking."
"No."

Kawahara told me that Sasaki apparently didn't follow the rule and slept with his legs out of the blanket for the whole week.
But what disturbed me most was the picture we had taken of ourselves a week ago with our school building in the background.
In the picture, an old woman stood behind Sasaki, and she was looking into the camera with a sinister smile....

If you have read this story, you'd better be careful too.
Because I too have suffered an injury to my legs.


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** It is customary for people in Japan to tell ghost stories to one another in summer, to feel cooler in the hot weather and also because it's the time for the Bon Festival (a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one's ancestors).