The Lid

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This happened several years ago, one summer night, back when I was living alone and working as an OL (Note: office lady).

The 1DK apartment I lived in back then had a unit bath, where the toilet and bathtub were in the same room.

One night, I decided to take a bath just after the water had finished heating.

When I lifted the lid off the tub, I saw some shadow that looked like a human head.

A bathtub with a lid (to keep the water warm)

The upper half of a head was bobbing right in the middle of the bathtub, while everything below the bridge of the nose was submerged.

It was a woman.

Her eyes were wide open, staring straight at the wall across from her, and her long hair drifted in the water like seaweed.

Two pale, slender arms floated upward, buoyed by the water, faintly visible between many strands of black hair.

No matter how one sat in the bathtub, there was no way someone could fit into it like that.

Obviously, it wasn’t human.

It was so sudden that I stood there frozen, completely naked, holding the lid in my hands.

The woman seemed to notice my presence.

Without moving her head, she rolled her eyes toward me— and then, in the water, and between her long black hair, her mouth stretched into a wide, red grin.

“Oh, no!”

The next moment, I slammed the lid shut.

From beneath it came a gurgling sound, mixed with laughter.

At the same time.I heard a scratching noise, as if she were clawing at the underside of the lid.

Panicking, I started piling anything I could grab—washbasins, brushes, shampoo bottles—on top of the lid, making as much noise as I could, and bolted out of the bathroom.

From the other side of the door, the scratching changed to a pounding, like palms slapping the lid.

I threw on the T-shirt and jeans I had just taken off and ran out of my apartment.

I flagged down a taxi and escaped to the nearest female friend’s place.

A few hours later—it must have been past midnight—

since I had fled without locking the door or bringing anything with me, my friend agreed to come back with me to check the room.

She was the type to laugh off ghost stories, curious and unafraid, so she volunteered to open the bathroom door herself.

The bathroom was perfectly quiet.

Everything I had piled on top of the lid was now scattered across the floor.

There was no laughter or pounding coming from under the lid.

My friend lifted the lid.

Only steam rose up, and there was no woman, not even a single strand of hair.

The water was clear.

Still, I was so creeped out that I asked her to drain the bathwater.

And that’s when I saw something abominable somewhere else. 

I stood paralysed on the spot. 

From the closed toilet lid, between the seat and the cover, long strands of hair were sticking out.

My friend noticed it too.

Before I could stop her, she—being the bold one—lifted the toilet lid.

Inside, there was a woman’s face, turned upward, staring blankly like a mask.

Her eyes moved, first locking onto my friend, then onto me.

When our eyes met, the woman opened her mouth wide and began laughing — this time clearly — in a shrill, piercing voice:

“Hahahahaha… hahahahahahaha…”

As she laughed, her face began trembling rapidly, like a wind-up toy,

and the long black hair hanging out of the toilet slowly slithered back inside.

My friend’s face twisted in horror as she slammed the toilet lid shut.

Still pressing down on it with one hand, she reached with the other and flushed.

The grating laughter was drowned out by the rushing water and the sucking sound as the toilet swallowed it all.

I don’t remember much what happened after that, probably because we were acting on pure panic.

When I came to my senses, I was standing outside my friend’s apartment, clutching only a change of clothes and my valuables.

The first thing my friend did after letting me in was open her own bathtub and toilet lids and say,

“Never close these, okay?”

Early the next morning, though my friend was reluctant, I begged her to come back with me one last time.

When we returned to my place, we found nothing there.

But even so, I decided to move out of that apartment and return to my parents’ home.

Commuting would be longer, but I didn’t care.

Even now, whenever I take a bath, I make sure to go in right after my mother or sister (See Note 1 below). 

And as for the toilet lid,  my family agreed to leave it off permanently.

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Note 1: The narrator wanted to go to the bathroom before her family could close the lid. Japanese families tend to share bath water. It is not seen as dirty because usually they clean their bodies thoroughly before taking a bath.