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The story goes that the temple was abandoned long ago, priests and men were afraid to set foot in the building for fear of the tales of the ghosts who resided in the building. Rumor had it that the temple was long ago raided and all priests who lived there killed by a large band of robbers who were there to take the precious items for their own. This story of the murder of all the priests was so horrible that the nearby folk the temple simply refused to maintain the temple and it fell into rot and ruin.
Our story, however, follows
a young priest, pilgrim, and
stranger to the land around Fushimi. He had not heard of the horrible
stories
surrounding the temple and knew not of the ghosts and spirits that
dwelt
within. It was a stormy night when he arrived at the rundown temple and
chose
to seek shelter within its walls, for he had little but cold rice in
his wallet
and the weather was so bad that he couldn't spend the night outdoors.
“At least,” he
reasoned to himself, “I will avoid drenching my clothes.”
He crept up into the temple and settled himself into one of the smaller side rooms that was less dilapidated than the rest of the temple, and actually still had a roof. He made his bed just as the rain began to fall on the roof of the ancient temple. The young priest ate his dinner and said his prayers as the storm threw torrents of rain against the roof of the temple and the wind howled through the cracks in the building.
In time
the priest lay down on his bedroll to sleep. But
the storm was so terrible and noisy that he couldn’t find rest. Around
the
On the other side he beheld Hiyakki Yako, the procession
of
one hundred ghosts. The ghosts marched and danced by. Some fought among
themselves and some danced merrily. All were seemingly oblivious to the
priest’s spying. The priest watched for several minutes until the more
bloodcurdling
of the ghosts came. Now these ghouls and goblins truly scared the
priest and
he
rushed back to his room where he barred the door and chanted prayers to
keep
the ghosts at bay the rest of the night.
In the morning he rose and fled the temple, completing his pilgrimage to Fushimi where he told everyone of what he had seen. It didn’t take long for the villagers to spread the priest’s tale, and a few hundred years later, through their descendants, their words came to my ears.
Here the story of the priest ends and mine begins. Having just escaped an encounter with Sir Forrester and his bloody footstep, I was curious if I might find other ghostly phenomenon in the places that the stories claim that there are ghosts.
I spoke with the locals about the temple and got permission to spend one night in the temple. I found myself in the same situation as the priest, for a terrible storm came crashing down on the area the night of my visit. Perhaps the weather was connected with the supernatural nature of the temple, luring unwary travelers to see the Hiyakki Yako. The rain fell hard against the roof and the wind howled and chilled me through to my bones.
I
persevered through the night and around
To my
amazement I saw the Hiyakki Yako as well. I rushed
from the wall with the crack back to my room to get my camera. But by
the time I had
returned,
the ghosts had all vanished. All that was left behind was a soft
glowing fungus. As I looked closer, however, I came to realize that the
visages of the Hiyakki Yako were
engraved on the floor and walls by the luminescent fungus.
Disappointed
though I
was that I had not gotten a photo, I had still encountered the
Procession of Ghosts just the same as the
priest had,
hundreds of years before, and now I had a new story to tell.
On to 'Three and
One are One'
Back to the Cover Page
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Author’s Note: This story intrigued me. What intrigued me about this story is that it features not one ghost, but a whole procession of them. In the original story the priest is an old man on a pilgrimage to Fushimi who sees the ghosts while staying at the temple to avoid the bad weather. That much I left the same in my story. The original story doesn’t end with the priest telling of his experience. The priest's tale then attracts a famous painter of the time, Tosa Mitsunobu, who wanted to paint the Hiyakki Yako and thought the ghosts at the temple would give him the inspiration.
As it develops the painter doesn’t see any ghosts,
but he gets
his inspiration from bioluminescent fungi growing inside the temple’s
center
room. While disappointed with not seeing any of the ghosts, he did get
his
painting done. I edited this second portion of the story out as it
seemed to me
to break from the ghost story theme and disprove what the priest had
seen.
Instead I added Nathan Proctor’s experience to the
story and put the fungus into his story. He
went to the temple seeking ghosts and found fungus when he wanted to
capture
them in a more permanent medium than that of his mind’s eye. I was
tempted to
put Nathan’s dead wife in the procession here. However, I ultimately
decided
not to, as I had difficulty justifying why she would be in
Bibliographical
Information:
"The Procession of Ghosts" by Richard Gordon Smith, from Ancient Tales
and Folk-lore of Japan (1918). Web Source: The Procession of
Ghosts