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Emi and I were splitting a bag of gas station gummy worms on my couch, half-watching some grainy YouTube compilation of “cursed” internet challenges, when she said, kind of offhand, “You know none of this is even scary compared to stuff from home.”
“Home” meaning Osaka, where she’d lived until she was fourteen. I perked up immediately because Emi doesn’t usually volunteer this stuff. I have to drag it out of her.
“Okay, hit me,” I said. “Scariest Japanese thing you know.”
She thought about it for a second, picking a gummy worm apart. “Daruma-san ga koronda,” she said. “It’s a game. Kids play it, but also… not just kids.”
“Is that the one with the doll? The little round guy with no arms?”
“Different Daruma. Same word, but this is a woman. A ghost.” She said it casually, like she was telling me about a recipe. “You do it in the bathroom. You fill the tub, you get in, you turn off the lights, and you wash your hair with your eyes closed while you say ‘Daruma-san fell down’ over and over.”
I laughed. “So it’s basically Japanese Bloody Mary.”
“No.” She said it fast, almost annoyed, which wasn’t like her. “Bloody Mary ends when you leave the bathroom. This doesn’t.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t end?”
“I mean once you start it, she follows you. That’s the whole point of the game. She’s not stuck in the mirror. She comes with you.”
I’ll admit, that got a real chill out of me, but not a serious one. The kind you get from a good campfire story, not the kind you get from something you think could actually happen to you. I asked her more about it—how you’re supposed to picture a woman slipping in the bathtub and dying, and how you have to keep your eyes shut or something goes wrong. She mentioned a word you’re supposed to say if she gets too close. Tomare, I think. Stop. And something else you say at the end, to cut it off, but honestly by that point I’d stopped really absorbing the details, because I had zero intention of getting in a bathtub and doing any of this. I was just enjoying the story.
“You have to end it before midnight,” Emi said. “If you don’t—” She stopped herself, shook her head. “Don’t play it, Zoe. I’m serious. I know how you get.”
“I’m not going to play it,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t even like ghost stuff that badly. I just like hearing about it.”
She gave me a look like she didn’t fully believe me, but she let it go, and we went back to the gummy worms and the dumb YouTube video, and that was that.
I didn’t think about it again until almost eleven that night, after Emi had gone home and I was alone in my apartment doing absolutely nothing productive. I was lying in bed scrolling on my phone when it occurred to me, out of nowhere, that I couldn’t quite remember the exact words Emi had used. Daruma-san fell down. Something like that. And before I really decided to do anything about it, I was already typing it into a search bar.
I want to be honest about this part, because it matters later: I didn’t research it carefully. I found a couple of forum posts that repeated the basic setup—fill the tub, lights off, eyes closed, wash your hair, repeat the phrase—and I skimmed past a lot of the comments because most of them were people arguing about whether it was real or just a modern legend made up for a horror movie. I wasn’t trying to learn the whole game. I was trying to remember enough of it to scare myself a little before bed, the same way you’d rewatch a scary movie clip alone in the dark because some small dumb part of you likes how it feels.
My bathroom is nothing special. White tile, a shower curtain with little lemons on it, a bath mat that’s seen better days. I filled the tub, got the water a little hotter than I probably should have, and got in. It felt completely normal. Kind of nice, actually. I turned off the light and sat there for a second in the dark, listening to the water settle, feeling a little silly.
Then I closed my eyes, reached for the shampoo, and started washing my hair.
“Daruma-san fell down.”
I said it quiet at first, almost embarrassed, like I was talking to an empty room because I was.
“Daruma-san fell down.”
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth time, my mind started doing what minds do in the dark with your eyes shut—it started filling in pictures. At first it was nothing, just shapes, the kind of visual static you get behind closed eyelids. Then it sharpened into something specific, something I hadn’t consciously built: a woman standing in a bathtub, her back to me, long black hair soaked flat against her shoulders.
I kept saying the phrase. I don’t know why. Momentum, maybe.
“Daruma-san fell down.”
In my head, the woman’s foot slipped. It happened almost gently, like slow motion, and then it wasn’t gentle at all—she went down hard, and the picture in my mind had sound now too, a wet crack and then nothing, and I felt something in my own chest tighten like I’d watched it happen in real life instead of imagined it.
I opened my mouth to say the phrase again and instead I just stopped, because I became completely certain, with no reason at all, that there was someone standing directly behind me.
Not near the door. Not across the bathroom. Right behind the tub, close enough that if I leaned my head back I’d touch them.
I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t feel any change in the air, nothing brushing my skin. It was just a certainty, total and immediate, the kind of thing your body knows before your brain agrees to know it.
I opened my eyes.
Nothing. Dark bathroom, lemon shower curtain, my own dumb shampoo bottle on the edge of the tub.
I got out of that bath so fast I nearly slipped myself, grabbed a towel, and stood there dripping and breathing too hard, feeling stupid and shaky at the same time. I told myself Emi had planted the image in my head, and I’d scared myself in the dark. That’s it. That’s all that had happened.
I went to bed telling myself that, and I mostly believed it, and I fell asleep faster than I expected to.
The next morning felt completely ordinary, which made me feel even more ridiculous about the night before. I got up, got dressed, went to the grocery store before my shift because I was out of literally everything.
I was in the cereal aisle, half paying attention, comparing granola prices, when I glanced up toward the far end of the aisle and saw a woman standing there.
She wasn’t doing anything. Just standing, facing my direction, with long black hair that hung wet and heavy past her shoulders, dripping slightly onto the floor tile even though there was no reason for anyone in a dry grocery store to be dripping wet. Her clothes clung to her like she’d just climbed out of water. I remember thinking, in the half second before it registered as strange, that she must have just come in from the rain, except it wasn’t raining. It hadn’t rained in days.
I looked back down at the granola. Told myself I was still rattled from the night before, that my brain was doing the thing brains do when you’ve primed them with something creepy.
I looked back up.
She was closer.
Not standing over me, not dramatically closer—but she’d definitely moved, maybe fifteen feet down the aisle instead of forty, and I hadn’t heard footsteps, hadn’t seen her walk, and there was no way, no physical way, she could have covered that ground in the second and a half I’d looked away.
Something Emi said clicked into place in my head. Once you start it, she follows you.
I don’t know what made me do it, but I said the word out loud, quiet, more reflex than plan. “Tomare.”
She stopped. Or she’d already stopped, I honestly couldn’t tell you, but either way she didn’t get any closer, and I turned my cart around and left that aisle so fast I nearly ran over a display of granola bars, and I didn’t look back until I was in my car in the parking lot with the doors locked, feeling like a complete lunatic and also completely certain I wasn’t one.
I saw her three more times that day, and I want to be clear that each time was different, and each time she was closer than she had any business being.
The second time was at work. I do the register at a little bookstore downtown, nothing exciting, and around two in the afternoon I looked up from ringing someone out and caught her reflection in the front window, standing across the street. Just standing. Watching the store, or watching me, I couldn’t tell. I rang up the rest of the sale with my hands shaking a little, and when I looked again, she was gone from the street—but there was a wet footprint on the bookstore’s welcome mat, just inside the door, and no explanation for it, and nobody else seemed to notice or care.
The third time, I was in the bathroom at work washing my hands, and I made the mistake of looking up into the mirror. She was standing in the stall behind me, reflected, even though I’d checked and there was nobody else in the bathroom when I walked in. I said “Tomare” again before I even really looked at her properly, and when I turned around, fast, there was nothing there. Just an empty stall with the door hanging slightly open.
By the fourth time, near six, when I was walking to the bus stop and saw her standing at the far end of a crowded crosswalk, unmoving while everyone else moved around her like she wasn’t even a slightly strange thing to see, I had to say it twice before it worked, and even then it felt like it held for less time than it had that morning. Like something was wearing thin.
That’s when I called Emi.
She picked up on the second ring, and I didn’t even get through a full sentence before she cut me off.
“Wait. Wait, say that again. You did what?”
“I played it. Last night. I know, I know, don’t—”
“Zoe.” Her voice had gone somewhere I hadn’t heard it go before. “I told you not to. I told you specifically.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I wasn’t even planning to, I was just curious and I looked some stuff up and—” I told her what had happened, the tub, the vision, the feeling behind me, and then the grocery store, work, the bathroom mirror, the crosswalk. She was quiet through most of it in a way that scared me more than anything she could have said.
“You have to end it,” she said finally. “Before midnight. You remember how it ends?”
“I think so. You say kitta, right? Like a cutting thing. You do a motion like you’re cutting her loose.”
“Yes, but Zoe, you have to actually—” And then her voice cut out, just static and a dropped word, and when it came back she was saying something about the order of it, something about facing her directly when you did it, but a truck went by outside my building right at that second and I only caught half of what she said, something like “—has to see your face when you—” before the call dropped completely.
I called back. It went straight to voicemail. I texted her, we got cut off, what were you saying, and got nothing back right away, which I figured meant her signal was bad, not that anything was actually wrong.
I felt like I had enough. Kitta. Face her. Cut her loose. That felt complete enough to work with.
By eleven-thirty, Daruma-san was standing at the end of my hallway, inside my apartment, closer than she had been all day, and I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for Emi to call back.
I won’t pretend I wasn’t terrified. I was, in the plain, unglamorous way that makes your hands clumsy. But I made myself walk toward her instead of away, because everything in me understood, without anyone telling me, that this was the only way it ended. I stopped a few feet from her, close enough to see the water still running off the ends of her hair onto my hallway floor, close enough to see that her face, when I finally forced myself to look at it, was just a face—tired, wet, unreadable, not monstrous, which was somehow worse.
I made the motion Emi had described, a sharp cut through the air between us, and said it as clearly as I could.
“Kitta.”
And she was gone. Just gone. No fading, no drifting away. One second she was there, and the next she wasn’t. The wet footprints on my floor stayed a second longer than she did and then those were gone too. The oppressive feeling that had been sitting on my chest all day lifted so completely and so suddenly that I actually sat down right there in the hallway, hands shaking, laughing a little, the way you laugh when you’ve been crying and don’t know which one you’re doing anymore.
Midnight came and went. Nothing happened. I checked my phone one more time—still nothing from Emi—and typed out a quick message before I let myself collapse into bed.
I did it. It’s over.
I put my phone on the nightstand, face down, and crawled into bed. I was exhausted, and for the first time all day, I didn’t feel like someone was watching me.
I was asleep within minutes.
My phone lit up on the nightstand.
What do you mean you did it?
A few seconds later, another message appeared.
Zoe. Call me. NOW.
I woke up for no reason I could name, the way you sometimes do in the middle of the night, alert before you understand why.
Then I heard it. Water running.
I lay there a second, telling myself it was the pipes, or a neighbor, or nothing at all, but the sound didn’t stop, and it was coming from my bathroom, and I hadn’t left anything on.
I got up. The hallway floor was dry. My bathroom door was open a few inches, and there was light coming from somewhere inside it that I hadn’t left on, a dim, wavering kind of light, and the water kept running, steady and unhurried, like someone was filling a tub and had all the time in the world.
I pushed the door open the rest of the way.
The bathtub was filling itself, water rising steadily toward the rim, and someone was already sitting inside it, facing away from me, long black hair hanging wet down her back into the water.
I understood, standing there in my own doorway, that whatever I had done in that hallway hours earlier had not been enough.
I’d missed something.
Slowly, the woman in the tub turned her head toward me.
“You didn’t finish.”
Want to know the legend behind the story?
Read Daruma-san: The Japanese Bath Game You Should Never Play to learn about the terrifying ritual that inspired Zoe’s encounter.
© 2026 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog.
Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission.
This tale may appear in a future special collection.