After Both Seller and Buyer Met Mysterious Deaths, a Leading Kansai Crime Scene Cleaner Reveals His Most Unexplained Encounters

Just when it seemed everything had been resolved

Kansai Clean Service specializes in cleaning so-called “stigmatized properties” (homes where deaths or other disturbing incidents have occurred), sorting and disposing of the belongings of the deceased, and clearing out hoarder houses that are nearly impossible to clean. Their employees routinely work in some of the harshest environments imaginable—rooms filled with foul odors and bodily fluids, or mountains of trash that seem endless no matter how much is removed. Along the way, they have also experienced terrifying incidents that sent chills down their spines.

In the previous article, “The Ghost of a Long-Haired Woman”—The Spine-Chilling Experience of Kansai’s No. 1 Special Cleaning Company, we introduced a bizarre consultation that was brought to the company. In this second part, we take a closer look at what happened afterward to the property where the paranormal phenomena occurred.

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The property was a vacant house in Osaka Prefecture.

After repeated reports of strange occurrences, the owner asked Kansai Clean Service for help, and the company ultimately decided to purchase the house.

Afterward, the family’s Buddhist altar underwent tamashii-nuki—a Buddhist ritual in which a priest chants sutras to symbolically remove the spirit believed to reside in the altar or a grave. The memorial photographs and the family death register were also disposed of properly.

During the cleanup, no employee reported seeing any ghosts.

Nor did any paranormal phenomena occur.

However, while sorting through the house, they discovered something unsettling: an urn whose owner could not be identified.

Even after asking the client, the response was:

“I have absolutely no idea whose it is.”

Other relatives were also questioned, but no one recognized it.

Had it simply been forgotten over the years?

Or had someone left it there without anyone ever knowing?

In the end, the urn was respectfully memorialized as the remains of a person with no known relatives.

After purchasing and clearing out the property, the company promptly put it up for sale.

The buyer was a man who loved DIY projects.

He worked as a carpenter and said he intended to renovate the house himself and live there.

The company honestly told him about the rumors that ghosts had appeared there.

It was not a stigmatized property in the legal sense, they explained, but these unusual circumstances were worth mentioning.

The man replied:

“I don’t believe in that kind of thing, so it doesn’t bother me.”

The sales contract was completed, and ownership of the house was transferred to him.

Not long afterward, however, the client’s mother—the woman who had sold the property together with her child—passed away.

According to the account, her health had deteriorated after the day she entered the house with the cleanup crew, and she never recovered.

She was still only in her fifties.

About six months after the sale, someone from Kansai Clean Service happened to be passing through the area.

Curious about what had become of the property, they stopped to take a look.

The house was gone.

The lot had been completely cleared.

There were traces of a jichinsai (groundbreaking purification ceremony).

A gohei—a wooden wand adorned with paper streamers used by Shinto priests during rituals—had been left standing in the ground.

It appeared that a new house was about to be built there.

Perhaps the buyer had decided to demolish the old house and build a new one instead of renovating it.

The company didn’t give it any further thought.

The tragedy that befell the buyer

About a year later, someone from Kansai Clean Service happened to pass by the area again. They assumed a new house would have been built by then, but the lot was still vacant. The remains of the groundbreaking ceremony had been left untouched, weathered and falling apart. Trash had been dumped on the land, and even a bicycle had been abandoned there.

They approached a woman from the neighborhood and asked,

“What happened to this place?”

She replied,

“The man who bought it was apparently planning to renovate the house himself, but he suddenly died in an accident.”

Since then, the land has remained exactly as it is.

When the house was demolished, they reportedly discovered an old well at the back of the property. Kansai Clean Service had not noticed it when they cleaned out and sold the house. The neighborhood woman said,

“Maybe that well is what’s causing all this.”

Since ancient times, water has been regarded as the source of life, and it was believed that gods dwell within it. When filling in a well, there is a ritual called “ikinuki” (“letting the well breathe”). Large stones are placed in first, followed by gravel, then soil, gradually using smaller materials. Finally, a pole is inserted so the well can breathe. It is said that if this ritual is not performed, misfortune will follow.

No one knows how that old well was ultimately dealt with.

What remains as fact is that misfortune befell one person after another who became involved with that house: the mother and daughter who claimed to have seen the ghost of a woman; the daughter, who was involved in a car accident on the way home after viewing the property; the mother, who fell ill from the day she entered the house and eventually died; and the man who bought the house saying, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” only to later die in an accident.

Who was the female spirit the mother and daughter claimed to have seen?

Whose ashes were in the urn?

Did the man who purchased the property also see something?

Did everyone who tried to inherit the property end up meeting with misfortune?

What, exactly, is on that land?

No one knows the answers anymore.