The first one was in 1972. It was about 4 o'clock on a lazy Sunday afternoon in Tokyo's then semi-rural Setagaya Ward.

Yaoi (above, center), an employee at Nippon Television Network, was stretched out on the tatami at home, gazing off into space as he planned his upcoming work schedule.

That's when the face appeared, right there on the ceiling boards, like an image cast from a movie projector.

The way Yaoi describes the vision, it was as frightening as it was bizarre: a man in his mid-20s, his face soaked in blood running from his brow. If it was a ghost, as it appeared to be, he had died long ago; he bore the topknot hairstyle and the shoulder-strapped armor of a samurai. Yaoi was transfixed.

"It felt as if it went on for about 10 minutes or so," Yaoi, today a 67-year-old professor who teaches about paranormal phenomena, said as we spoke in a Tokyo cafe. "Suddenly I could move and the figure disappeared. I got up and looked around, but nothing had changed. It was just my ordinary room."

Japanese popular wisdom has it that the souls of the dead, if not properly worshipped by surviving relatives, cannot enter heaven. Instead, they wander among the living as agitated, melancholic ghosts. But Japan, meanwhile, isn't alone in the belief that people who die by violence need more appeasement than most and are thus particularly likely to come back to haunt us.

How had the floating samurai succumbed? Had he died at the end of a spear in some feudal battle centuries ago? (That wasn't likely; a Setagaya Ward official said there are no records of medieval clashes in the area.) Or was he the victim of a murder or a freak accident? Yaoi never learned.

"I felt that he wanted to tell me something, but he couldn't . . . He tried to open his mouth, but he couldn't," he recalled.

Yaoi says he crossed paths with a ghost again several years later, when he was directing a popular television show on UFOs and other mysterious topics. He had heard that some dozen people -- all show-business types -- who had stayed at a particular room in a fancy Kyoto hotel had described being attacked by a specter that suffocated them as they lay in their beds helpless, unable to move.

It would make a perfect theme for a TV segment, thought Yaoi. He and his cameraman went to the hotel, located across the street from a cemetery, and rented the much-discussed room. They turned off the lights and waited.

Around midnight, he says "an unnatural sleepiness" overtook them, and the cameraman fell unconscious clutching his Betamax video camera in his arms. "It surprised me," he said. "This cameraman never slept when working."

Like the room's previous tenants, Yaoi's body went rigid. But he managed to keep his eyes open and saw a brilliant light fill the room.

Then came the ghost, an ashen-colored vision in vaguely human form. It floated across the room to a corner about 2 meters away and hovered there as rain pounded against the window. Yaoi wanted to wake his cameraman, but he found that he was unable to move.

The minutes passed, and he discovered he could move his hand enough to jostle his colleague. By then, though, it was too late. The shadow had vanished. The two men checked the door to the hallway. It was locked and chained.

The stuff of an overactive imagination, a skeptic could say -- but still, Yaoi's stories were not easy to dismiss, if only because they were so much like others told across these much-spooked isles.

A friend in the countryside, for instance, once told me of seeing her grandfather's ghost stare at a clock in the family living room. An unassuming teenager confided that groups of spirits would often gather outside her house and wave when she got back from school. Yet another person recalled a laughing man standing in the doorway with a knife in his head.

The hair-raiser that came closest to home was during a trip to a remote mountainside inn in Yamagata Prefecture, where some foreigners, including myself, had been sent as English instructors to entertain a group of teenagers with language games.

One night just after everyone had gone to bed, a group of girls ran screaming from their room, wailing that they had seen three phantoms -- a man, a woman and a little girl -- climb out of the wall.

Some of the girls were crying with shock, so it didn't seem like a prank. I wondered if it was perhaps a case of adolescent hysteria set off by a ghost story. But then another English teacher burst from her room. Three eerie figures -- once again a man, a woman and a little girl -- had just wafted past her futon.

Hotel officials were blase when told of the incidents. "Well, there they go again," said the folks at the reception desk, explaining that a family of three had been killed in a car accident nearby and had haunted rooms at the hotel ever since. A Shinto exorcist who arrived the following morning told us the uninvited guests had come from the beyond during the recent O-bon festival, but then had lost their way.

At the very least, coming face-to-ghoulish-face with an apparition is a reminder -- as Hamlet told his comrade -- that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

For Yaoi, his experience with the paranormal was so profound that he quit his television job to make his own documentaries on the subject and teach a correspondence college course.

It is not surprising to Yaoi that so many of his compatriots claim to meet spirits. Anyone, he says, with enough sensitivity will tune in to them like a TV antenna picking up electromagnetic waves.

"Right here," Yaoi said with a sweep of his hand to indicate the cafe, "there is energy from hundreds, thousands, of ghosts."

The Japan Times: Aug. 11, 2002
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This story originally appeared in a Japan Times package on ghosts:

• Days of the dead: O-bon and the ghosts of Japan
• Chill out in Tokyo's favorite haunts
• One god to rule them all