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A Friend Possessed by a Ruin

Yamada, who joined the same company as Eiko, contacted me to say that Eiko had been acting strange lately.

Eiko has been my best friend since elementary school, and Yamada was our classmate in high school. The three of us were close. Eiko and Yamada happened to get jobs at a local company, while I went to a beauty school in the neighboring town.

About half a year had passed since we graduated high school.
The three of us kept in touch, though we hadn’t had the chance to meet because of our schedules.

When Yamada told me that Eiko seemed “off,” I thought maybe she was just tired from her new job. Even when I asked him what exactly seemed strange about her, all he said was, “I don’t know, it’s just a feeling… something’s weird.”
A vague answer.

From what I could tell in our LINE messages and phone calls, Eiko sounded perfectly normal. I assumed Yamada was just overthinking it. I had no idea something was truly wrong.

But after a while, I started to notice something odd too.
The selfies Eiko sent me changed.
They used to be in cafés or at home, but lately, the backgrounds showed rough concrete walls — unfamiliar places, dimly lit, her face barely visible.

I forwarded one of those strange photos to Yamada, and he told me Eiko had sent him similar ones. Apparently, Eiko had recently gotten into camping, and according to Yamada, the photos were probably from a campsite she often visited. I remembered her mentioning that too — and that there was a handsome staff member there she liked. She’d said she went camping often just to see him.

But still… that dark place looked nothing like any campsite I’d seen.
I didn’t know much about camping, so I didn’t question it.

About a year after we graduated, Yamada contacted me again — this time with terrible news.
Eiko had gone missing.

She’d been absent from work for two days without notice, unreachable, and hadn’t returned home. Her parents had already filed a police report.

I was shocked. But deep down, I somehow felt like I knew where she might be.
Apparently, Yamada felt the same way. He asked me to come with him to look for her at the “campsite” she often went to. Of course, I agreed.

Yamada said Eiko had once told him roughly where it was located.
The next day, I went to Yamada’s house, and he told me he’d found what looked like the place on Google Maps — a structure deep in the nearby mountains.

We drove there together. It took about twenty minutes.

The “campsite” was halfway up a mountain road — but it wasn’t a campsite at all.

When we got out of the car, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

It wasn’t a campsite, but a ruin — a large, concrete building that looked like an abandoned gymnasium or something similar.

It was quite big, visible even from the outside. It was daytime, so there was some light, but I could imagine how pitch-dark it must be at night with no streetlamps around.

“Should we go inside…?”
Yamada murmured. I wanted to say absolutely not, but being left alone outside felt worse. So I quietly followed him.

Yamada entered first, flashlight in hand, through a broken front window.

Inside, it was surprisingly bright — we could see without the flashlight. The back wall had collapsed, letting sunlight spill in.
The place was just a wide, empty concrete floor.

“There’s nothing here…”
I said to Yamada, but he didn’t reply. My voice echoed faintly.
Puzzled, I turned to look at him.

He was frozen, staring at something ahead. I followed his gaze—

—and screamed.

“KYAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

There, in the middle of the room, was a girl smiling and hugging a mannequin.

It was Eiko.

My scream snapped Yamada back to his senses. He shouted Eiko’s name.
Eiko slowly turned her head toward us. Her eyes were empty, lifeless — something was clearly wrong.

Her movements were strange, unnatural, almost puppet-like.
It was as if her soul were gone.

Yamada rushed forward and pulled her away from the mannequin.
She didn’t resist — she just let him.

We carried her to the car and drove straight to the hospital.

But the conclusion was unbearable.

Eiko was already dead.
She had died there, embracing that mannequin.

The doctors said it was heart failure, but none of us could understand how a young, healthy girl like her could just die like that.

Later, Yamada told me what he’d learned about the ruin.

It used to be a wealthy couple’s private villa.
One day, the husband went mad, murdered his mistresses there, and then took his own life.
Since then, the place had been abandoned — a cursed ruin.

Even so, why had Eiko been drawn there?
Why did she keep visiting?
And how had she even found out about that place?

Perhaps…
Eiko had been possessed — captivated — by the spirits that lingered in the ruin.