It’s 1:47 AM as I write this.
I have exactly 16 minutes before I need to stop, close my laptop, and stay away from anything reflective until dawn.
You might think that’s paranoid. You might think this is just another internet ghost story.
But if you’re reading this after 2:00 AM, and there’s a mirror anywhere in your room…
Check it now. Quick glance. Just to be sure.
Still just you?
Good.
Now let me tell you why that might change.
The Suspicious Forum
I found that story on a rainy night, unable to sleep, wandering into the dead corners of the Japanese Internet—places most people can no longer even remember. An abandoned forum from the early 2000s that doesn’t appear on Google. Not on the Wayback Machine either. I stumbled upon it through a broken chain of links from an old creepypasta site—digital trash that security experts call deepjunk.
NazoBako — “The Mystery Box.”
Its logo: a crude ASCII icon of a slightly open box, with tiny text underneath:
「開けた者は閉じるな」 — “He who opens must not close.”
Black background, white text, font glitches, corrupted images flickering like rotten teeth of an ancient digital monster. Most thread titles were typical: 「3:33 Challenge」, 「Shadow on Kisaragi Railway」, 「Banned Audio from 1998」… cheap creepypasta games with bizarrely precise details—coordinates, train numbers, pixel color codes, dream times matching eclipses.
I was about to leave when a small thread at the bottom caught my eye:
[Level 0]
No description. No comments. Only three posts.
None had clickbait titles. No hashtags, no conspiracy theories, no illustrations. They seemed written not to attract attention, but to conceal.
The last post: March 11, 2011, at 1:59 AM.
Just hours before the great Tōhoku earthquake struck.
The title whispered from the screen:
SHIBUYA – 2:03 AM – DO NOT STAND BEFORE THE MIRROR
I hovered my mouse over it. The cursor turned into an error icon. The page hesitated, choking, then finally opened.
At that moment, I felt something was wrong—as if someone was standing behind me, watching me open a post I was never supposed to see.
The Second Bell
No username. No avatar. No registration traces. Only a cold tag: #m48x_sh. Under the title, a short note—not a loud warning, but something calm, certain, carved into a tombstone:
“I do not write to be believed. I write to warn. If you ever hear the second bell at Shibuya Station at 2 AM… you must run. Don’t look back.”
The story followed a man named Kido—night shift worker at a small ramen shop in Shibuya, corner of Dogenzaka Street, opposite the public restroom in Miyashita Park. Not famous, just an old-style shop with a faded wooden sign, paper lantern swaying in the wind, serving noodles to drunk customers and night-shift street sweepers.
Kido: 33 years old, simple life, modest dress, no social media, no lover. Rented alone in Udagawacho, walking home every night after closing. Always 1:40 AM—lock the shop, greet the old owner, step into the faint night smelling of rain and garbage.
His route passed Shibuya Station’s facade, near the Hachiko exit—crowded with tourists by day, deserted after midnight like an abandoned gallery. No trains after 1:20 AM. Hallway lights switched to energy-saving mode. Only a few signs flickered weakly like memories of a dying man.
Kido wrote:
“I don’t remember when it started, but one night, right at 2:03, I heard a very soft ‘ting’—not a train bell. It… sounded like cracking glass.”
He thought it was exhaustion. But it returned the next night. And the next.
“I was walking past the station front. When the bell rang, I looked up. And I saw… myself… in the glass of the phone booth near exit number 3.”
Reinforced glass, dusty, often vandalized. No mirror there. But that night—a clear reflection. Exactly like him: black hoodie, white medical mask. But something was wrong:
“I didn’t raise my hand. But in the reflection, I—or whatever that was—was raising its hand, beckoning me.”
Kido ran. It became an obsession.
Night by night, the reflection grew bolder:
First: beckoning with a hand. Second: hand touching the inside of the glass. Third: face pressed against glass, head tilted, lips moving—whispering something soundless.
“I started losing sleep. Asked to change shifts. Changed my route home. But whenever I came back late—if the clock struck 2:03—I’d see it… in restroom mirrors, taxi glass, even water pooled under manhole covers.”
“It’s not me. But it knows me.”
His tone changed in the later posts. Shorter sentences. Spelling mistakes. As if writing in agitation or losing consciousness.
The story felt too real. Unlike fake ghost stories online—no climax, no dramatic scare. Just cold, steady observation. A victim’s report before disappearance.
But below was an addendum. Different style, as if inserted later:
Tag: #H01K31
“Kido disappeared March 11th morning. Earthquake day. No body found. No one knew if he ever left his boarding house. The ramen shop closed indefinitely. The old owner vanished, though the building didn’t collapse.”
“I went to the phone booth by exit 3. Glass covered by an old sign taped across. I peeled it off. Behind, a messy handwritten line in dark red marker:”
“Whoever hears the bell at 2:03—is no longer human.”
The 24th Frame
I thought Kido’s story was a closed delusion.
I was wrong.
Under the original post: exactly one comment, posted nine years later, August 2020—height of the pandemic. When people avoided each other, stayed off streets, and the city became… audible.
@tomoya_retro88. No profile, no avatar. Just a hurried paragraph, as if someone wrote then vanished from the digital world:
“I thought it was urban legend until I saw it myself. I work night shift filming in Shibuya—street scenes for a local station. When free, I set the camera to record automatically.”
“There’s one frame… I can never forget.”
Footage shot from the third floor opposite Shibuya Station, near Hachiko exit—exactly where Kido passed. Camera fixed, filming from high angle where people wouldn’t know they were recorded.
“At 2:03 AM, the frame captured the entire street front—signboards, glass walls, traffic lights—everything normal. No people.”
“But when I slowed the footage to cut it, I found a single frame—only one out of 24 per second—with a shadow standing in the middle of the glass wall opposite.”
“Not on the street. Not inside a room. But in the void—right in the glass—like pressed from inside.”
“Head tilted to one side, hand pressed to glass from inside—like trying to pierce through. And though it appeared for only 1/24th of a second, the eyes… were mine.”
“But I was never there.”
Google Drive link left: BROKEN. Files automatically deleted after years untouched—or maybe they never existed in the system.
I searched @tomoya_retro88 everywhere—Twitter, Reddit, Flickr. Nothing. That name existed only once, in one comment, then dissolved into Shibuya’s damp dawn air.
I got chills. Not from fear, but because I knew he wasn’t lying. I’ve done post-production work. I know what cannot be photoshopped in compressed security footage. And I’ve seen that thing too—not in mirrors, but in a friend’s eyes the night she said:
“I saw myself looking at me from across the street. But I couldn’t move. And it was smiling.”
The Reflection Hour
I saved that post to my hard drive.
shibuya_frame.txt
Last edited: 2018. But I opened it in 2023.
I remembered every word @tomoya_retro88 described. The phrase “the reflection was stuck reversed on the glass” haunted me for years. But every time I reopened the file, that passage disappeared. Not erased—fragmented into strange characters, corrupted code missing bytes.
The symbols: 郢¬í@
Different every time.
As if the world didn’t want me to read it again.
I tried printing, saving as PDF, copying to USB. But in every format, the “frame” description blurred or vanished.
Something didn’t want that part to survive in human memory.
I refused to stop. I needed verification. Tuesday night, November. I took the train to Shibuya. Exactly 1:50 AM. Cold. Only lazy taxis waiting for passengers. I stood near the phone booth Kido mentioned—exit 3, Don Quijote corner.
Nothing unusual. No bell.
Until exactly 2:03.
Still no bell.
But all sound suddenly vanished.
Not silence—a vacuum of sound. Someone had pressed “mute” on the entire city. Wind stopped. No horns, no fan noise, not even blood flowing in my ears.
Two seconds.
Everything snapped back to normal.
I almost thought I’d imagined it—until I looked at the Don Quijote shop window.
My reflection was there. But turning its head back.
Though I stood still, eyes straight ahead, hands motionless.
I quickly spun around.
Nothing. No one behind me.
But in my heart, a gap had just opened.
I stepped back, heart pounding. It wasn’t hallucination. It was a message:
“I see you.”
Since that night, I’ve never returned to Shibuya after 2 AM. Actually, I avoid looking in mirrors after 2 AM anywhere—restroom glass, water reflections, even clock faces reflecting light.
I don’t know what really happened to Kido.
But there’s one detail from that old post I cannot forget:
“In the end, it no longer looked like me. But like… the version of me if I had chosen a different path. A different person I could have become.”
It didn’t come to kill him.
It came to replace him.
The Warning
I don’t know what time it is where you are. Maybe it’s noon, busy streets, a lit office.
But if you’re standing before any glass, or about to pass through a hallway with mirrors…
It’s best not to look.
If it’s exactly 2:03…
And you see yourself in the mirror looking back—but you are not looking back—
Run.
Don’t turn around.
Don’t reflect it.
Don’t let it know you’ve seen it.
Because once the gap opens…
You’re already halfway gone.
EPILOGUE
The NazoBako forum went offline the day after I finished writing this. Domain expired. No archives exist. Sometimes I wonder if I was meant to find it—or if it found me.
Last night, I found a new file on my desktop: “shibuya_level1.txt”
I haven’t opened it yet.
I’m not sure I want to.
But I can hear it calling.
END