Who is Hanako-san?
Hanako-san of the Toilet is the ghost of a girl said to live in a school girls’ toilet. In the best-known version, you knock three times on the door of the third stall from the entrance in the third-floor toilet and say, “Hanako-san, are you there?” and a voice answers, “Yes.” She is usually described as a girl with a bob haircut and a red skirt.
Nationwide fame through the school ghost story boom
Similar stories are said to have been told as early as the 1950s, with details varying by region and school. In the 1990s came the “school ghost story boom,” with a string of books collecting scary stories from children and anime and films based on them, and Hanako-san became known to children all over Japan.
Why the toilet?
School toilets are divided into stalls, dim, and places where you are likely to be alone. In older schools the toilets were often at the far end of the building, making them a little scary for children. That anxiety is thought to have been the soil from which ghost stories like Hanako-san’s grew. Some works even portray Hanako-san as a kind figure who listens to children’s problems.
