About

What Kaidan Files is

Kaidan Files is an English-language reference for Japanese ghost stories (kaidan), urban legends, yokai, and reportedly haunted places. It is edited by the team behind ocsoku.com (オカルト速報), a Japanese-language site that covers the same material. Kaidan Files exists to bring Japanese-language accounts of these stories — told first in online forum threads, regional folklore records, and published sources — to English-speaking readers.

How an article is made

Each article starts from a Japanese-language account rather than being written from scratch in English. Names, dates, and places mentioned in that account are checked against the sources cited on the page, and each claim is labeled documented, contested, or unverified based on how well it holds up, shown alongside its sources in an evidence table. Articles are not machine translations: they are researched and written in English for English-speaking readers, working from the underlying Japanese material.

How claims are labeled

Each row in an article's "Claims & evidence" table carries one of three labels.

• Documented — a source cited on the page directly supports the claim.
• Contested — the cited sources disagree with each other, or a source itself marks the claim as disputed or unconfirmed.
• Unverified — the story says it, but no source we found confirms that it happened.

A label describes the evidence cited on that page. It is not a verdict on whether the legend is true.

Earliest known record is the oldest record of the legend that we could confirm in a source cited on the page. It marks the earliest record confirmed for that article, not the earliest possible origin; older records may exist.

Corrections

If you spot an error, let us know through our contact form. We check reported errors and, once confirmed, update the article and reflect the correction in its update date.

What we do not do

We do not invent quotes or claims without a cited source, and we do not reproduce copyrighted text beyond what quotation allows. For removal requests about 5ch threads or other original Japanese-language sources, please follow the guidance on ocsoku.com.

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