Hanako-san: The Ghost Waiting in the Third Stall

In 2020 a Japanese anime series put a school toilet ghost in its title, twenty-five years after a live-action horror film had done the same thing. Both were working from a dare that children in Japan have passed to one another for decades: find the toilet on the third floor of the school building, knock three times on the third stall, and ask whether the girl inside is there. In the films and games the answer starts a horror plot; in the schoolyard it was a test of nerve, performed in a corridor that had gone quiet after the last bell.

Quick facts

• Verdict: folklore, not a documented event — a school ghost story that later accounts trace to the late 1940s, whose name appears in dated writing by 1979, and that children carried across Japan by word of mouth in the 1980s, long before the internet existed.
• Name: Toire no Hanako-san (トイレの花子さん), roughly “Hanako-san of the toilet”; often shortened to Hanako-san.
• What she is: a girl’s ghost said to answer a knocking ritual performed at a stall in a school toilet.
• Earliest known record: the name appears in a 1979 survey report, and a 1983 collection of Iwate folk beliefs is the first clear record of the tradition; an account set around 1948 in Iwate Prefecture is older but was written down later (see below).
• Where it spread: among schoolchildren nationwide from around the 1980s, then into weekly magazines, children’s books, films, anime and games from the early 1990s onward.

What the story says

The core of the legend is an instruction rather than a plot. The most famous version tells children to go to a toilet on the third floor of the school building, knock three times on the third door, and ask aloud whether Hanako-san is present. The point of the game is that something answers. English-language accounts record the same shape: three knocks at the third stall of a girls’ toilet, usually on a school’s third floor, and a question addressed to whoever might be inside. Some versions turn the question into an invitation — “Hanako-san, let’s play” — which is answered with a “yes”, and in some of them the child who called her is then pulled into the toilet bowl.

She now has a fixed look, which is part of why she is instantly recognisable in illustrations: a girl with a bobbed haircut and a red skirt, described in some versions as a red suspender skirt and in others as a red skirt worn with a white blouse. That image is younger than the legend. An article on nippon.com, drawing on the work of Kazushi Yoshioka, an associate professor at Yamaguchi Prefectural University, notes that the early Hanako-san was only a voice, and that the bobbed hair and red skirt became fixed in the 1990s through children’s books, manga and anime.

Beyond that, the tradition supplies very little. There is no agreed narrative of what she does to a child who calls her, no single school where it is supposed to have started, and no canonical ending. What the legend does carry, in abundance, is explanations for why she is there — several of them, each pointing at a different kind of death, and all of them attached to the same ritual.

Earliest known record

Reference works long gave “around 1950” as the starting point: a legend known as “the third Hanako-san” is said to have existed from about that time and to have spread among children throughout the country from about the 1980s. The folklorist Matthew Meyer is cited for the view that the story dates back to the 1950s, and a 2014 NPR article described it as having been told for the past seventy years. None of these gives a first source.

Japanese sources push the story slightly earlier and give it a setting. The nippon.com article and a 2019 piece on KADOKAWA’s Da Vinci Web both describe an account set around 1948 at an elementary school in Iwate Prefecture. In the toilet of the school gymnasium, a child who went into the third stall from the far end heard a voice say “the third Hanako-san”, and a white hand reached up out of the toilet bowl. Da Vinci Web traces the account through Itsuki Asazato’s companion guide to modern Japanese strange phenomena to Miyoko Matsutani’s folktale collection Gendai Minwa Ko. It is the oldest dated version in the sources, but it was written down later, so its date rests on recollection.

Records written at the time come later. In a 2025 conversation published by Shueisha’s Yomitai, the folklorist Ryuhei Hirota notes that the name already appears in a middle-school pupil’s essay in a 1979 report on a survey of the Tama River basin and its water pollution. The earliest record he treats as clearly tied to the tradition is a 1983 collection of folk beliefs from Iwate Prefecture, which records a short saying: at the third stall from the right, say “Hanako-san”, and a voice inside answers “yes”. His view is that the legend must have been known widely by the end of the 1970s, even though almost nobody wrote it down.

So the answer has layers: an account dated to around 1948 but recorded afterwards, the name in a 1979 document, and a clear record of the tradition from 1983. They do not contradict each other; they differ in how firmly each is tied to its date. What is much better attested is the next stage: the nationwide spread among children in the 1980s, and the move into commercial media in the 1990s.

What is documented

Several things about Hanako-san are solid, in the sense that sources of different kinds consistently record them.

The ritual itself is stable. Accounts written in Japanese and English, from reference works to a summary of a university researcher’s findings, describe the same procedure — third floor, third stall, three knocks, a spoken question — which is unusual for a children’s legend and suggests the instruction, rather than any story about a victim, is what actually travelled between schools.

The chronology is also reasonably clear in outline: an account set in the late 1940s, written records from 1979 and 1983, a nationwide children’s phenomenon from the 1980s, and mass-media adaptation from the early 1990s. The step into adult media can be dated fairly closely. Hirota says that in the early 1990s Hanako-san was taken up by popular weekly magazines, after adult media had largely ignored school ghost stories. His conversation partner Yuki Yoshida adds that the writer Gensho Ishimaru began calling her “Gakko-rei Hanako” (roughly “Hanako the school ghost”) in 1990. Da Vinci Web credits Toru Tsunemitsu’s book Gakko no Kaidan as one trigger of the school ghost story boom of the 1990s.

She is also catalogued in academic folklore work. The International Research Center for Japanese Studies, a national research institute, runs a database of strange phenomena and yokai folklore that has a separate entry for Toire no Hanako-san. The entry is based on a paper by Naoto Furui on everyday talk in modern life, centred on toilet ghost stories, published in 2001 in issue 6 of Sanin Minzoku Kenkyu, the journal of a regional folklore society. It records something the popular retellings leave out: a charm, reported by a high-school student in Hyogo Prefecture, to be recited after saying Hanako-san’s name. The legend, in other words, produced protective lore as well as the dare. More broadly, reference works on the legend cite folklore and yokai writing published from the 1990s onward.

Finally, the sheer number of origin stories is itself documented. English-language accounts list three: that she died while hiding during an air raid in the Second World War, that she was killed by a parent or by a stranger, or that she died by suicide in a school toilet after being bullied. Japanese reference works list a different set: a girl who came to school on a holiday, was chased by a stranger and killed in the third stall; the spirit of a child who had been abused; the spirit of a girl who fell from a library window in Fukushima Prefecture; and the spirit of an elementary-school child who fell through a toilet pump-out opening.

What is contested

Those origin stories cannot all be true, and no source claims any particular one is. They are not accounts of identified people or reported cases; they are the explanations children and later writers supplied for a ritual that already existed. Read side by side, they contradict each other on nearly every point — wartime or peacetime, home or school, accident or violence, and in one case a specific prefecture, in others no place at all. That pattern is what folklore looks like when a memorable game acquires a backstory afterwards, rather than what a real incident looks like when it becomes a rumour.

The early dating is the other open question. The “around 1950” date in reference works comes with no cited document, and the account set around 1948, though more specific, was written down in a later collection rather than at the time. The name appears in a dated document only in 1979, and a clear record of the tradition only in 1983. Anyone writing about her honestly has to say that the ghost’s own biography is the least verifiable part of the story.

What the sources add

Set against the version most readers know, the newer sources agree on the core of the legend and differ on almost everything around it.

They agree on the number three. The account set around 1948, the 1983 Iwate entry and the modern ritual all place Hanako-san in the third stall, and in each the point is that something responds — a voice, a “yes”, a hand. The stall and the reply look like the oldest stable parts of the tradition.

They differ on Hanako-san herself. In the early accounts she is a voice and at most a hand; the bobbed hair and red skirt belong to the 1990s, when children’s books, manga and anime gave her a body. None of the early accounts quoted in these sources comes with an origin story about how she died, and none links her to a real incident.

They also sharpen the dating. In place of a round “around 1950” with no source, there are now points of different strength: a story attributed to about 1948 but recorded later, the name in a 1979 document, and a clear record of the tradition in 1983. Both the 1948 account and the 1983 entry come from Iwate Prefecture, which hints, but does not show, that north-eastern Japan was one early home of the tale; the 1979 essay, from a Tama River survey, shows it was not confined there.

Finally, they show the legend as living lore rather than a single script. A regional folklore journal recorded a Hyogo student’s protective charm in 2001, and a national research institute’s database preserves it. The knock at the door is the part everyone repeats; the tradition also told children what to do after saying her name.

Adaptations

The legend’s move from corridors to screens came with the occult boom of the 1990s, when it began appearing in films, anime and other works. The best-known example is the 1995 live-action film that takes the legend’s name as its title. Later appearances include a 2020 anime, Toire Hanako-kun, and the game Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II — the entry points many readers outside Japan meet first, long after the dare itself had circulated through actual schools.