Kisaragi Station: The Train Ride to Nowhere

At 9 a.m. on 8 January 2022, Enshu Railway began selling a 500-yen souvenir ticket at Shin-Hamamatsu Station, Sagi-no-miya Station and its railway office. The ticket was named after a station that was made up for a story: Kisaragi Station. The sale fell on the anniversary of a night in January 2004, when someone on an internet forum began reporting, post by post, a train ride that seemed to have no end.

Quick facts

• Verdict: There is no evidence the station or the journey is real. The story first appeared as a live-reported post on 2channel in January 2004, and no older folktale with the same plot has been found.
• Name: Kisaragi Eki (きさらぎ駅), or Kisaragi Station
• Type: An urban legend that started on the internet
• Earliest confirmed record: A thread on 2channel’s paranormal board, with posts dated to late on 8 January 2004
• Where it spread: It began on 2channel, Japan’s large anonymous forum. Since then it has been covered by Japanese and English Wikipedia and has inspired two live-action films, a song and souvenir tickets from a real railway company.

What the story says

Japanese Wikipedia sums up the original post as a scary experience reported live, as it happened. The poster said they were on a train that was behaving strangely. Instead of stopping as usual, it just kept going for a long time. The poster also said that every other passenger was asleep. The train passed through a tunnel called Isanuki, a name that does not match any real tunnel. Finally it stopped at an unfamiliar station with no staff, and the sign said Kisaragi.

The area around the station was described as grassland in the mountains, with no houses anywhere. Although it was late at night, the poster heard festival music in the distance, which made no sense at that hour. A one-legged old man appeared and then suddenly vanished. The poster used their mobile phone to ask for help, but the people they reached did not take them seriously. Eventually the posts from the thread stopped, and nothing more was heard from the poster. That open ending, with no rescue and no explanation, is what the Wikipedia summary ends on.

Earliest confirmed record

The oldest record found is a thread in the paranormal section of 2channel. The title roughly means “a thread for live-reporting when strange things happen around you.” An archived copy is still online on the site now called 5channel. Its thread ID, 1073411138, points to a creation date around January 2004. Japanese Wikipedia says the first post came late on 8 January 2004.

There are some limits to what can be confirmed. The archived thread could be opened, and it does mention Kisaragi Station. However, the poster’s handle, as given by Wikipedia, did not show up in the part of the page that was checked. This article therefore does not treat the poster as a known or identifiable person. And although this is the earliest record found, that does not prove nothing older exists.

What is documented

Several independent sources agree on where the legend started. Japanese Wikipedia names the January 2004 post on 2channel’s paranormal board as the first appearance. English Wikipedia also calls Kisaragi Station an urban legend posted to 2channel in 2004. The English article’s main text gives no exact date, but its footnotes link to the original thread. Because both articles agree and the thread still exists, the legend’s online origin is well supported.

The story was not based on any known folktale. It did borrow real-world details, and readers have connected the setting to the Enshu Railway line. The railway itself has taken up this connection. Its official website has a special Kisaragi Station page explaining why fans picked Sagi-no-miya Station as a likely candidate. The page gives three reasons: the post was dated 8 January 2004, the ride in the story took about twenty minutes from Shin-Hamamatsu Station, and the fictional name is written in hiragana, like part of Sagi-no-miya’s name.

The company has also used the legend commercially. Besides the ticket sale on 8 January 2022, Enshu Railway sold a “Kisaragi Station limited ticket” at Shin-Hamamatsu Station at 9 a.m. on 8 January 2025. It came as two replica tickets on a mounting card for 500 yen, limited to 1,000 sets. The replicas cannot be used to ride a train.

The legend has also appeared on digital maps. On 15 July 2015, Livedoor News reported that searching Google Maps for Kisaragi Station brought up Tennodai 1-chome in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, which is a pond on the University of Tsukuba campus. The same article said that searches for three other station names, Gosho, Gozu and Katasu, also led to ponds on the campus.

What is contested

The biggest open question is how closely the story matches any real place. The Enshu Railway page explains why fans came to see Sagi-no-miya Station as a candidate. But explaining a fan theory, and running promotions based on it, is not the same as proving the real station inspired the story. Sagi-no-miya should be seen as a popular guess, not a confirmed setting.

Some details of the later ripples are also unconfirmed. Several outlets have reported that the 2022 tickets sold out in about an hour. However, the listing that records the sale does not give that figure, and the research behind this article could not reach a page that confirms it. For the Google Maps story, the 2015 article did not say whether the pin came from Google or from a user. The date is sometimes given as around 2014, but the only report that could be found dates from July 2015.

Adaptations

Enshu Railway’s ticket sales are one sign of how far the legend has spread. Film and music are others. A live-action film called Kisaragi Station opened on 3 June 2022. It was directed by Jiro Nagae and starred Yuri Tsunematsu. When the film was announced, Eiga.com called it her first leading role in a movie and described the story as a “king of urban legends.”

A sequel, Kisaragi Station Re:, opened nationwide on 13 June 2025. Jiro Nagae directed again, and Miyu Honda, who was also in the first film, took the lead. According to the official website, the sequel takes place three years after the first film. Asuka Miyazaki, who escaped the otherworldly Kisaragi Station, goes back there to help people who are still trapped. Both films are fiction built on the legend, not accounts of real events.

The legend has also reached music. The electronic musician Camellia released an album called U.U.F.O, which has 27 tracks themed around “Ultra Urban Legends.” Track 13, “Kisaragi,” runs for 5:55. Camellia’s official Bandcamp page says the track is about the Kisaragi Station legend. The album is listed with the year 2021.

How it is discussed in Japan today

Ocsoku, a Japanese occult blog, has covered Kisaragi Station in 5 posts published between 2017 and 2020.