Spooky Season greetings from a real-life haunted house in a woodland just a crow’s swoop from Sleepy Hollow, in New York’s Hudson Valley – a place of incredible autumnal beauty, where the damp soil is soaked with the blood of tortured histories. 120 countries and counting . . . welcome, fellow traveller, fellow drifter across this Dark Earth.

Tonight: a weary Buddhist pilgrim, lost at nightfall on a haunted plain, is offered shelter by a kind old woman in a tumbledown hut. She asks only one thing of him while she gathers firewood: whatever happens, he must never look into the back room.

‘The Goblin of Adachigahara’ is tale three of my ‘13 Japanese Tales Spooky Season Countdown’ – thirteen ghost stories and tales of dark folklore from my former home of Japan, as we approach Halloween. I invite you to join me on the road this month and beyond, as I record them from a haunted house near Sleepy Hollow, and whilst journeying through New York City, the Hudson Valley, Sonoma’s Russian River, San Diego, and Joshua Tree National Park.

Tonight’s tale was preserved by Yei Theodora Ozaki, who was born in London in the early 1870s to an English mother and Baron Saburō Ozaki, a statesman from an old Kyoto samurai family. With her feet in both worlds, Ozaki collected and translated many of Japan’s tales for a Western audience, at a time when Japan and the West were engaged in a hot and heavy cultural love affair. ‘The Goblin of Adachigahara’ comes from her anthology The Japanese Fairy Book, published in 1903.

By chance, Ozaki married Yukio Ozaki, then mayor of Tokyo, after years of their mail being misdelivered to one another. He later sent three thousand cherry trees to Washington DC, where they bloom to this day.

Please note: these are my own retellings. I may sparingly edit elements of vintage tales to suit a contemporary audience, as part of my work to research, narrate, and compile these often lost stories for collections I plan to publish at a future date.

Dark travel journals, true crime, and creatures of shadow. Welcome to 15Minutes2Kill.

‘In the hunt for a serial killer nicknamed the Gay Slayer, the UK’s top crime show outed me to the entire country. They then doubled down, comparing me to a gay teenage street prostitute. Everyone has their own path to the world of true crime. That was mine . . .’

Author D. J. Swales, international tumbleweed of 120 countries and forty-five US states, invites you to explore the Dark Earth. Discover a new perspective on the paranormal, true crime, dark travel journals, serial killers, twisted history, mysteries, cryptids, and terrifying folklore.

Bonus episodes include selected short fiction and little-known tales.

See the Dark Earth through the eyes of someone who has lived it. His only constant companion: a huge suitcase called Letitia.

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