The forest was haunted. It was said that anyone who passed the forest would be tortured or a worse fate awaited him. Everyone knew that if they went into the forest, they wouldn’t return. The chief of the village had told the villagers that it was forbidden to go in the forest. The forest got sealed when people went in and never returned. No one could take a step inside and no one had dared to. No one was brave enough. Some people obviously didn’t believe in this but there was proof. People had heard strange noises from the forest. The noise was of people screaming. The screams were terrifying.       

              The story was that a family had lived in the forest. The father had killed his family by torturing them in a chamber and then drowning them. It is said that he hadn’t even given them a proper burial. It is also said that the bodies of the family members were hung from the house for the dogs to eat. A few years later the father was found in the forest with a knife through him. And carved on his stomach was “This is our revenge for killing us!”

That was what we had been told, the forest had been haunted for 50 years now and no one had taken a step inside. Many things were happening in Japan during this period. Christianity was banned and Japan was closed to the outside world, only Chinese and Dutch were allowed to trade with Japan.

The villagers were nice people. There in the village lived a boy with his family; he was from a poor family. His name was Takeo. He has 2 brothers. He was the eldest brother in the family. He was 15 years old and his brothers were 12 and 7. The 12 year old brother was called Takeshi and the youngest was Kazuhiro.

I mentioned above, that the forest was sealed but that’s not exactly true. There was an entrance which hadn’t been sealed. This unsealed entrance led straight into the forest.

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Kazuhiro was playing with his friends in the neighborhood, everyone else were busy doing their work. When most of the people noticed that Kazuhiro had disappeared, it was too late. Kazuhiro had been playing and had wandered into the forest through that unsealed entrance. People had seen them playing near the entrance but no one could guess that they would actually go in there.