Doai Station Ghost Stories: Japan’s Long Staircase

Explore Japanese ghost stories tied to Doai Station, a quiet railway stop beneath the mountain. Discover its legends among the haunted places in Japan and the eerie, demanding climb down and back up its long staircase.

CULTURAL

10/19/20267 min read

In August, we made the journey from Yuzawa to Doai Station, a trip that took us nearly an hour one way by train. It was a destination we had wanted to see, an unusual railway station hidden deep within the mountains of Gunma Prefecture. We knew about the stairs, the long underground platform, and the station's reputation for being one of Japan's strangest railway stops. What we didn't know was how it would feel to actually be there.

Doai Station is unlike most railway stations. Its most remarkable feature lies beneath the mountain, where a train platform sits deep inside a long, dark tunnel. Reaching it requires descending 462 steps. The staircase seems to go on forever, carrying you away from the daylight and the ordinary world above.

We went up and down those stairs about two times for a total of 1944 steps.The famous staircase from the underground platform has a relatively gentle average slope, but it feels steep because of its length as it rises approximately 80 metres or 262 feet.

By the time we had finished exploring, we had certainly earned our visit. Yet the stairs were only part of the experience. The real character of Doai Station revealed itself once we were underground, with nowhere in particular to go and time to spare.

There were four of us: my wife, Mary, our adult son, and our adult daughter. We had come to see the station, take in its unusual architecture, and experience a place that had acquired a reputation for being eerie. Doai is also associated with Japanese ghost stories, though the stories are difficult to substantiate and its paranormal reputation remains just that—a reputation.

The station hardly needed a ghost story to create an atmosphere of its own.

The platform stretches into the tunnel, its lights illuminating the tracks and the rough walls of the mountain. The air feels different underground. Sounds travel in unexpected ways, and the ordinary noise of a railway station is largely absent. There are no crowds hurrying toward connecting trains, no steady stream of announcements, and little of the bustle that makes most stations feel alive.

At Doai, there is a great deal of quiet. And because trains are infrequent, that quiet has time to settle around you.

We knew we had to catch the 11:00 train back. Missing it would mean waiting until approximately 1:00 for the next one. We were careful not to take any chances. After all, we had already spent nearly an hour getting there, and the prospect of adding another two hours to the trip was not especially appealing.

We made sure we were on the platform with time to spare.

That left us waiting.

At first, the experience was peaceful. There was something almost meditative about being so far beneath the surface, surrounded by the mountain, removed from the distractions of everyday life. We had time to look around and absorb the place rather than simply pass through it. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no sudden noise, no unexplained apparition, and no moment that could be described as a classic encounter with the supernatural.

And yet, something about the atmosphere began to feel unsettling.

It is difficult to explain the difference between silence and a silence that seems to have a presence of its own. One is merely the absence of noise. The other can make you unusually aware of your surroundings, conscious of the space behind you, the darkness beyond the reach of the lights, and the feeling that you might not be entirely alone.

At some point, there was a sense of being watched.

I cannot say exactly when it began, or what prompted it. What I remember is that the feeling was not accompanied by anything I could point to as its cause. There was no figure standing in the shadows, no movement at the far end of the tunnel, and no voice calling from the darkness.

There was simply an uneasiness.

The strangest part was that none of us said anything about it.

Mary was there. So were our son and daughter, both adults and generally not people who are easily frightened. We had come to the station together, and we were sharing the same quiet, the same underground platform, and the same wait for the train.

Eventually, the suggestion was made that we move into the waiting room on the platform.

Everyone was eager to go.

Looking back, that may be the detail I remember most clearly. Nobody needed to persuade anyone else. There was no discussion about ghosts, no attempt to explain what we were feeling, and no declaration that something frightening had happened. The suggestion was made, and we all welcomed the idea of moving somewhere else.

We went into the waiting room and waited there.

Perhaps the feeling had a perfectly ordinary explanation. The darkness, the isolation, the acoustics of the tunnel, and the knowledge that we were deep inside a mountain may have combined to make us more alert than usual. Perhaps we were simply tired from the journey and the repeated climb up and down those hundreds of steps. There are many reasons why an unfamiliar place can affect us in ways we don't immediately understand.

But there is another aspect to the experience that I find difficult to forget: the quiet was palpable.

Doai Station has acquired a place in Japan's modern ghost-story lore, and its proximity to Mount Tanigawa adds another layer to its atmosphere. The mountain has a grim mountaineering history, with numerous lives lost to its challenging terrain and severe weather. It is easy to imagine how a place so isolated, surrounded by mountains and connected to stories of tragedy, might inspire tales of spirits lingering in the darkness. The creepiest story associated with Doai Station is the tale of a spirit appearing in the underground platform's men's restroom. The story is particularly unsettling because it connects the station's ghost lore to real mountaineering tragedies nearby. According to Japanese ghost-story accounts, a spirit associated with people who died on nearby Mount Tanigawa is said to appear in the men's restroom on the underground platform. The tale has several disturbing details: A ghost is said to appear in the restroom mirror, even when nobody else seems to be there. Some accounts describe hearing voices or strange noises coming from inside the restroom. Visitors have also reported hearing unfamiliar sounds while sitting in the small underground waiting room, despite seeing nobody nearby. One Japanese paranormal website says the restroom story is also associated with the ghost-story collection Shin Mimibukuro (新耳袋), a well-known series of Japanese supernatural tales. The underground platform's restroom was reportedly closed around 2022. The only restroom open was on the upper platform when we were there.

Visitors have reported hearing unfamiliar noises near the waiting room and toilets. The stories are particularly unsettling because the platform sits deep inside a railway tunnel, far from daylight. It was pretty busy the day we were there so it would have been difficult to discern ghostly footsteps from those of the living. We didn’t hear anything.

Ghost-story accounts also describe footsteps behind people on the stairs and shadowy figures on the platform. The story goes like this: Someone is walking alone on the long staircase, either descending toward the platform or climbing back toward daylight. They begin to hear footsteps behind them. At first, the sound seems entirely ordinary. Someone else must be using the stairs. But the footsteps seem to maintain a steady distance, following the person as they continue walking. The unsettling part comes when they turn around and nobody is there. In some versions of the story, the footsteps continue despite the empty staircase, leaving the visitor feeling that something unseen is following them.

The setting makes this an especially effective ghost story. Doai's staircase is long, enclosed and surrounded by concrete. Footsteps can echo and seem to come from a different position than their actual source. The sound of your own shoes may also reverberate back at you, creating the impression of a second person. That provides a plausible explanation for such an experience, but it doesn't establish what happened in any particular reported encounter.

I do not know whether any of those stories have a basis in anything paranormal. We saw no ghost, and nothing happened that could serve as evidence of one. It would be easy, after the fact, to embellish the story and turn an uneasy afternoon into a supernatural encounter. But that would miss what made the experience memorable in the first place. We didn't need to see anything. The station itself was enough.

Eventually, the time came to board our train. We were ready to leave, and there was a certain comfort in seeing the train arrive, hearing it approach through the tunnel, and knowing that we would soon be climbing back toward daylight and returning to the familiar world above.

The journey back would take us toward Yuzawa, away from the deep silence of the mountain.

I have thought about that afternoon since. Was it the atmosphere of the place? Was it the isolation, the darkness, or the strange acoustics of a railway platform buried beneath a mountain? Was it the sort of instinctive uneasiness that people sometimes experience in unfamiliar surroundings, without being able to identify its source? I can't say.

What I remember is that four people shared an afternoon at a remarkable station in Japan. We explored its endless stairs, waited for a train that came only occasionally, and experienced a quiet that felt different from ordinary silence. At one point, we all seemed quite happy to leave the platform and retreat to a small waiting room on the platform, even though none of us had offered an explanation for why.

Perhaps nothing unusual happened at Doai Station that day. Or perhaps the most unsettling experiences are not the ones that frighten us outright, but the ones that leave us with a question we cannot quite answer.

For us, Doai Station was a fascinating stop on a journey through Japan. It was also a reminder that travel sometimes gives us more than the sights we set out to see. Occasionally, it gives us a feeling, a memory, or a moment shared with the people we love that stays with us long after the journey is over.

And sometimes, when we think back on a place, it isn't what we saw that we remember most clearly.

It is what we felt in the quiet.

And the fact that, without quite knowing why, we were all ready to leave.