Hanako-san, also known as “Hanako of the Third Toilet”, is the ghost of a young girl who’s said to haunt elementary and middle school bathrooms in Japan. Being an urban legend, the story is bound to differ in whatever school or region you hear it, but the basic gist is that Hanako is a former student who haunts the third stall of the third-floor girls’ bathroom. If a person goes to Hanako’s stall, knocking on the door three times and asking “Hanako-san, are you there?”, they will hear a ghostly voice answer back “Yes, I’m here.”
Now if the person doesn’t rush out of there but proceeds to open the door, they will find a little girl with a bobbed haircut dressed in a red suspender-skirt and a white t-shirt. Hanako usually pulls the person into the stall and kills them, but other versions of the story replace her with a bloody hand that pops out of the toilet and drags the victim down into hell.
In another variation from Iwate Prefecture, the hand is a pale white and emerges from the floor before the victim can open the stall door. A version in Yamagata Prefecture adds the bizarre twist that “Hanako” is actually a giant three-headed lizard that lures is meals by impersonating a little girl’s voice.
Generally, anybody who opens the stall door is doomed, but a couple variations do offer tips that can help you escape from Hanako. In Kanagawa Prefecture, where Hanako is an equal opportunist who haunts the boys’ bathrooms too, a person can prevent Hanako from being summoned by running around the stall’s toilet three times in three seconds. (Hanako seems to be very fond of threes.)
Hanako-san as she appears in the video game Yo-Kai Watch.
So what exactly turned Hanako into a furious other-worldly killer who will strangle you for opening a door? According to one story, Hanako was an elementary school girl who had come to play at the playground during a holiday. As she played alone, a pedophile spotted her and chased her into the empty school. Hanako ran for her life up to the third-floor, and thinking she was safe in the girls’ bathroom, hid in the third stall there. The man, however, eventually found her and murdered her in the stall.
The other explanations also tend to display Hanako as a helpless victim. Some say that she was an unpopular and miserable girl who locked herself in the stall to get away from some bullies. Once her tormentors went back to class, Hanako either committed suicide or had died after the door got stuck and nobody came to look for her. Another widespread theory suggests that she was killed in a bombing during World War II.
A poster of one of the Hanako-san movies.
Along with the Slit-Mouthed Woman, Hanako-san today is one of the most popular urban legends in Japan. While it first began to circulate on a national scale in the 1980s, with two movies and some anime appearances in the decade that followed, the story’s roots stretch back at least 40 years earlier. Already around 1948, students at an elementary school in Iwate Prefecture were claiming that a pale ghostly hand could be summoned in the third stall of one of the schools’ bathrooms by calling out “Hanako-san of the third”!
