Whose Child Is This?
A story of a certain famous livehouse, that isn't there anymore.
At that livehouse on the outskirts of Kanto, the witness accounts of ghosts didn't peter out. Accordingly, I heard this personal experience story from a friend.
For rehearsals, the band members would have set up each of the instruments on stage in advance, but it was dark, and they practically couldn't see - not just for tuning the instruments, but also how the guest seating could be viewed from the stage, so they had to check the lighting. Naturally they assumed the guests couldn't enter yet, and it was just the staff and the store employees in the guest seating, but there was a young boy around primary school age motioning for them to come closer.
'Strange... did one of the staff bring him along?' that friend was thinking, but didn't pay it too much concern.
As he finished up the rehearsal, the child who had been waving his hand just a while ago was no longer there.
'Huh? Did he even go backstage?' he thought, and called out to an employee washing a cup at the bar counter.
"Hey, that kid here just now? Who brought him along? Who would bring such a small child to a livehouse, anyway, right?"
Then...
"Ahh, a child appears here, you know. Please don't worry about it," the employee said without looking up.
"Appears? Appears, but isn't here...?"
The employee's hands finally stopped as he said this, and with a bitter smile she responded, "Yes, exactly. That's a ghost. We've seen him many times already so we've gotten used to him."
"Yeah, I even saw him just now..."
Afterward, he heard similar stories from his colleagues in other bands, about that livehouse where everyone would say that they thought they saw something.
At that livehouse on the outskirts of Kanto, the witness accounts of ghosts didn't peter out. Accordingly, I heard this personal experience story from a friend.
For rehearsals, the band members would have set up each of the instruments on stage in advance, but it was dark, and they practically couldn't see - not just for tuning the instruments, but also how the guest seating could be viewed from the stage, so they had to check the lighting. Naturally they assumed the guests couldn't enter yet, and it was just the staff and the store employees in the guest seating, but there was a young boy around primary school age motioning for them to come closer.
'Strange... did one of the staff bring him along?' that friend was thinking, but didn't pay it too much concern.
As he finished up the rehearsal, the child who had been waving his hand just a while ago was no longer there.
'Huh? Did he even go backstage?' he thought, and called out to an employee washing a cup at the bar counter.
"Hey, that kid here just now? Who brought him along? Who would bring such a small child to a livehouse, anyway, right?"
Then...
"Ahh, a child appears here, you know. Please don't worry about it," the employee said without looking up.
"Appears? Appears, but isn't here...?"
The employee's hands finally stopped as he said this, and with a bitter smile she responded, "Yes, exactly. That's a ghost. We've seen him many times already so we've gotten used to him."
"Yeah, I even saw him just now..."
Afterward, he heard similar stories from his colleagues in other bands, about that livehouse where everyone would say that they thought they saw something.
<Coach's Enquiry>
As is pretty standard for a ghost story, though not limited to livehouses, this story has the frequent target area which is a "box." I often collect stories from livehouse staff too, but I feel that the structure of this even resembles "school ghost stories." It has the same strange coincidence of a "mystery that happens outside performance time." Although there are many witnesses such as the employee at the bar counter, and the man on stage, for some reason it's not usual that the people sitting in the guest seating would not notice the strange occurrence in the guest seating beside them. But the range is even a lot closer, isn't it? On the other hand, what they see from the guest seating is predominantly the ceiling or the wings of the stage. That is to say the appearance was outside the field of vision of where they're usually looking... Along the same lines, all of the usual witnesses seem to naturally grow accustomed to it in the same way, as they continue to see it...