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Rotting corpse discovered by two men exploring “haunted hotel” in Japan

Casey Baseel Apr 20, 2020
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Hotel stopped taking living guests almost 30 years ago.

While Japan is really good about keeping litter off the streets, the country can be surprisingly lax in cleaning up unused architecture. For example, the Green Hills Hotel, in the town of Ebino, Miyazaki Prefecture, has been out of business since 1992, but the owners didn’t bother to tear it down after they vacated it, and the local authorities never sent a wrecking crew over either.

And so the hotel has stood, unused, for the last few decades. Well, actually calling it unused isn’t 100-percent accurate. Even though there’s no commerce going on, the Green Hills Hotel still gets occasional visitors because its spooky exterior has earned it a rumor that it’s haunted, turning it into an attraction for would-be ghost hunters.

Gaining access to the building isn’t hard. The property isn’t sealed off from the street, and the plate glass on the front doors is broken, so anyone who wants to can just walk right in. That’s exactly what two men in their 20s did after midnight but before dawn on last Wednesday, having traveled to Ebino from another prefecture after reading about the hotel on a website listing supposedly haunted places in Japan.

After entering the lobby, the two men began making their way, floor by floor, towards the top of the nine-story building, but didn’t make it all the way. Sure, it’s tempting to call them chickens for that, but we can’t say we’d have done any differently. As the men entered a guest room on the sixth floor, they realized they weren’t completely alone. Lying on the bed, facing towards the ceiling, was a dead body.

The corpse was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and dark pants, with graying hair and a height of between 170 and 180 centimeters (67 and 71 inches). However, due to the heavy rate of decay, the deceased’s sex is currently indeterminable.

Having had far more horror than they’d bargained for, the men called the police and reported their discovery. Investigators are unsure whether the death was some sort of accident or a murder, and are currently investigating both possibilities, as given how long it’s been since the hotel went out of business, it would seem to be mathematically impossible that this was a bedridden guest who was left behind.

The two men who found the body don’t appear to be on the hook for any trespassing charges. The local paper does report that “they regret their actions,” though it’s unclear whether that’s in a legal sense, or simply because they really wish they didn’t have to live with the memory of finding a rotting corpse inside an abandoned hotel.

Sources: Mainichi Shimbun via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin, Miyazaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun
Images: Google
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