One reason may be that a secret to forgetting the heat is experiencing the chill that runs down your spine at a scary story. Some people say that because the Obon festival honoring our ancestors is a hallmark of summer, believing in a rush of spirit hauntings just comes with the season.
Obon is a bit like Halloween, which is celebrated on October 31 in the West, but the significance of the holiday is completely different. One explanation for Halloween is that all of the evil spirits are driven out on the night before All Saints Day on November 1. The tradition of wearing costumes may be a way for people to protect themselves by pretending to be one of the ghosts and witches that appear.
Halloween parties and other events are fairly lively in Milan, but I’ve never heard of them telling a bunch of ghost stories in summer—even though it gets quite hot here. TENOHA Milano recently held a ghost-themed event. They set up all kinds of experiences at the venue, sharing Japan’s long tradition of ghosts and ghost stories and even offering lifelike experiences. The biggest draw was making full use of the inimitable style of Benjamin Lacombe, a cutting-edge French painter in his 20s, to make the female evil spirits essential to Japanese phantom and ghost stories mysteriously appear in his paintings. We had an unseasonably cool May and June this year coupled with frequent heavy rains, so the event didn’t seem to create the chilling fear that helps people get through the summer heat.
Incidentally, there are several places in Italy that will scare you without Japanese ghost stories or staging haunted houses.
One is an island right next to Venice called Poveglia. I actually spent a wonderful summer vacation on the island right next to it, not knowing until afterwards that this fearful place was right in front of my eyes. There is a barrier island nearby called Lido where the people of Venice go to enjoy the beach—the same beaches that were the setting for Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice. Several smaller islands dot the area, and one of those is Poveglia. Some say it is the most haunted place in the world. People afflicted with cholera were once taken there for quarantine, where it is said they were hastily treated and abandoned. Definitely a recipe for ghosts…
There’s another frightening place not too far from Milan. The story is not quite like that of Ubasute, a mythical Japanese mountain where the old are left to die, but it’s spooky enough. It was once a town created for entertainment, like Las Vegas—apparently a dreamlike toy city that could have been the setting for Pinocchio. But just a few years after it was finished, it suffered such massive damage from a landslide. It couldn’t be repaired and was abandoned.
So if you just show up and wander around on your own, you’ll find things moving that shouldn’t be. There have been some plans for a makeover in recent years, and I heard they organized a hide-and-seek competition there, but I really wish they’d thought of having another kind of fun—I mean, what if the people who went hiding never came out? Scary!
