Am I Alive or Not?

3/17/2025

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Reports are received worldwide that in the aftermath of disasters those that perished appear to be ignorant that they are no longer among the living. Calls are received at emergency centers, taxis are hailed, and these lost souls try to reach homes that are demolished or connect with loved ones who are dead as well.

Tagajo, Japan c.2011

The town of Tagajo, Japan bore the brunt of the 2011 tsunami. In the aftermath, the fire station continued to receive calls for homes where only rubble remained. It was only until the fire crews went and prayed that the calls ceased.

Taxi drivers described being hailed by passengers they later realized were victims of the disaster. In Sendai, one picked up a man with an unhappy expression on his face. He requested an address that brought them to a place where the house had been leveled. When the driver turned to speak to his fare, the man had disappeared. Another driver stopped for a woman wearing a coat, standing near the Ishinomaki Station. She directed him to the Minmihama District. He knew the place was "almost empty", and he asked her if she was sure she wanted to go there. Her response was both disturbing and sad. In a trembling voice she asked, "Have I died?" When he turned around the seat behind him was empty. A young man hailed a taxi ad asked to be taken to the Hiyoriyama mountain. Sometime during the trip, the driver looked in the rear-view mirror realized he was the only one in the vehicle.

Shinto, Christian and Buddhist priests received numerous calls to lay the spirits.

Rev. Kaneda a chief priest at a Zen temple in Kurihara, Japan, started to receive requests to exorcise the spirits of people who were possessed by victims who had drowned in the tsunami. Before this he performed funeral rites for approximately two hundred corpses brought by their family members to the temple. These were people who had lost their homes, livelihood and their loved ones.

Then one day he received a visit from a man named Ono who owned a small building firm. He'd felt the earthquake, but had been spared the destruction of the giant wave, and only saw the devastation through the news. Ten days later, Ono with his wife and mother went to see the effects firsthand. They arrived in what was known as the "tsunami zone". They were unprepared for the total destruction the saw. They returned home and ate dinner. He described feeling lonely. The next day he sensed his wife and mother were tense around him. Then they described what he had done after their meal, which he could not recall at all:

He had jumped down on all fours and begun licking the tatami mats and futon, and squirmed on them like a beast. How at first they had nervously laughed at his tomfoolery, but then been silenced when he began snarling: ‘You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.’

In front of the house was an unsown field, and Ono had run out into it and rolled over and over in the mud, as if he was being tumbled by a wave, shouting: ‘There, over there! They’re all over there – look!’ Then he had stood up and walked out into the field, calling, ‘I’m coming to you. I’m coming over to that side,’ before his wife physically wrestled him back into the house. The writhing and bellowing went on all night until, around five in the morning, Ono cried out, ‘There’s something on top of me,’ collapsed, and fell asleep.

The next day as dusk fell Ono saw figures walking past his house. People of different ages, all covered in mud. They stared at him, but said nothing. He would sleep heavily for ten minutes, then wake up fully and act unlike himself. "He staggered when he walked, glared at his wife and mother and even waved a knife. ‘Drop dead!’ he would snarl. ‘Everyone else is dead, so die!’"

His family urged him to visit the temple, and after three days he met with Reverend Kaneda. Ono told him about his visit to the coast, but a part of his mind said, “Don’t look at me like that, you bastard. I hate your guts! Why are you looking at me?”’ Ono felt resistant but also desired to be helped. The priest splashed him with holy water, and he felt a return to his normal senses.

Rev. Kaneda explained what happened to him:

'Ono told me that he’d walked along the beach in that devastated area, eating an ice cream,’ the priest said. ‘He even put up a sign in the car in the windscreen saying ‘disaster relief’, so that no one would stop him. He went there flippantly, without giving it any thought at all.

I told him: 'You fool. If you go to a place where many people have died, you must go with a feeling of respect. That’s common sense. You have suffered a kind of punishment for what you did. Something got hold of you, perhaps the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead. They have been trying to express their regret and their resentment through you.'

Ono recognized all this, and more. It wasn’t just the spirits of men and women that had possessed him, he saw now, but also animals – cats and dogs and other beasts which had drowned with their masters.

This 2011 disaster was the largest loss of life in Japan since Nagasaki in 1945. Rev. Kaneda joined other priest to travel around the coast to meet with survivors. These people spoke about the horror they had experienced, and the pain of losing those they loved. Among these stories they also described encounters with the supernatural. They saw ghosts of strangers, and loved ones. They saw them at home, work and public places. Others also felt the dead trying to take them over.

A young man complained of pressure on his chest at night, as if some creature was straddling him as he slept. A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who squatted in her house. A middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain, because the eyes of the dead stared out at him from puddles. A civil servant in Soma visited a devastated stretch of coast, and saw a solitary woman in a scarlet dress far from the nearest road or house, with no means of transport in sight. When he looked for her again she had disappeared.

A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway and prayed for the spirits of those who had died – and the ghostly calls ceased.

A cab driver in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, he looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the leveled foundations of a destroyed house, and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.

At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbor would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses, and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.

In Japan it is believed that when a person dies prematurely or due to an act of violence and anger they can become "gaki, hungry ghosts", who are stuck between two worlds. There are rituals to placate them but many surviving family members were not able to perform them, in other cases the entire living family had been wiped out.

Even before the tsunami struck its coast, nowhere in Japan was closer to the world of the dead than Tohoku, the northern part of the island of Honshu. In ancient times, it was a notorious frontier realm of barbarians, goblins and bitter cold. For modern Japanese, it remains a remote, marginal, faintly melancholy place, of thick dialects and quaint conservatism, the symbol of a rural tradition that, for city dwellers, is no more than a folk memory. Tohoku has bullet trains and smartphones and all the other 21st century conveniences, but it also has secret Buddhist cults, a lively literature of supernatural tales and a sisterhood of blind shamanesses who gather once a year at a volcano called Osore-san, or ‘Mt Fear’, the traditional entrance to the underworld.

Two years after the disaster the area of Tohoku was in the process of rebuilding. Rubble has been cleared away from the destroyed towns, and only overgrown grass is there. The living were still encountering the unquiet dead, and Kaneda described the following story involving a 25-year-old woman named Rumiko:

She had telephoned him in June in a state of incoherent distress. She talked of killing herself; she shouted about things entering her. That evening, a car pulled up at the temple: Rumiko, her mother, sister and fiancé were inside.

She was a nurse from Sendai – ‘a very gentle person’, Kaneda said, ‘nothing peculiar or unusual about her at all’. Neither she, nor her family, had been hurt by the tsunami. But for weeks, her fiancé said, she had been complaining of something pushing into her from a place deep below, of dead presences ‘pouring out’ invisibly around her.

Rumiko herself was slumped over the table. She stirred as Kaneda addressed the creature within her. ‘I asked: “Who are you, and what do you want?”’ he said. ‘When it spoke, it didn’t sound like her at all. It talked for three hours.’ It was the spirit of a young woman whose mother had divorced and remarried, and who found herself unloved and unwanted by her new family. She ran away and found work in the mizu shobai, or ‘water trade’, the night-time world of clubs, bars and prostitution. There she became more and more isolated and depressed, and fell under the influence of a morbid and manipulative man. Unknown to her family, unmourned by anyone, she killed herself. Since then, not a stick of incense had been lit in her memory.

Kaneda asked the spirit: ‘Will you come with me? Do you want me to lead you to the light?’ He took her to the main hall of the temple, where he recited the sutra and sprinkled holy water. By the time the prayers were done, at half past one in the morning, Rumiko had returned to herself, and she and her family went home.

Three days later she was back. She complained of great pain in her left leg; once again, she had the sensation of being stalked by an alien presence. The effort of keeping out the intruder was exhausting.

‘That was the strain, the feeling that made her suicidal,’ Kaneda said. ‘I told her: “Don’t worry – just let it in.”’

Rumiko’s posture and voice immediately stiffened and deepened; Kaneda found himself talking to a gruff man with a peremptory manner of speech, a sailor of the old Imperial Navy who had died in action during the Second World War after his left leg had been gravely injured by a shell. The priest spoke soothingly to the old veteran; he prayed and chanted, the interloper departed, and Rumiko was calm. But all of this was just a prologue. ‘All the people who came,’ Kaneda said, ‘and each one of the stories they told had some connection with water.

The priest went on to exorcise 25 spirits from Rumiko. Most of them turned out to be victims of the tsunami. Some sessions involved not one but three spirits. The process involved speaking to these ghost and listening to their stories. One that spoke through Rumiko was a man that kept calling for his daughter who was attending school when the tsunami struck. He had headed out to pick her up when he was overtaken by the wave.

'Kaori!' the voice called. “I have to get to Kaori. Where are you, Kaori? I have to get to the school, there’s a tsunami coming.”

When Kenada spoke, the voice asked: “Am I alive or not?”
“No,” Kaneda (Zen priest) said. “You are dead.”

The voice asked how many people died. When Kaneda said 20,000, the voice said, “20,000? So many?” Kaneda asked him where he was. “I’m at the bottom of the sea. It is very cold.”

‘Come up from the sea to the world of light,’ Kaneda said.

‘But the light is so small,’ the man replied. ‘There are bodies all around me, and I can’t reach it. And who are you anyway? Who are you to lead me to the world of light?’

The conversation went round and round for two hours. Eventually, Kaneda said: ‘You are a father. You understand the anxieties of a parent. Consider this girl whose body you have used. She has a father and mother who are worried about her. Have you thought of that?’

There was a long pause, and the man said, ‘You’re right,’ then moaned. Kaneda chanted the sutra. He paused from time to time when the voice uttered choked sounds, but they faded to mumbles and finally the man was gone.

The spirits all came to tell their story. One man who survived the disaster committed suicide after learning of the death of his two daughters. Eventually Rumiko gained control over the spirits who came to visit her. She eventually married and moved away from the area, however during those days not only human spirits came to Rumiko.

One night in the temple, Rumiko announced: ‘There are dogs all around me, it’s loud! They are barking so loudly I can’t bear it.’

Then she said: ‘No! I don’t want it. I don’t want to be a dog.’

Finally she said: ‘Give it rice and water to eat. I’m going to let it in.’

'She told us to seize hold of her', Kaneda said, 'and when the dog entered her it had tremendous power. There were three men holding on to her, but they were not strong enough, and she threw them off. She was scratching the floor and roaring, a deep growl.’

Rumiko recounted the story of the dog. It had been the pet of an old couple who lived close to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. When the radiation began to leak, its owners had fled in panic with all their neighbors. But they forgot to unchain the dog, which slowly died of thirst and hunger. Later, when it was much too late, the spirit of the animal observed men in white protective suits coming in and peering at its shriveled corpse.

The 2010 Chilean earthquake resulted in many reports of ghostly sightings

On February 27, 2010 an 8.8-magnitude earthquake tore through central Chile causing a tsunami. Stories of shouts asking for help, the light from cellular phones and disembodied voices were soon reported. These accounts were confirmed by engineers and workers sent to repair the bridge Cardenal Raúl Silva Henríquez which spans the Maule River.

One of the night guards reported in late April, 2010 that close to a lagoon adjacent to the river he was approached by a woman that materialized out of nowhere. She asked him, "Can you help me? My son is under water by that pillar (she pointed to it). He died in the tsunami."

The man, very surprised by her sudden appearance told her she could not be on the property at night, but to return in the morning and speak to his supervisor. When he asked her name, she responded, "Maria". He pulled out a notebook to write down her complete name, but when he looked around, she had disappeared. He was so spooked by the encounter that he quit the next day.

It so happened that during those days, military personnel sent to assist in recovery efforts found the body of an 11- year-old boy, wrapped in a tarp exactly in the spot the woman had pointed at.

On April 20, Renato Perez, an engineer was sent to assess the damage at Cancun Island which had been impacted by the tsunami. Five other workers accompanied him. He was alone and examining an area when he clearly heard a child's voice say, "Hello." Then a few seconds later, the same voice said, "Hello, sir." He turned around and found himself alone.

He said, "I knew there was no way a child would be on the island on that day, but I was afraid of being laughed at, so I never told anyone what I heard." Later he confirmed that this was the same day the security guard had the encounter with the woman's apparition.

Perez went on to say that in the following weeks, several strange things happened at the cabins where he and other workers were staying at. Electrical lights would flicker and chairs would move by themselves. The heater in the bathroom would make loud noises, but never turn on.

He said, "All of us there witnessed these events, and we joked about it, saying that it was 'Maria' trying to communicate with us."

Tsunami approaching a coastal city

In June, 2010, Mario Pizarro a risk assessment engineer was crossing the same bridge accompanied by the supervisor of the entire project. At mid-point they were surprised to see a couple hugging each other, leaning against the rail and looking out over the river. Their back was towards them. Close by were two children holding hands and playing.

He said, "We were very alarmed by their presence since pedestrians were not allowed on the bridge. A guard stationed at each end had strict control of who came on the bridge, and we couldn't understand how they got by him."

When they reached the north end of the bridge they immediately questioned the guard, however he said no one had come by him. They called the guard on the other end of the bridge and he assured them that he had not allowed anyone on the bridge. The engineers asked the guards to each walk towards the middle and report what they saw. They said that no one was there. Pizarro and his companion realized the family they had seen had simply vanished into thin air. The only logical explanation is that all four had jumped into the river, but the question remained how they could have sneaked in past the guards.

Blanca Jaque who lived in the affected area recalled where two young girls, daughters of one of her neighbors died in the disaster. She and her family would hear the sounds of the girls coming down the stairs from the apartment above them, or using the bathroom. She eventually moved far away from any ocean, but recalled that other neighbors also reported hearing voices in the night, especially in those areas where many had died.

Juan Morales a worker in the town of Constitución believes the supernatural events are caused by those who were killed, and are asking to be found and buried properly. Orrego Island which was full of tourist attending a festival the day of the earthquake, is now desolate and deserted. Tourists shun it with its memories of pain and loss. Only the family of those who lost a loved one ever visit it. Similar stories were reported after the 1910 avalanche in Wellington, Washington and the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand were many lives were lost in a few minutes.

Elvira "Vera" Smith nee Briones (1939-2005)

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina raged into New Orleans, claiming 1,200 lives. Vera Smith (real name Elvira Briones Smith) was killed on the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, when it was reported she was run down by a drunk driver who sped away. She had left her home to get something to eat at a local store during those hours the hurricane flooded the city.

First responders were overwhelmed, as were other city services, and her body lay on the street for four days decomposing in 90 degree heat. A makeshift grave was hurriedly made for her on a vacant lot next to where she was killed by neighbor John R. Lee along with others.

Mr. Lee who had asked police to remove the body was told they could not move it, nor could he, however he could bury it.

Neighbors covered her with dirt, then a plastic shroud and wrote the sorrowful epitaph: "Here lies Vera. God help us." When the picture of Vera's grave made newspapers across the country her relatives found out what happened to her.

In November of the same year her remains were cremated and spread across her parents' grave in Texas. She was born in Mexico and grew up in Texas before she moved to New Orleans. Vera was married four time. and had two adult daughters. Her death which was originally reported as a result of a hit and run turned out not to be accurate. An autopsy report showed she had no injuries indicative of an accident, however it doesn't list the cause of death. Her cause of death was not listed on the report, and remains a mystery.

Vera's makeshift tomb c.2005

When Vera lived in the neighborhood it was dirty and crime-ridden. She lived with her common-law husband of 15 years C.N. "Max" Keene near where she died. She worked at restaurants and bars while struggling with alcoholism. Keane who died in 2007, said he had covered Vera's body with a bedspread when he had gone looking for her, and found her deceased. He left her on the sidewalk feeling there was nothing else he could do.

Charcoal’s Gourmet Burger Bar in the Irish Channel, opened its doors in 2012, right where Vera's body was left. The area had changed, and become trendy. They were soon reporting flickering lights and cold spots, as well specters reflected in the windows. The restaurant eventually closed. Many believed it was the spirit of Vera who caused the disturbances.

The business is now Deanie's Sea Food Kitchen. Like the days when it was Charcoal’s Gourmet Burger Bar customers report strange encounters.

The New Orleans Superdome, built atop the abandoned Girod Street Cemetery, is said to hold spirits, adding to the city's already haunted atmosphere.

Stories of those that experienced the dark side of Hurricane Katrina:

My best friend was doing clean up construction after Katrina in the lower 9th ward. He was operating a backhoe. A lot of the doors and windows to those little shotgun houses have bars on them. The people that were going house to house looking for bodies/marking houses couldn’t get into a house so they asked my friend to rip the bars off with his backhoe. He said that when he took the bars off, half of the wall came off too. He said that the feeling that washed over him when that door came off was like something he’s never felt before. He said the best he could describe it was a mix between electricity, sadness and depression. He said he sat on his machine for a few minutes looking into the house at what he thought was a person standing in the entry way smiling at him, only to realize that it was a dead body draped over a chair. He asked for a transfer after that. Couldn’t mentally handle the sight of a dead body or the feelings that came over him. You can’t get him to talk about it anymore. He won’t even go to New Orleans anymore. The closest he will get during Mardi Gras is Metairie.

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As someone who grew up in south Mississippi, with NOLA being just a 2 hour or so drive away, we went there often for field trips / day trips to the zoo or the aquarium. As an adult I now HATE going there, and understand why adults when I was young also dreaded going. People blame it on the traffic or the terrible road systems or the rough areas of town. But it's a heavy feeling in that town. It gives me, and any other people I know who are sensitive at all, a lot of anxiety.
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A friend of mine did search and rescue during Katrina. He rarely talked about it but one thing he did tell me was that one house he went to before the water receded he and his group were on the boat and saw a little girl on the roof of one of the homes waving her arms and yelling for help. All 4 of the guys saw this and they had to turn around to get to the house. In the time it took for them to come about the girl was not on the roof anymore, they assumed she went back in the house to tell her family a rescue group was coming. They get to the house and my friend and one other guy climbed in the window to help whoever was in there out to the boat. Except there was no one alive inside. They did however find the body of the little girl they saw on the roof. Same clothes, same braids with the hair ties that have little plastic balls on them. My friend told me it was obvious she had been dead for days at this point but all 4 men saw that girl on the roof just minutes before finding her body.