Every night on their walk home from school they would carefully watch the bottom of each telephone pole that lined the road. They would try to hurry past as fast as possible, hoping not to see a woman standing there with long black hair hanging down to her waist and wearing a surgical mask.
Surgical masks are commonly worn in Japan during the cold and flu season to help protect people from germs, but that year a woman wearing that kind of mask could mean something different –it could mean she was an angry ghost called Kuchisake Onna, the Slit-mouthed Woman.
After a while the children started to travel in groups for safety, then teachers got involved and would usher home the kids in their classes. But that didn’t work and such a panic set in that even the police got involved, they upped their patrols to keep an eye out for the woman in the surgical mask that was known to wait in the shadows at the bottom of phone poles.