トイレの花子さん
といれのはなこさん

Translation: Hanako of the Toilet
Alternate names: Sanbanme no Hanako-san (Hanako of the Third Stall)
Habitat: the third stall in the third floor girls’ restroom

Appearance: Toire no Hanako-san is an urban legend about a young girl’s ghost who haunts elementary school restrooms. She is the subject of schoolyard legends across Japan, and the details of her story vary from place to place and generation to generation. She is usually said to look like a schoolgirl with bobbed hair wearing a white shirt and a red skirt with suspenders.

Interactions: In most versions of the story, Hanako-san haunts the third stall in the third floor toilet of the schoolhouse. If a student knocks on her stall three times and asks if Hanako is there, a scratchy voice will reply, “Yes.” If the student opens the stall door, Hanako-san will pull them down into the toilet and kill them. The precise steps to summon her spirit and the way in which she reacts to being called vary greatly from school to school.

Some versions of the legend also include methods to escape from Hanako-san, such as by showing her ghost something that she hates: for example, a test sheet with a perfect score, a school lunch milk carton, and so on.

Origin: Hanako-san’s legend has roots dating back as far as the 1950s, but it reached the peak of its popularity in the 1980s and 90s. It is said that nearly every school in Japan had its own legend of Toire no Hanako-san at this time. Many schools invented origin stories for their version of Hanako-san. In some versions she was a schoolgirl who was being chased by a madman. She ran to her school and hid in the third floor toilet’s third stall, but the man found her and murdered her. Because it was a holiday nobody found her body for several days. In other versions she was a student during the Pacific War. She was playing hide and seek with her friends and hid in the third floor bathroom when the air ride sirens went off. She was unable to hear the sirens, so she continued to hide in the stall while her classmates were all evacuated to an air raid shelter. She died in a fire when her school was struck by a bomb, but her spirit continues to hide in that bathroom to this day. Other versions claim she was a victim of constant abuse, either by her parents or by bullies at school, and she committed suicide in that particular the bathroom stall. Or that a pit latrine at the school was left open by mistake, and she fell in and drowned.