The Wet Back Seat: Did Japan's Phantom Taxi Legend Begin With the Hida River Bus Disaster?

Following an earlier episode about the 1968 Hida River bus disaster, this installment pursues the rumors that remained in the area afterward. It begins with stories of passengers who somehow disappear after entering a vehicle and follows where this urban legend came from and where it traveled.

For many people, the phantom taxi recalls a story from Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo: a woman leaves the taxi at her destination and never returns, and when the driver calls at the house, the family says their daughter is already dead. The video says this version derives from *Japanese Ghosts*, recorded in 1959, while the supposed event itself dates to the early Showa era. The Kansai equivalent is associated with Midorogaike in Kyoto, where it reportedly spread rapidly after appearing in a newspaper in 1969.

But the sequence of dates matters. If the Midorogaike article appeared in 1969, the presenters suggest that rumors from the Hida River bus disaster the year before may have come first. Immediately after the disaster, stories reportedly spread locally that dead passengers were trying to go home. In Central Japan, taxi drivers' experiences then became a standard ghost story: a passenger picked up near the scene asks to go toward Nagoya, disappears without warning, and leaves the seat soaking wet. The Aoyama Cemetery tale has no water. The presenters speculate that a reported event and people's memory of the disaster mixed, joining two previously separate stories.

In a land of frequent disasters, the video says, this type of story repeatedly follows accidents. It suggests that people create narratives because they cannot indefinitely hold emotions at their original intensity, citing repeated films about major disasters such as the Titanic. The pattern predates automobiles. Meiji-era rickshaw stories feature disappearing passengers, and Edo-period rakugo includes similar plots. Touching on vehicle yokai such as Oboroguruma and Wanyudo, the presenters propose that transport itself—carrying anxiety about travel, attraction to vehicles, and grief from accidents—was the phantom taxi's starting point.

The pattern exists overseas too, including the American story of Resurrection Mary, a woman in white who asks to be taken to a cemetery. Such tales are grouped as the ‘vanishing hitchhiker.’ The video says the Japanese term for ‘urban legend’ spread through a translation of that phrase during the occult-TV boom from the late 1980s. Because the image of a vanishing passenger was already attached when the term arrived, phantom-taxi stories may have been readily accepted. Television accelerated their spread and allowed similar local stories to shape one another. Even now, reports circulate of Tesla displays showing human figures in supposedly empty cemeteries, with some owners allegedly using their cars for ghost hunting.

In the second half, another speaker reveals a personal connection. On August 17, 1968, the night of the disaster, his family was visiting a village upstream and planned to take the same highway toward Nagoya. His father intended to leave despite the torrential rain, but the young child suddenly developed a fever and his mother's objections led them to cancel only after 11 p.m. With no mobile phones, it was an era when people felt compelled to return home even in dangerous conditions. He wonders whether the bus drivers felt the same pressure.

The connection continues. He says he heard the phantom-taxi account directly from an elderly villager who had reportedly been the driver. He cannot know whether it was true, but regards it as closer to the source than a broadly circulated rumor. His grandfather worked for Japanese National Railways and, although absent from the scene on the day of the accident, later joined restoration work and told him details too graphic to repeat. A bypass now threatens to reduce the number of people who see the disaster memorial. The video closes with the hope that this account can stand in its place.