Our School’s Bathroom is Haunted

The Story

Every school has its secrets. Ours was hidden in the tiled walls and the echoes of dripping water.

The third-floor girls’ bathroom of Hoshino Middle School was always avoided. Not because it was dirty, or because the sinks never worked properly, but because of the story every student whispered after the bell rang.

Hanako-san.

The legend went that if you knocked on the third stall door three times and called her name, a pale schoolgirl with a red skirt would appear. She would ask you one question: “Do you need a friend?”

If you answered wrong—or worse, didn’t answer at all—you would never leave the bathroom again.

At least, that’s what the older students claimed. I never believed it. Ghost stories were nothing but pranks to scare us first-years.

But everything changed the day Aya dared me to try.

Aya was bold, fearless, and always looking for ways to prove she wasn’t like the rest of us. That Friday after school, when the building emptied out and silence hung heavy in the halls, she grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the forbidden bathroom.

“Don’t tell me you’re scared,” she teased.

I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction. “Of course not.”

We pushed open the bathroom door. The air inside was colder than the hall, heavy with the smell of mold and something metallic—like old blood. The fluorescent lights above flickered, buzzing faintly.

Aya strutted toward the third stall. “Ready?” she asked, her grin daring me to chicken out.

I nodded, though my throat was dry.

She knocked. Once. Twice. Three times.

The sound echoed strangely, as though the walls were hollow.

“Hanako-san,” Aya whispered, “are you there?”

For a moment, nothing happened. Just the hum of the lights and the drip-drip of water from a leaky faucet.

Then—

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Three knocks. From inside the stall.

My heart stopped. Aya’s grin faltered.

The lock on the stall door rattled, as though unseen hands were jiggling it from the inside

“A prank,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince.

The door creaked open just an inch. Darkness yawned inside, darker than it should have been.

And then I saw her.

Two pale hands curled around the stall’s edge. Small hands. Child-sized. Slowly, a face emerged from the shadows—skin white as chalk, lips tinged blue, and eyes too dark, too deep, like pits without a bottom.

Aya gasped, stumbling back.

The girl smiled at us. Her teeth were crooked, and the corners of her mouth stretched too wide.

“Do you need… a friend?” she asked.

Her voice was soft, childlike, but it reverberated in my skull like a scream.

I wanted to run, but my legs refused to move. Aya, trembling, whispered, “No.”

Hanako-san’s smile widened. Her head tilted, jerking unnaturally, like a doll’s.

“Wrong answer.”

The bathroom lights burst all at once, plunging us into darkness.

I grabbed Aya’s arm, but it felt cold—too cold. When I turned toward her, she was gone. The only thing I held was empty air.

“Aya?” I shouted, my voice echoing through the pitch-black room.

From the stall, giggles rang out—high, girlish, and endless.

I bolted from the bathroom, not daring to look back.

The next morning, Aya wasn’t at school. No one remembered her. Not the teachers, not the students, not even her own desk—it was empty, like she’d never existed.

I tried to bring her up, but people just stared at me with blank confusion. Some even asked, “Who’s Aya?”

That night, I dreamt of the bathroom. I dreamt of the stall door creaking open and Hanako-san smiling at me in the dark.

And when I woke up, there was dirt beneath my fingernails. As if I’d clawed my way out of somewhere deep, and cold, and buried.

I don’t go near the third-floor bathroom anymore. But sometimes, when the hallways are quiet, I hear knocking.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

And a voice whispering

“Do you need a friend?”