Mashiro Reads Viewers’ Ghost Stories for Over 100 Minutes, Then Improvises One

NIJISANJI — Mashiro, a Nijisanji streamer, spent a 102-minute stream reading scary stories sent in by viewers, pausing after each one to talk it over, and finished by making up a ghost story of their own.

The reading opened with a story about a childhood doll named Mel-chan, which the writer’s parents said kept falling from a shelf at night. Mashiro followed it with an aside about having been unable to throw things away as a child, out of worry for the people who made them. Later submissions included a tale of a haunted building that a telecom repair worker kept being sent to, where static on a business phone line would not clear, and a story of a child alone in an apartment who saw something part a sliding door. Mashiro also read a Fukui Prefecture account of a sleep-paralysis encounter after a fishing trip to a small island off the coast.

“Nice, improvised ghost stories. I feel like I could do one now.” — Mashiro, after making up a story on the spot

One submission, about a nurse on a night shift, drew an audible reaction. In it, a bedridden patient in a hospital room turned, said “Oh, I got it wrong,” and died, while the patient in the next bed, who had been expected to die, recovered. Mashiro said it gave them chills and wondered whether a death god had made a mistake. After a story about a department store where a manager was said to haunt the third floor, Mashiro mused that spirits may stay where people died rather than at their graves, which would make hospitals the most crowded places of all.

The first part of a three-part serial about a down-on-his-luck fortune-teller, in which his mentor quits because she can no longer see the future beyond a certain August, ended on the line that a seer cannot foretell what does not exist. Mashiro called the series’ recurring characters distinctive and said they would like to hear the rest. Mashiro then tried an improvised ghost story in an exaggerated country dialect about a man named Oidon who spots a woman in a bamboo grove, and said it was surprising how well it held together.

The last story came from a viewer who passes an apartment where an old man seems to press his face against a frosted-glass window once a week. Mashiro noted that frosted glass blurs more the closer one gets, so the man cannot actually see out, and said that was the frightening part. The talk turned to the fact that clear tape on frosted glass makes it transparent, which Mashiro called a good trick for a story.

Near the end, Mashiro said two studio recordings this week would cut into streaming time, and asked viewers to send in moments from past streams they would like clipped.