Dwarf Imperial Army (小皇军)

My pal Richard and his wife went to Japan for a tour and they stopped over at Osaka for a few days.

At the meantime, the couple stayed in a hotel beside a very famous noodle shop.

All went well and they enjoyed the sightseeing trip very much and only to return to their room to rest.

In the middle of the night, Richard faintly heard some thumping noise came from the left side of the room wall. He thought it was the noise of hot water pipe shaking; which is normal when the boiler has just heated up. So Richard continued to lie in the bed and tried to shut his eyes…

Then the thumping noise became more audible. Now the thumping noise resembles the marching noise of a troop of soldiers. It was ‘thump, thump, thump…’ sound of leather boots storming the ground in a rhythmic order. Slowly the ‘thump, thump, thump…’ became louder which caused Richard to fix his gaze on the left wall. Not long after that, he saw a trop of soldiers in WWII Imperial Army uniform marched out from the left wall. The soldiers were about 3 feet tall. They marched in the mid of the air and slowly passing Richard and his wife who were still lying in the bed.

Richard wanted to turn his body so that he could wake up his wife but he just couldn’t move or open his mouth. Some invisible force seemed to have taken control of him. So, Richard could only watch the dwarf Imperial Army procession passing him and his wife in the mid of the air.

Gradually, the procession entered into the wall on the right side. And row by row of ghostly Imperial Army disappeared into the opposite wall and as the last row of soldiers disappeared into the wall; so are their thumping sound of their boots…

Finally, the thumping noise subsided and Richard found the binding force on him has also gone. So he jumped out from the bed and rushed to inspect the walls on both sides of the room but he found no traces of any sort. Richard’s action stirred his wife from her slumber and she asked what Richard was doing. At this point, he could only squeeze out a bitter smile; he just couldn’t tell what he just saw to his wife. There was no sign or no proof whatsoever.

One afternoon when I happened to meet Richard in a coffee shop, he just poured the strange incidents onto me and wanted some explanation to the ghostly phenomena he saw in Osaka hotel.

Personally, I think what Richard saw was only a snap shot of images somehow ‘recorded’ from the past and this image was ‘released’ when the temperature, time and humidity are right. Since the ghostly figures did not react to Richard’s presence; it is safe to assume that they have no intelligence and they are just mirages of the past.