A thought rose in my mind before I could stop it.
Something incredibly evil is resting here - something that used to live in the vicinity. I'm sure of it.
I can't explain why I felt this way. Maybe there used to be a statue of Jizō or something here, but it broke - maybe that's all it was? Or maybe someone carried it off? I tried to believe this. But it wasn't true. Something hung in the air there, without a doubt - a passion of terrible intensity that had kept accumulating new layers over the years until it became one dense mass. The feeling that came over me then was so creepy that I just stood and stared.
As I looked more closely, I noticed ten or so pitch-black stones, each shaped like a small egg, that had been arranged in a circle right in the middle of the shrine. There was something very eerie about them too.
I got out of there quick, trying as much as possible to keep the ring of stones out of my view. During my travels, I had come across such things. There are, without a doubt, places in this world where something has settled, and it's best for us little humans not to get involved.

Ultimately, though, it's living people that frighten me the most. It's always seemed to me that nothing could be scarier than a person, because as dreadful as places can be, they're still just places; and no matter how awful ghosts might seem, they're just dead people. I always thought that the most terrifying things anyone could ever think up were the things living people came up with.