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On the outskirts of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, a roughly 900-meter tunnel built in the early 1950s carries a name and a legend built around one of the more distinctive figures in this site's catalog: a man with the head of an ox.
The Legend
According to the story, the haunting traces to a specific night in July 1952, when a local farmer named Tsunetaro Kume was walking through the tunnel and heard a strange sound from the darkness ahead. He reportedly saw a huge figure emerge — a man's body topped with an ox's head, eyes glowing — and fled without looking back. The account spread quickly through the region, with some locals dismissing it as an overactive imagination and others convinced something genuinely unusual haunted the tunnel.
The most detailed later account dates to 1979, when a married couple reported hearing something running toward them before the ox-headed figure emerged from the shadows. Both, according to the story, fainted from fear on the spot, and by the time they regained consciousness, the figure had vanished entirely.
What's Actually Verifiable
We could not verify either the 1952 or 1979 encounter against a documented source, and no independent record confirms a farmer named Tsunetaro Kume or the married couple's account. Ox-headed and other hybrid animal-human figures do appear across broader Japanese and East Asian folklore traditions, which may explain why this particular image took hold as a coherent, specific figure rather than a vaguer shape or shadow — the ox-headed man has a recognizable folkloric shape to draw on, unlike some of the more formless hauntings this site has covered.
A Legend With a Named First Witness
Unlike many tunnel legends built around anonymous “locals” or “travelers,” Ushikubi Tunnel's origin story names a specific individual — Tsunetaro Kume — which gives the account a texture of specificity, whether or not it can be independently confirmed. That naming convention recurs at a handful of similarly detailed tunnel legends on this site, and tends to correlate with stories that read as more recent additions to the local landscape rather than centuries-deep oral tradition.
A Modern Legend Wearing an Old Folkloric Shape
What's notable here is the gap between the legend's recent dating — a named 1952 encounter — and its imagery, which draws on much older hybrid-creature folklore traditions found across East Asia generally. That combination, a 20th-century sighting dressed in centuries-old folkloric clothing, suggests the witness (or the tellers who shaped the story afterward) reached for existing cultural imagery to explain an unfamiliar experience, rather than inventing something entirely new from nothing.
Can You Visit?
Ushikubi Tunnel remains part of the road network near Kanazawa. As with any mountain tunnel of this length, visitors should prioritize ordinary driving safety over any interest in encountering the figure at the center of its legend.
Ghost-Hunting Gear & Further Reading
- Books on Japanese folklore and hybrid creature legends
- Ishikawa Prefecture and Kanazawa travel guides
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