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Known locally as Kawadoton, the Old Wada Tunnel in Akita has carried a reputation for danger — and this is a case where checking the record changed more than one detail commonly repeated about it.
The Commonly Told Legend
Local legend holds that the tunnel became cursed by local spirits, haunted by the souls of those who lost their lives there. The defining incident, in this version, came in 1965, when a truck driver died in a head-on collision with a bus inside the tunnel. Since then, locals have avoided driving through at night, believing the driver’s ghost remains — strange noises and ghostly lights in the darkness are the phenomena most consistently attributed to his presence. This version also dates the tunnel’s construction to 1902, framing its narrow width and steep inclines as a hazard that had been claiming lives for over sixty years by the time of the 1965 crash.
Correction: A Later Tunnel, and a Different Cause of Death
Japanese-language sources documenting the actual Old Wada Tunnel in Akita City place its construction in 1961, not 1902 — a roughly 60-year discrepancy — as a short, roughly 100-meter passage on what was then National Route 13. It was closed and buried around 2000 due to age and a bypass route. The ghost stories attached to it in Japanese sources don’t center on a single 1965 truck-bus collision; they describe a wider cast of apparitions — children, an old woman, a middle-aged man, a young woman — with a specific, documented reason for why children feature so heavily: the tunnel had no sidewalk, forcing pedestrians onto the roadway itself, and this genuinely led to pedestrians being struck and killed. A boy is reported standing near the entrance in multiple independent accounts, consistent with a child pedestrian fatality rather than a commercial-vehicle collision.
What’s Actually Verifiable
We could not verify the specific 1965 truck-bus collision as told in the commonly repeated version. What Japanese sources do document, independent of that specific claim, is a 1961 construction date, a roughly 100-meter length, a location on old Route 13 in Akita City, closure around 2000, and — critically — the absence of a sidewalk as a genuine, structural safety hazard that plausibly explains why pedestrian deaths (including children) are the recurring thread in the tunnel’s actual haunting reports. We’re presenting both versions here because the 1965 collision story is widely repeated, but the underlying facts we could independently confirm point to a different, no-sidewalk-related cause and a construction date nearly sixty years later than commonly stated.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the Old Wada Tunnel actually built?
Documented Japanese sources place construction in 1961, not the 1902 date commonly repeated in English-language retellings of this legend.
Was the tunnel’s ghost caused by a truck-bus collision?
That’s the commonly told version, but we couldn’t verify it. Independently documented sources instead point to pedestrian deaths caused by the tunnel’s lack of a sidewalk, which better explains why child ghosts are the most consistently reported figure.
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