Creepy - Day 21 - The Devil's Jaws

Episode Date: October 21, 2018

There is an old myth about having wishes granted...***Credited to DarkMyth***Check out more from the Kowbana podcast at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kowabana-true-japanese-scary-stories-from-around-internet/id1317416071?mt=2***Please consider supporting the podcast at Patreon.com/Creepypod or creepypod.com/support***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Produced by Steve Blizin, Puzzle Audio***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is the bloody disgusting podcast network. And thank you as always to the support of our patrons. Patrons like Alyssa M. Mathis, Brody McDougall, Ariel Teague, Wesley Schull Jr., Ruth, Heather Thomas, Andrew Dato, Jordan Silva, Christopher Maras, Luke Wood, Scott Savino, and Chris Swihart. We try our hardest to reward our patrons for their constant support. between shout-out, sticker sets, bonus episodes, personal narrations, and more. Check out how you can support the podcast and get rewarded at patreon.com slash creepypod. The episode you're about to hear has some Japanese words involved. And as I have a tenuous grasp on English, I reached out to one of my favorite horror

podcasters, Tara A. Devlin of the Coabana podcast for some help in my pronunciations. If you have even passing interest in Japanese horror stories, I highly recommend you check out the link for Coabana in the show notes, or Tara reads horror stories translated from their native Japanese. I think you're going to love it. Now, this is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastas and urban legends in the world.

Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Briefie presents the 31 Days of Horror. Day 21 The Devil's Jaws Credited to use their dark myth. I suppose when I say Noroi Kokutsu,

most of you would guess I was talking about some exotic delicacy or maybe some holiday resort in the Far East. You'd be dead wrong. Anoroa Kokotzu is a very nasty object that's been part of Japanese folklore for centuries. Maybe even millennia. Please, keep listening. I know that folklore, especially folklore from a completely foreign culture,

bores a lot of people to snores. I can assure you, I'm no fan either. But please believe me, when I say it's essential that you read this and understand what Noroiko-Kozu are and how they work. As best as it can be translated, Noroika-Gozu means devil's jaws in English. According to Japanese tradition, a Noroika-Kozu is made of two thin boards of wood, one upon the other, that are bound together on one side with either a strip of leather or a length of twine, so the board can be open and closed like a book, or a set of jaws.

A certain spell is then written upon the board to give you. the object its dark powers. Basically, so long as they knew the magic words, anybody could make one from household objects. Noroy Kokotsu were used to strike a bargain with something they called, Kafka Oni Kohn, which I'm told means, he who pays for his food with good luck. Don't be fooled, though. Even though the name might sound benevolent, Kofko Oni Kohn was regarded as a cruel, evil creature, and was greatly feared. He was believed to have sway over the forces of luck, and a person could request him to turn a near-certain failure in their future into a glorious victory

by writing what they wanted upon a piece of rice paper and placing it inside a Noroagokotu. But there was also a catch. Kafka Oni Kohn would only honor the request if you nominated your payment for his services. on top of the message. And the only payment he would accept was the life of someone you held dear. It had to be someone you truly cared for, but not necessarily a family member. It could also have been a close friend. If you named someone you didn't care for, or even someone you actually wanted to die,

somehow the Kafkaone cone would know and the wish wouldn't be granted. But if the Kafkaone cone approved of the nominated person, payment, then the person who made the wish would be blessed with the best possible luck in whatever matter they had asked for the Kafka Oni Kohn to help them with. After that, the nominated victim would mysteriously disappear almost entirely without a trace. The worst part of the story is that after it had claimed its price, the Kofko Onikon would leave a souvenir outside the front door of the person who made the wish. Sometimes, it was the victim's bloody clothing, or some other personal effect.

But more often than not, it was part of the victim's remains. Some people believe it did this to traumatize the person who made the wish, to remind them of the terrible faith they placed upon their loved one. Others apparently think it was more like the Kafka Oni Kohn leaving a receipt behind for the person who made the wish, acknowledging that it had received its purpose. payment, and that their business was concluded. Either way, making a Noroy Kukotsu, and striking a bargain with Kufko and Ekon, were forbidden practices in Japan, punishable by death.

So once a deal was done, the person who committed the crime would usually destroy all the evidence, the Noroy Kukotsu, and whatever traces of the victim have been left upon their doorstep. Even if you are into old monster legends, I'm sure you're probably just listening to this and thinking that it's some old superstitious Hocum. Well, a few days. Hell, probably even a few hours ago, I would have agreed with you. But not anymore. I can't tell you too much about who I am and how I know what I know.

What I can tell you is that I have connections in the missing persons or an homicide investigation of a teenage boy somewhere in the Midwest. About a year ago, in the lead-up to Halloween, There was this meme going around with a picture showing the top of a skeleton, the skull, neck, and shoulder blades. People would forward it with MMSs, tweets, and the like with simple messages like, like, happy Halloween, or boo, etc. You might have gotten one yourself. Eventually, the meme found its way to someone with a bit of knowledge about anatomy,

and they realized that the skeleton in the picture was awful realistic. They reported it to law enforcement, but it would be weeks before the first of the body. report made it through the bureaucracy to a medical examiner who verified that the image did indeed warrant some investigation. The ME was convinced that the skeleton was indeed the genuine article, but of particular concern to her was the pinkish tone of the bones and the trace amounts of what appeared to be blood and flesh still on it. What also concerned her were a series of scrape marks that could be seen on the bone when the photos examined at high resolution. They appeared to encompass the entire skull, in the EMU's opinion that the

These were made when the flesh was stripped off the body, by something with very sharp and very heart teeth. There seemed to be no legitimate reason for a photo like this to be circulating among the public. Law enforcement determined it was either a lead crime scene photo or evidence to an as-yet-undiscovered crime. They considered that the photo might have been taken by some callous private citizens or household kids. We found a dead body, photographed it, published it online, and never reported it to the Even more disturbing was the possibility that the photo was published by the psycho who had done this

and wanted the world to admire his handiwork. The trouble was that we only had one photo to go on, which made a really hard to determine whether or not the photo was even related to an act of herself case. The XF data, the data buried within the JPEC file that detail of where the photo had come from, what camera had taken at, when it had been taken, etc., had all been wiped clean, which isn't hard to do if you know what you're doing. All we had to go on was the photo itself. No one bore you with the technical details,

but suffice it to say the computer forensic text made a thorough sweep of the National Crime Scene Photo Database and determined that the photo didn't pertain to any case in the digital archives. Several other analyses were run in the photo. But the one that paid off was the facial reconstruction simulation, a piece of software that scans a photo of the skull and determines what the guy would have looked like when he was still alive. Eventually, we were able to match the reconstructed face to an active case file out of state.

The skull belonged to a teenage boy. Let's call him Jack, who'd been reported missing. While the photo itself was being investigated, the meme was also being examined. We were charting its course back from the concerned citizen who initially reported the image to the police, to the first person who'd ever sent the image. It wasn't easy, as a meme leapfrog back and forth across. several popular messaging services along its way. Just over a week after the victim's identity was confirmed,

we were able to determine who had started the meme. We'll call her Jill. It was of immediate interest to law enforcement. It was that Jill's name was already on record in Jack's case file. She was apparently a school friend of his and one of the last people to seem alive. The warrant was issued for Jill's cell phone and she was brought in for questioning.

The phone was thoroughly analyzed and MMS was recovered containing the skeleton photo. But while the phone had a definite record of receiving the message, was later discovered that Jill's service provider had no record of ever transmitting it to her. Another weird thing was that the sender ID for the MMS didn't contain any numbers. It contained only Unicode Japanese kanji characters. This is technically impossible. The way the system is set up,

the phone should only be able to log a series of numeric digits into the sender ID field. The characters in the sender IDs spelt out, Anato no Shtoke. This isn't someone's name. The text translated it and discovered that it roughly means your employee or your business partner. Under interrogation, Joe recalled receiving the MMS.

She said that the message kind of creeped her out, especially because it came from an unknown sender, which is what the messaging software told her because it was unable to interpret the invalid sender ID. But because it was close to Halloween, she assumed that one of her friends sent it as a seasonal thing, so she forwarded the cool, creepy photo on, starting the meme. According to the MMS's timestamp,

she received it only a few hours after Jack was last seen. But Jill claimed she never linked a message to Jack's disappearance in her mind because at the time she received the MMS. She didn't even know Jack was missing. The detectives grilled Jill for over three hours, but when she began to get really upset, her father ended the interview, and without harder evidence, the detectives couldn't hold her. The tech who analyzed the photo. Well, let's just say that he's very thorough at his job.

And he didn't give up on the mystery of how the phone could have received an impossible MMS, that its service provider had no record of ever sending. He dug deep into its software, looking for his explanation. Eventually, he came upon a curious anomaly embedded in the phone's firmware. More Unicode Japanese characters. This time a long block of them. The firmware is supposed to be just universal machine code that tells the phone how to work. Japanese text or text in any human language that matter doesn't belong in there.

But as intriguing as this discovery was, it still didn't explain the impossible MMS. At least, that's what we thought at the time. You see, the Japanese text was garbage data, which means it was working into the firmware in such a way that it had no actual effect on how it worked. It was on the phone, but it wasn't doing anything. By this time, I was involved in the investigation. When I learned about the Japanese text and the firmware, I got curious, so I ran it through Google Translate. It didn't translate well, though. A quarter of the words weren't even recognized, and the ones that were didn't make any sense together.

frustrated I called upon a Japanese-American acquaintance to translate for me. I'd expected it to be the manufacturer's copyright on the firmware code, or perhaps even the programmer signing's work. But it actually turned out to sell more like a somber poem of sorts. My Japanese-American friend agreed, saying the language is far more elegant than day-to-day Japanese, and more than a little archaic. Seeking answers, we phoned up the phone manufacturer's development lab in Japan. We eventually got through to the manager of the team who developed a phone software and, with my friend acting's translator, we asked him about the mysterious text in the firmware, and also if he had any explanation as to how a Japanese phrase could be recorded as the sender ID for an MMS on one of their phones.

He very politely denied knowing anything about either of these matters. Assured me that any garbage data in the firmware was of no consequence. Still wanting answers to at least one of the mysteries, I phoned a professor Japanese literature at Tokyo. university to see if you could recognize the verse in the firmware. Before my colleague could finish reciting the verse, the professor cut him off. He recognized it all right. Despite the language buried between us, I could hear the discomfort in the man's voice as he explained that the verse was the incantation written upon Noroika Kotsu to give them their

dark powers. It was at this point that my colleague explained the Noroika Kotsu legend of his culture to me. He knew the story well. He'd just never heard the actual incantation used to create one. Until now, while this was all quite educational, it really didn't get us anywhere in terms of the investigation. But I kept thinking about the problem of the MMS and eventually, I had this crazy thought. The fact that Jill had received a photo of Jack's remains was eerily similar to the part of the Noroiko-Kozoo legend where the monster would leave behind some proof of his victim's death.

I suppose just for fun. I skimmed through the rest of the case notes to see if there were any other parallels between the murder and the Japanese legend. I almost wish I hadn't. When I read through Jill's original witness statement, the one taken when the police were just investigating Jack's disappearance as a missing person's case, she remarked that she remembered the last day she saw him clearly, because it was the same day her history teacher had returned a test that she'd surprisingly aced, even though she thought she was sure to flunk it. My stomach sank when I read that statement. because I was quite familiar with the contents of Jill's phone, and I remembered reading about

this history test before. About three days before Jack's disappearance, Jill had typed a text message into her phone. I need to pass this history test. Jack's name was marked at the top of the message, as the intended recipient. The similarities between the old stories I've been hearing and the murder were suddenly clear as day. Jill had a phone that, for some reason, contained an old Jack's. Japanese spell used to summon a monster.

She typed what could be interpreted as a demand for a good history mark into the phone, with her close friend's name on the message. And just like in the stories, Jill aced her test. Jack disappeared without a trace, and Jill received a sick memento of his death. If you pointed this out to me at the time, I would have chuckled and said, yes, it is a weird coincidence, isn't it? I wanted to believe that that's all it was. I really did.

But deep down in that hidden doubting Thomas part we all have that doesn't completely trust modern rationality to be our salvation, I was frightened. Then a couple of days ago, which was about a week after I'd called the phone manufacturer, I received a package in the mail. There was no return address, but the postmark was from Osaka, Japan. Inside were a heap of papers. On top of the stack was a cover letter explaining what the package contained. It was written in bad English.

although I was able to get the gist of what it was saying. The sender didn't identify themselves, but it's clear that they must work for the manufacture of Jill's phone and that they were aware that I've been asking questions about the hidden text in the firmware. My informant was part of the development of the phone series that Jill's phone belonged to, and he or she had an explanation for how the Noroika Kocutsu incantation had gotten into the phone's firmware. There was a guy on the development team, smart but a real emo loner type. Not the shy kind of loner, the crazed gunman and the making kind.

People would try to be friendly and reach out to him and he'd stare diggers at them. For whatever reasons, the guy had issues. Shortly before the phone series went into production, the guy hung himself. My informant believes that before he died, the guy implanted the hazard to spell into the phones as his ultimate screw you to the world. Within a few months of the phone's release, somehow the company's executives got win that there was a problem with them and resellable. receiving and disturbing MMSs that the phones seemed to be generating themselves. The company began to investigate the problem quietly themselves, secretly querying all their active phones remotely.

They found scores of incidents where a phone had a record of an incoming MMS from an Ananatush Tocke, your business partner, containing a single JPEG file. Most people who'd receive these messages that subsequently deleted them. But in several dozen cases, the JPEG. were still on the recipient's phones and were retrieved by the company. An upgraded version of the firmware, with the incantation removed, was developed, but ultimately never implemented because it was discovered that the phone kept rejecting it. The guy who put the incantation into the firmware had also rigged it so it would never allow

itself to be overwritten. Two months before Jack's disappearance, the company abruptly terminated their investigation. By this time, they were aware of nearly 800 incidents of MMS as being received. received from Anitano Shatoke. An unspoken agreement was made that the problem was unsolvable and that their best course of action was to simply turn a blind eye. Everyone involved in the informal investigation was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Orders were issued to destroy all the records, but my anonymous contact managed to keep copies

of most of them, which he or she sent to me. It's taken me a while to get through the documents here she sent me, as most of them are written in Japanese. But luckily, their list of the phones that received in and a Tana Shatake message was written in regular digits. I ran all the American numbers on the list through a database, and all of them, every single one, belonging to someone who was questioned in relation to a missing person's case that began within days of them receiving that message. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that my contact also sent me printouts of all the JPEG,

they could salvage that turned up during the manufacturer's investigation. They are all just like the photo of Jack's remains that began this entire case, a realistic skeleton cringing into the camera, covered in scrape marks left by whatever sharp-toothed nightmare stripped them of all their flesh. I don't have access to the advanced software that synthesized an accurate face of Jack's skull. At least, not the kind of access that allows me to use it without answering a lot of difficult questions first. But I scanned the photos and overlaid them with Photoshop on the case photos of the missing person associated with their recipient. I admit I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell, every one of those skulls fits perfectly inside the face of one of those missing people.

I can't tell you the name of the manufacturer involved, nor the name of the phone series. Suffice to say, they're a well-known company and the phone series is quite popular. I wish I could tell you more. But if I do, I have no doubt that the company will have this warning suppressed as defamation. And that can't happen. The word has to get out, and I figure that half a warning is better than no warning at all. There's a common series of phone out there with an evil curse marked inside them. You may well be carrying a Noroika Koto in your purse or pocket.

And even if you aren't, someone who cares about you may be. So please be wary of typing out what you wish. for or hope for or think you need. But most of all, be especially careful of whose name you place on those messages. Because you may just be sending them into the devil's jaws. Spread the word. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us.

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