Hiroshima ghosts

By / August 22, 2024 / commentary

(*This is a personal travel story. It’s not about budget slow travel in early retirement.)

A girl came to visit me in Hiroshima. She was about 10 or 11 years old, or maybe she was older – I only saw her general shape, not her features. I sensed she was happy I was there, in an apartment to visit her lost city, which is now booming again decades after the atomic bomb vaporized, burned, and radiated people. The ghost of this girl was sweet — I felt she was trying not to frighten me.

She came to me during the first night of our week-long stay. Spouse Theo went out to view the Atomic Bomb Dome – the iconic remnants of a bombed-out building that has become a symbol of Hiroshima, of the twisted war-time decision to kill tens of thousands of people in one second and tens of thousands more in the days and years afterward. It is also a symbol of today’s Peace Memorial Park.

The Atomic Bomb Dome is an iconic symbol of the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

I had started reading about the bomb’s facts after Theo left with his camera. I’d been reading for about 15 minutes, propped up and lying on my stomach on the bed in a typical tiny Japanese Airbnb apartment rental. A sliding door partition called a shoji separated the bedroom from the kitchenette because the air conditioning was on. Often shoji doors are made of paper thin enough to let light through. However, this partition had opaque plastic panes. So truthfully, the ghost I encountered was really only a blur moving around behind the door in the kitchenette. Yet somehow I knew she once wore a white dress and black shoes, her hair cut short with bangs that framed a face I couldn’t make out.

Her presence was somehow comforting and I didn’t want to scare her off, much like I sensed she didn’t want to scare me off. I kept reading. Now and then I’d look up when I sensed movement ahead of me through the doors, which I never opened to investigate. I think she stayed about 20 minutes, occasionally floating around the kitchenette from side to side behind the shoji.

If you’re still reading, and you think I’m in need of professional help, or that I have a disturbed imagination, please let me assure you that I am sane. I sometimes have these types of experiences when strong energy in my environment manifests into …. well, something I cannot explain. This has happened to me since I was a little girl and almost no one knows about it. Long ago, I spotted a mass of yellowish energy floating in my childhood friend’s stairway. As a kid I used to play around with astral projections through my neighborhood — flying over houses and streets. As I got older, I stopped that type of travel and blocked out unusual energies.

Yet, sometimes now as an adult, I feel an inexplicable ‘energy’ – or what some people might call ‘spirit’.

Occasionally as an adult, I’ve glimpsed other realities at places with dramatic or violent history, but it’s never in full focus. I suppose that in a place like Hiroshima, latent ability to sense other levels of existence might become stronger, temporarily granting me access to inexplicable ghostliness.

I believe the ghost of that girl eased me into the heavy energy I’d feel throughout the week we spent in Hiroshima. I believe that’s why her presence was somewhat comforting as I began to read the gruesome facts about the atomic bomb that fell on her on August 6, 1945. Maybe she even took a bit of pity upon me, knowing I that while I was in her city, I would experience an energy I haven’t yet experienced.

That night I met her, I eventually stopped reading about the bomb and went on to read some world news, then fell asleep. During the night I opened the shoji and went through the kitchenette to reach the bathroom. Theo was sleeping, and no other being was there.

The next day, we began a week of exploring the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum and Peace Park. We listened to stories of survivors, watched films, looked at exhibits, rang peace bells, prayed, asked questions of a hibakusha (survivor) through an AI program that generated her recorded responses.

Top: An AI ‘ask and tell’ session with a real hibackusha, or bomb survivor; middle: clothing worn by bomb victims; bottom: a boy with peeling skin and facial burns receives some medical care.

I learned that our Airbnb unit was within half a kilometer from Ground Zero – where the atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” exploded in the air over the city. The closest school to our apartment rental was Honkawa Elementary, at the time a rare reinforced concrete building in a neighborhood of mostly wooden structures. Two people initially survived at the school — one a student who lived into her 80s. Many teachers and 400 hundred students died.

Was that girl’s ghost from the school? I don’t know… but I don’t think so. I didn’t feel or see her when we visited the school, which now has a small museum and parts of the former building still intact. With so much devastation all over the city, she could have come from anywhere.

The red ball in the air over the model of Hiroshima is the hypocenter – where “Little Boy” exploded. The red dot below that to the left of the ball is the location of our Airbnb. The closest structure to the right is Honkawa Elementary School. The bridge between the two is Aioli Bridge, where the pilot aimed to drop the bomb.

We befriended a Peace Volunteer who offered much of his time on a couple of tours and who chatted with us over some meals. Our new friend was born in 1949, and witnessed Hiroshima’s rebuilding. His grandfather was a hibakusha who died from the bomb’s aftereffects. He was kind and patient with all of our questions, and we found we had much in common, including love of travel, good food and drink.

Through all of it, everything I saw and heard and learned, there was immense sadness in the air around me. Not rage, not revenge, not horror. Sure, the results of this bombing were horrific. But what I sensed – day in and day out for seven days – was an energy mass that was inconsolably wretched. Even in the few areas of today’s Hiroshima further from the blast zone where the city is modern, clean, pleasant-looking — the sadness was always there.

And as I write this from Maezora, Hatsukaichi, a place Theo picked for us to ‘rest’, I can see Hiroshima’s skyline to the northeast up the coast. It’s 22 kilometers away, but I still feel that black, sorrowful air pushing on my soul. Yes, we need rest as I process all that I’ve experienced during the last week of my human reality – a reality that sometimes butts up against the universal existence of humanity with layers on levels that I cannot explain.

Thanks for reading, “Hiroshima ghosts.”

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Ellen’s sobriety date is April 13, 2010. She left the news business in 2015.

During budget slow travel in early retirement with husband Theo, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She had a double mastectomy without reconstruction in Croatia in 2018.

Today she travels the world as a ‘flattie’.

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