As many may remember from my last report, Karakura High School’s current occult club is not its first - it previously hosted one for a 20 year period between 1967-1987. However, as my previous report noted, tragedy struck and claimed the lives of nine of the club’s ten members in February 1987 - with the tenth member, Takeshi Sone, going missing.
To this day, the mystery surrounding the deaths of the club’s nine members, Tagawa Suki, Yanagi Katsu, Asato Michi, Tsukimoto Hikaru, Kase Tatsuya, Ohashi Tomiko, Mizuno Yasuko, Soga Kayo and Rei Nobuko remains unsolved - and Takeshi’s disappearance remains as confusing.
Despite this, however, I have made a breakthrough - and while I, regretfully, can’t say I know what became of Takeshi or where he is now, I can say with the utmost certainty and confidence that I know exactly what became of the nine deceased members - both with what exactly the Occult Club of that time was attempting to do, and exactly what went wrong and resulted in the nine deaths.
As previously stated, the Occult Club - given the present circumstances when their bodies were found - can be assumed to have been performing a ritual game known as One Hundred Candles, where a group of people gather in a dark room with, as implied by the name of the game, a hundred candles - and all tell stories, extinguishing a candle each time, until no lit candles remain - with the intent of summoning a spirit once all hundred candles have been put out. Due to the information I have gained, I can say with certainty that this is not only what they attempted to do, but even succeeded in achieving.
As anyone who read my last report will know, on February 21st, 1987, the ten members of Karakura High School’s occult club at the time - founders Takeshi Sone and Tagawa Suki, alongside eight other club members - Yanagi Katsu, Asato Michi, Tsukimoto Hikaru, Kase Tatsuya, Ohashi Tomiko, Mizuno Yasuko, Soga Kayo and Rei Nobuko - entered the school’s boiler room with a hundred candles, only to be reported missing soon after - and found early the next morning by school caretaker Mitsurugi Sugimori as he was called to investigate a “putrid” smell coming from the boiler room, only to find the near-unrecognisable bodies of nine of the ten club members - and Takeshi missing, and surrounding the bodies were exactly one hundred candles. Sugimori’s testimony on the incident can be seen in the newspaper article below.
During my investigation, I ran into several issues - namely, a lack of police reports or government records of the incident or the victims - and was therefore almost entirely incapable of continuing my research on this tragedy, until I came to a breakthrough, and consulted a source who will remain anonymous, naturally for the sake of their privacy, who had insider information regarding the incident.
(Photo unrelated)
During an interview with the source, they claimed to have known exactly what the Occult Club of 1987 were attempting to do with the ritual - namely, attempting to summon and make contact with a being known as “Kugutsu”, whom the club members of the era worshipped. Given the information provided by my source, it can be assumed that the entity was hostile, and it was this successful summoning that directly resulted in the nine deaths, though the spirit itself was shortly after re-contained, with the recently-lifted ban on any occult practices on school grounds - and especially the creation of a new occult club - assisting in this.
In summary, the Occult Club, worshipping this spirit - Kugutsu - attempted the One Hundred Candles ritual game in a misguided attempt to summon it, only for nine of the club’s members to ultimately be killed as a result of the successful summoning of the spirit - with Takeshi having likely either being taken to wherever the spirit originated, or having fled and gone into hiding as a result of the tragic disaster that the successful completion of the ritual concluded in.
CLOSING NOTES, PT. 2: With these recent discoveries, it can be assumed with confidence that certain rumours surrounding the case accusing former principal Izumi Shimizu of involvement in the nine deaths can be disregarded, given the information we have at hand regarding the deaths. While there is no reason to suspect the new Occult club will have any reason to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors and join in worshipping Kugutsu, their recent founding means caution should be taken around the woods - especially with October approaching.Those of you who know will know what the implication here is. For any smaller future updates, tune into Journalism FM (once I've found a co-host...), where we'll discuss this - and all the hot topics around school!
