S02E05: The Last Train Home

 On December 14, 2012, Train 223 departed Tokyo's Shinjuku Station with 47 passengers aboard. It never reached its destination. No wreckage was found. No bodies were recovered. Three years later, witnesses began reporting encounters with a mysterious train on Platform 13 - one that seems to travel through both space and time. Join us as we explore one of Japan's most baffling railway mysteries and hear the stories of those who claim to have caught a ride on a train that shouldn't exist. 

Transcript

Tonight on Unexplained, we investigate a case that has haunted Japan's railway system for over a decade - the mysterious disappearance of Train 223 and the inexplicable experiences of those who claim to have boarded it since.

On December 14, 2012, the 11:45 PM local train from Tokyo's Shinjuku Station to Hachiōji vanished without a trace. All tracking systems showed the train departing on schedule, but it never arrived at its destination. More remarkably, no wreckage was ever found, and none of the 47 passengers or crew members were ever seen again.

"It was as if the train simply ceased to exist," explains Detective Kenji Tanaka, who led the initial investigation. "The security cameras show it entering the tunnel near Mount Takao, but there's no footage of it coming out the other side. Search teams combed every inch of that tunnel and the surrounding mountains. Nothing."

The case might have remained just another unsolved mystery, filed away in police archives, if not for what began happening three years later.

In March 2015, university student Yuki Watanabe was waiting at Shinjuku Station's Platform 13 after a late study session. "It was nearly midnight, and I knew I'd missed the last train," she recounts, her voice still trembling at the memory. "But then an older model train pulled up. The station display showed 'Train 223 to Hachiōji.' I thought it was strange - that line number had been retired after the 2012 incident."

Yuki boarded the train, finding it oddly empty except for a few other passengers. "They all had this... distant look. No one was checking their phone or reading. They just stared straight ahead. The woman across from me was wearing clothes that seemed decades old."

As the train entered the Mount Takao tunnel, Yuki says the lights flickered, and she experienced a sensation of weightlessness. "When I looked out the window, I saw... impossible things. Fragments of other times - both past and future versions of Tokyo, all overlapping. And through the gaps between them, something else. Something vast and dark and..."

Yuki never finished her journey. In a panic, she pulled the emergency brake and fled at the next station. But her story sparked a wave of similar accounts.

Dr. Mika Yamamoto, a quantum physicist at the University of Tokyo, has spent years collecting these testimonies: "We've documented over 200 cases of people claiming to have boarded Train 223 since its disappearance. The details are remarkably consistent. The old-style train. The oddly-dressed passengers. The disturbing visions in the tunnel. And most intriguingly, the distortions in time."

Some witnesses report arriving at their destination hours or even days before they departed. Others describe journeys that seemed to last weeks, only to find that mere minutes had passed in the outside world. A few claim to have glimpsed the original missing passengers, still riding the train, unaged and unaware that any time has passed.

The phenomenon attracted the attention of Dr. Heinrich Mueller, a theoretical physicist specializing in Einstein-Rosen bridges. "The Mount Takao tunnel passes through an area of unusual geological composition - layers of magnetite and quartz that could, theoretically, amplify certain quantum effects. Our calculations suggest the possibility of a localized temporal distortion, what laypeople might call a 'time eddy.'"

But the most disturbing evidence comes from Akiko Tanaka, the daughter of one of the original missing passengers. In 2019, she received a phone call from her father's number. "When I answered, I could barely hear him through the static. He said he was on his way home, apologized for running late. In the background, I heard the sound of a train and a conductor announcing the next station. The call ended before I could say anything."

Phone company records confirm the call came from her father's number - a line that had been disconnected seven years earlier.

The case has drawn attention from paranormal researchers, including Dr. James Chen of the International Society for Paranormal Research. "We've encountered other instances of phantom vehicles - ghost ships, spectral planes, even phantom buses in London. But Train 223 is unique. It seems to exist in a state of temporal flux, neither fully present in our time nor completely absent from it."

The Japanese Railway Company has officially dismissed the sightings as urban legends, though they maintain a strict policy of not using the number 223 on any of their lines. They've also installed additional security cameras and sensors in the Mount Takao tunnel, monitoring for any unusual phenomena.

But the stories continue. Every few months, another witness comes forward with an account of boarding a train that shouldn't exist, of seeing things that shouldn't be possible, of experiencing time itself coming undone around them.

Some locals now avoid Platform 13 at Shinjuku Station after 11 PM, claiming they sometimes hear the distinctive sound of an old-model train approaching, even when the platform is empty. Others report seeing strange lights in the Mount Takao tunnel, and hearing the phantom sound of wheels on tracks when no trains are scheduled.

Dr. Yamamoto offers this reflection: "In quantum physics, we talk about superposition - the idea that something can exist in multiple states simultaneously. Perhaps Train 223 has become something similar - a quantum ghost, riding the rails between different times, different possibilities. The real question is: where was it going? And more importantly, where did those original passengers end up?"

The case of Train 223 remains officially unsolved. The Japanese Railway Company maintains an active missing persons file for the 47 individuals who vanished that December night. Their families still wait for answers, for some explanation of what happened to their loved ones on what should have been just another late-night commute home.

And somewhere, perhaps, a train that disappeared in 2012 continues its journey through the darkness between moments, carrying passengers who don't realize they're lost in time, eternally on their way home to a station they may never reach.