Kisaragi Station (きさらぎ駅), The Station With Arrival Posts, but No Record of Return

Kisaragi Station.
In Japanese, it is きさらぎ駅.

Just hearing the name makes it sound like an old rural station.
A small station in a snowy region, an unmanned ticket gate, a worn bench, a train that comes once an hour. That is the image that comes to mind first.

But it is not a place confirmed as an actual railway station. It is not on route maps, not in timetables, and has no station sign. At least, not as a station operated by a real railway company.

The widely known story of Kisaragi Station is generally understood to have begun with real-time posts made on the occult board of the Japanese anonymous forum 2ch on the night of January 8, 2004. The poster used the name “Hasumi” and said they had boarded a train at Shin-Hamamatsu Station. But the train did not stop for more than 20 minutes, and eventually arrived at an unmanned station they had never heard of. The name of that station, they said, was Kisaragi Station. Enshu Railway has also treated this urban legend as a story connected to its own line, introducing the sequence of “a train departing from Shin-Hamamatsu,” “a train that does not stop for more than 20 minutes,” and “the nonexistent Kisaragi Station.”

The first thing I checked wa