A voice in a school bathroom stall asks: "Red paper or blue paper?" Choose red and you are flayed alive. Choose blue and you are strangled to death. There is no right answer.
After school. An empty bathroom. You enter the last stall, and while you sit there—a voice speaks from nowhere.
"Do you want red paper, or blue paper?"
This is Aka Manto. Among Japan's school ghost stories, it is the most merciless.
Choose red, and you will be flayed alive until your body is as red as the paper. Choose blue, and you will be strangled until your face turns blue-purple with death.
What if you refuse both? What if you say "yellow paper" or "green paper"?
You are dragged to hell.
The origins of Aka Manto trace back to 1930s Japan.
Newspaper reports from the late 1930s document a wave of panic in elementary schools across Osaka and Kyoto. Rumors of "Aka Manto"—a figure in a red cloak—spread so rapidly that children refused to attend school. Teachers and police intervened to restore order.
In this early version, Aka Manto was not a bathroom ghost but a suspicious figure in a red cape who abducted children. The legend likely emerged from real anxieties about child kidnapping, which then evolved into something supernatural.
After World War II, the legend was reconstructed as a toilet ghost story. The setting shifted from dark alleys to bathroom stalls, the kidnapper became a spirit, and the iconic "red or blue" choice was added. With this final element, Aka Manto became a perfectly constructed engine of fear.
The genius of Aka Manto lies in the absence of a correct answer.
Most urban legends offer survival rules. Teke-Teke can be repelled with a chant. Bloody Mary requires only stepping away from the mirror. But Aka Manto offers no escape through compliance. Red leads to death. Blue leads to death. Any other color leads to death.
For children, this represents the most fundamental terror imaginable: a situation where doing the right thing does not save you. In the adult world, unfairness is routine. But in a child's world, problems are supposed to have solutions. Aka Manto demolishes that assumption.
The only rumored survival strategy is to answer "I don't need any paper"—to reject the choice entirely. But even this escape route is contested. Some versions of the legend state that refusal simply triggers a different punishment.
Aka Manto belongs to a rich Japanese tradition of toilet-based supernatural encounters.
Hanako-san, the Purple Mirror, and numerous other legends place the supernatural encounter in the school bathroom. In Japanese folklore, the toilet represents a liminal space—a boundary between the mundane and the otherworldly. It is enclosed, private, and leaves the occupant utterly defenseless. The supernatural intrudes at the moment of maximum vulnerability.
This tradition is notably rare in Western horror, where bathrooms seldom serve as primary settings for supernatural encounters. In Japan, however, the school bathroom has been firmly established as the most terrifying place a child can be.
Aka Manto remains embedded in Japanese popular culture.
Video game franchises like Yo-kai Watch and Persona feature variations of the red-caped bathroom spirit. On social media in the 2020s, videos of students whispering "red paper" in school bathrooms periodically go viral.
But the essential horror of Aka Manto has not changed in nearly a century. You are given a choice, and every option leads to the same destination. It may be the first lesson children learn about the fundamental unfairness of existence—delivered in the most mundane and vulnerable setting imaginable.
Red paper or blue paper?
What would you answer?
