At 8:13 p.m. on 22 November 2008, someone posted in a Japanese forum thread about going back in time. The post admitted it was off-topic, then described a different trick entirely: how to ride an ordinary elevator into another world.
The thread was on the occult board of 2channel, now called 5ch, a large anonymous Japanese message board. The post read as hearsay, not a personal story, and gave no named source. A reply a few posts later even asked which older thread it had been copied from. Nobody has found an earlier dated version. The earliest wide reproduction we found ran about four and a half months later, on 8 April 2009: a post by writer Miura Kazunori on Gizmodo Japan, a tech and internet-culture blog. Miura wrote that someone who tried the ritual had filmed it and caught something unexplained on camera, and linked to a separate page, Mudai Blog ("Untitled Blog"), for the full account. Neither post describes what the image showed.
A Woman Who May Not Be One
The setup needs a tall building: an elevator reaching at least ten floors. The rider has to be alone the whole time. If anyone else steps into the car during the sequence, the attempt is already over.
The floor order, as the 2008 post gives it, is four, then two, then six, then two, then ten, without getting off. At the tenth floor, still aboard, the rider presses five. Someone gets on there: a young woman, the post says, though it is blunt about what she is not. Don't speak to her.
Once she's aboard, the rider presses one. The doors close, but the car doesn't drop to the ground floor. It climbs back toward ten. Press any other button on the way up and the attempt fails, though the post calls that your last real chance to back out. Clear the ninth floor without touching another button, and it counts as close to done.
Which Version of the Rules Do You Trust?
The 2008 post gives one way to check success: you're now the only person in that world. It says nothing about what that world looks like, how long to stay, or how to get home.
A fuller version, copied and recopied since, answers those gaps. It adds steps the original post never had: call the elevator with only the up button, and start alone on the first floor before the sequence begins. If the car drops to the ground floor instead of climbing after the woman boards, the attempt has failed; leave without looking back or speaking, and try again another day. A rider who steps off at the tenth floor is told not to look at the woman or answer her, even if she asks where they're going. To get back, this version says, board the same elevator, run the floor sequence again, cancel the second climb before the ninth floor, and check your surroundings when the doors open on the first floor. If anything looks wrong, do it again.
None of those extra rules trace back to the 2008 post. They're simply how the ritual is usually told now, by people retelling a retelling.
No source we checked names a real building or a confirmed account of anyone reaching the other side. Worth saying plainly, too: an elevator held between the fourth and tenth floor by one rider going nowhere is an elevator nobody else in the building can use while it happens.
A Forum Aside, Then a Trend
One researcher who has revisited the story over several years found the Japan-versus-Korea origin disputed, with no agreement on which country told it first. The earliest dated version is Japanese, though: the 2008 thread. No earlier dated telling, Korean or otherwise, has turned up. The story crossed over anyway, and within a few years it was being retold in Korean, English, and other languages, each version changing small details of the return trip or the ending.
Two other message-board rituals follow the same arc, from one anonymous post to a franchise: hitori-kakurenbo, a hide-and-seek game for one player posted in 2007, and kisaragi-station, a train ride to a station that isn't on any map, told live in 2004.
The Ritual On Screen
Otherside Picnic (裏世界ピクニック), a 2021 anime based on Iori Miyazawa's novels about explorers of an internet-lore world, adapted the ritual into its tenth episode, "How to Get to the Barbeque Restaurant by Elevator," which aired on 8 March 2021. The same series had already used Kisaragi Station as a location two episodes earlier.
A standalone horror film, simply titled Elevator Game, premiered on the streaming service Shudder on 15 September 2023, directed by Rebekah McKendry. Its plot follows a web series crew who play the ritual to investigate a teenager's missing sister.
The ritual has no shrine, no festival, and no older version in any woodblock print. What it has is a date, a thread number, and a line of buttons that, in the story, a building's own elevator is never supposed to press in that order.
