Urban Legends

Cow Head

Origin: Japan

The Cow Head story (or "Gozu") is a Japanese urban legend about a scary story that is considered the scariest horror story ever written. It is supposed to be so terrifying that you will die of fright after hearing it.

According to a legend, a horrific short story called "Cow Head" was discovered in Japan in the 17th century. The actual origin of the story is still shrouded in mystery.

Several written accounts from this era make references to the awful story. Yet, they only mention its title and describe it as a tale too terrible to tell.

Rumors state that upon hearing the dreadful tale, listeners were overcome with a terror so great that they trembled violently for days until they finally died from fright.

The Cow Head story was deemed too dangerous, and most existing copies of it were burned years ago. The few copies that survived were cut into sections and distributed across the country. Today, it is believed that only fragments of the original story remain in existence.

Most of the actual details of the story remain unknown to this day. The unfortunate people who read the story never lived long enough to repeat it.

One recent rumor tells of an elementary school teacher who inexplicably came into possession of some fragments of the original "Cow Head" story. According to the rumor, the teacher was taking his class on a school trip. He was in the habit of entertaining the students on the bus with ghost stories. The students, who tended to become unruly on long trips, grew remarkably subdued as they listened to the teacher's horrific tales. Many of them seemed truly frightened.

After some time, the teacher announced he would tell them the legendary, forbidden tale called "Cow Head." Before he could finish the first sentence of the story, however, the children began to panic. "Stop!" they cried. "Don't tell us!" One child turned pale and covered his ears, and the others began to scream. But the teacher refused to stop. They say his eyes went blank, and he proceeded with the story as if some unseen force had taken over his mind.

Almost an hour later, the teacher regained his senses and found that the bus had crashed into a ditch. The students had fainted and were frothing at the mouth. The bus driver lay slumped over the wheel, sweating and shivering. It is unclear what happened next, except that the teacher never told the "Cow Head" story again.

You won't find the Cow Head story on the internet. However, as rumors go, the story starts somehow like this: 

"There is a little deserted village in the middle of nowhere and archaeologists are digging to find out why nobody lives there. They unearth a weird skeleton with the head of a cow and the body of a man. They do research and find out that years before, there was a famine. (The story then flashes back to the time of the famine). Everybody in the village is starving. They eat all the cows and horses. Then they start on the pets, dogs, and cats, etc. Then there's nothing left, and people are dying from lack of food. One day, a strange figure wanders into the village. He has the head of a cow and the body of a man. (He is the "Cow Head" or "Gozu"). The starving villagers attack him, brutally kill him, ripping him limb from limb and eat him. That is when the village becomes cursed, and all hell breaks loose..."