Seventeen reports of knocking before dawn at a Suzaki housing block, nothing on camera

The first report came on Aug. 14. A ground-floor resident woke around 3 a.m. to two knocks at the front door and mentioned it to the caretaker the next morning. Since then the reports have concentrated in one of the block's five buildings, reaching 17 by Sept. 1.

The accounts closely resemble one another. Two knocks, about a breath apart. Not a hard knock, residents say, but something like the back of a finger touching the steel. Laid out by the time they were heard, the sounds move upward floor by floor and stop at the fifth, the top. On some nights two or three reports came in succession.

"There's nobody there when you look through the peephole," said a resident of the third floor, 58. "But before my own door sounds, I hear the neighbor's door first. Knowing your turn is coming — that's the worst part of it." A man on the fifth floor, 45, opened his door immediately after hearing it one night in late August. "I could see all the way down the corridor. Nobody. Down by the stairs I could see the light sensor was on. A sensor comes on when someone passes, so I'd like to believe somebody had gone down. But the one that was lit was on the up side."

The residents' association says the building has three corridor cameras, on the first, third and fifth floors. Footage from the nights in question was checked; no person was recorded at any of the relevant times. An equipment contractor inspected the system in late August and found no fault.

On Aug. 29 the association distributed a notice to all households. It runs to two lines: "Please do not answer knocking before dawn. If you have answered, report it to the association regardless of whether anything was amiss." Below that is a telephone number. Nothing is said about a cause, or about what is being guarded against. "We can only write what we can write," said the association chairman, 69. "Give a reason and the residents split into those who believe it and those who don't. There are four hundred households here. When we split, the circular notices stop moving."

Suzaki Third Housing was built in 1977 as five buildings and has been managed by the municipal housing corporation. The city's housing register records that many Drifter households moved in when occupancy began; for a period, households transferred in stages from temporary housing on the bay front accounted for nearly forty percent of the total.

A man of 81 who has lived here more than thirty years recalls: "There really was a custom of knocking on doors at night to wake people. Back in the temporary housing, evacuation notices went by word of mouth. Two knocks, and if there was no answer you moved to the next door. That was the rule." Then: "But not one of the people who did that is still here." The association says there is no basis for connecting the block's occupancy history to the current reports.

In the caretaker's office there is a university notebook in which the date, time and unit number of each report is written down. It was handed on by the previous caretaker, and among entries for equipment faults and noise complaints, the 17 reports appear in the same format. "I haven't made a special column for them," said the current caretaker, 63. "If I made one, it would become a special thing."

No reports have come from the other four buildings, though the talk has spread among their residents. Turnout for the end-of-August cleanup after the blocks' summer festival was higher than usual. "It's simply that being awake alone in the night is worse than tidying up together in the daytime," said a woman of 66 on the neighborhood association.

Police increased night patrols from late August, routing officers through the building between 2 and 4 a.m. No patrol has recorded the sound. "No indication of a crime has been confirmed at this time," police said, adding that patrols will continue for the time being. From September the neighborhood association began volunteer rounds, though few have signed up: residents say that on nights when someone is standing in the corridor, the knocking does not come.

The woman on the third floor moved her bedding from the corridor side to the back room at the end of August. "It isn't that the sound gets quieter. It's that when you're far from the door, there's a beat before you wake. In that one beat, the second knock is already over." The TDA says the permeation index in the area has held at normal values with nothing in its records corresponding to the reports, and that it has no plans to add the housing block to its observation network.