It turns out that the fictional town of Hanuda in the PlayStation 2 horror game series Siren is based on a real place. It’s an abandoned town called Chichibu in Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo, and recently a camera crew went to check it out (thanks Rocket News).
If you don’t know, the story in Siren involves the Hanuda locals, who have strong religious beliefs and try to isolate themselves from the world. But this goes awry when a ritual near the town, and a subsequent earthquake, thrusts the town somewhere between time and space while an infinite sea of red water replaced the natural terrain.
The first and third game in the Siren series both take place around Hanuda while the locals, who have becoming shibito, haunt what remains of the abandoned town in our dimension. Essential to the game’s eeriness was the town itself: the creaking buildings, the decrepit appliances, and the dimly-lit streets.
You can see where this creepy atmosphere in the game comes from by watching the video above. It shows the real town that the game is based on as the forest steadily takes back over its rotting wooden houses and rusty metal bridges. You can’t hear the ambiance of the place due to the music in the video but you get the impression that, if you could, the whispers of ghosts might come through.
