In Saikaku Ihara’s Saikaku Oridome, a house near Kyoto’s Rokkakudō rang nightly with sounds like collapsing beams until the residents moved out. A tale from Odawara tells of a voice at a celebration crying, “My neck is tight,” traced to a pillar in the parlor—revealed to be a reverse pillar. By contrast, at Nikkō Tōshōgū’s Yōmeimon there is a deliberately inverted decorative “reverse pillar,” a protective device based on the idea of intentional incompletion, distinct from the cursed reverse pillar of ghost stories.