Human skull found in Universal Studios Japan bushes

Police search turns up other bones too.

Universal Studios Japan has positioned itself as one of Japan’s top Halloween celebration spots. Tokyo Disneyland has plenty of Halloween events too, but there’s usually a lot of kid-friendly cuteness mixed in. USJ, on the other hand, is content to let zombies take over parts of the park after sundown, and also happy to send guests into a maze full of Resident Evil monsters.

A lot of that probably has to do with Universal’s long movie-making history, including films in the horror genre. On Wednesday, though, USJ was the site of a frightening and unsettling real-world incident, as a human skull was found on the premises of the Osaka theme park.

▼ Video of police searching the scene

At around 2:30 in the afternoon the Osaka police received a call to the 110 emergency number from a female USJ employee saying, “I found some things that look like human bones in the shrubbery on our property.” Investigators arrived to examine the items and believe them to be a human skull and upper jawbone with attached teeth. The age and sex of the deceased are indeterminate, but the police say that the size of the bones is too large for them to have come from a child.

The bones appear to have been found in the plants alongside an exterior road bordering the northwest corner of the property, not in an attraction-filled part of the park that sees heavy visitor traffic or which requires an admission ticket to access. A subsequent search of the area turned up what appear to be several other bone fragments scattered about as well as scraps of cloth, but investigators are yet to come across any personal belongings that could be used to shed light on the identity of the deceased.

Sources: Nitele News, TBS News Dig, MBS News
Top image: Pakutaso
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