In the months after the devastating 2011 Japanese tsunami, people began reporting encounters with those who had died. Some saw figures wandering through neighborhoods that no longer existed. Others believed the dead had returned to visit the living.

Then there were the taxi drivers.

Seven drivers in Ishinomaki told a university researcher about mysterious passengers, including a young woman who asked to be taken to an area destroyed by the tsunami. When the driver questioned her destination, she asked him something chilling.

“Have I died?”

This episode, Deb and I look at the Ghosts of the Tsunami and the strange possibility that some of the dead weren’t haunting anyone at all.

They may have simply been trying to find their way home.