The engineer of the real train, seeing that all his signals were useless, put on a tremendous burst of speed. He eventually caught up with the phantom, which suddenly disappeared. When he stopped his train, a crushed fox was found beneath the engine wheels. Similar phantom trains have been reported as being seen in some parts of Japan as late as the 1950s and the foxes may still be running on some rural rail lines yet.

D.C. Buchanan, an early observer of Japanese folk belief, reported that the priest of the Inari Shrine at Wakayama told him the following story as true:

The most common folkloric image of the fox as trickster and shape-changer has the fox turning into a beautiful woman in order to deceive its victim.

Late one evening, a man was walking along the narrow and steep road known as Kurumazaka (“Cart Hill”), which leads down from the Inari Shrine when a large automobile, blazing with lights, rushed up and came within a hair’s breadth of hitting the pedestrian, who stepped to one side in the nick of time. Several days later, in the wee small hours of the night, this same man was in his own motor-car carefully making his way down Kurumazaka when again up the hill came a larger car going at tremendous speed. There was no room to pass and no time to stop. The driver in the first car put on his brakes and braced himself for the collision. There was a dull thud, and the huge car disappeared. Getting out, the driver saw beneath the wheels of his car an old, dead fox!

Another legend found in rural Japan tells of a farmer who smoked a fox from its den by burning pine needles. He then killed the fox and sold its fur. Several days later he was awakened by six men, armed with shotguns, who demanded money.

After giving them all the money that he had in the house he managed to escape from them and ran into the village. When he returned with the policeman, several firemen, and others, he found his money untouched on the floor, but his rice cooker was empty, his food supply had been ransacked, and there were fox paw prints all over his floor.