All Hallow on the Eve 2026 - Unknown True Crimes - The Wakayama Curry Poisoner
It's summer and there's a matsuri (music and dance) festival being held in your local area in Japan. You expect good music, great food, and an all-around good time for both yourself, your friends, and even your family. You go to check out the food vendors situated around the area and notice a large line of people standing just outside of a curry vendor.
The smell is insatiable, and from what you hear from others who have just ordered and indulged in their meal sounds delectable and outstanding. So, you wait in line, and after some minutes go by you finally arrive at the counter and order a bowl of curry yourself. Some more time passes, though eventually you're presented with your curry and, with a salivating mouth and lapping tongue, are more than excited to consume such an invigorating dish.
Yet the moment that you take that first spoonful, something seems off. Perhaps it's the after taste, or the first taste of the dish that has you questioning "what is in this meal?' yet you carry on. Consuming the entire bowl, nothing apparently wrong hits your senses, until a few hours go by and you're holding onto your stomach which is cramping, as you feel your body contort and waves of nausea wash over you.
If you're lucky enough, you become one of the survivors to the Wakayama Cury Poisoner...
Three months later a Miss Masumi Hayashi is accused of the hospitalization of 67 separate individuals, with the deaths of four innocents based solely on witness accounts. She is apprehended by the police, then penalized and sentenced to death for introducing a lethal amount of arsenic into her served curry.
Although she is sentenced to death, her own personal claims maintain an air of innocence and has repeatedly sought retrial since her incarceration. And in April of 2009 her final appeal was rejected.
She has remained on death row to this day, still asking for numerous retrials and claiming her innocence during the event.
However, substantial evidence would state the contrary to her claims. Before the murderers, Hayashi had been a local insurance saleswoman in her town of Wakayama. However, she had easy access to the arsenic used during the festival, as her husband was an insect exterminator at the time. Prior to that even, Hayashi was subjected to numerous insurance fraud claims and became shunned by her community.
What's worse is that she had been tried for three other separate instances involving individuals that she attempted to poison for life-insurance fraud purposes. If that wasn't insidious enough, her husband had also nearly been killed due to arsenic poisoning by her own hands once previously. With her main motivations for these several poisoning attempts coming down to spite.
"She was angry at the community that shunned her family and wanted to enact revenge..."
Out of the four fatalities enacted (allegedly) by Miss Hayashi, two were an older man and woman, while the other two were a 10-year-old and 16-year-old boy. It's said that at least 130 grams of lethal level arsenic were added to the curry, again leaving 63 others poisoned. With a blue paper cup that contained traces of arsenic from within, it's clear that she had committed these crimes, even while pleading innocent.
It's said that her actions during that festival were of a copycat variety, with poisoning becoming a real outbreak in Japan during the era. Unfortunately, supposedly due to her mother's actions and imprisonment, Hayashi's 37-year-old daughter had leaped from a bridge, ending both her own life and the life of her 4-year-old daughter in the process. It's difficult to say what's more saddening, the four lives that were taken by Miss Hayashi, or the lives of her daughter and granddaughter being ended due to their mother/grandmother's selfish actions.
Regardless, 37-year-old Masumi Hayashi was found guilty of ill-intentions that far surpass a regular trial. She remains alive and still incarcerated to this day, awaiting the moment when her death sentence finally enacts itself.
Unfortunately for the Japanese community of Wakayama, she still pleads innocence and continues to delay the inevitable...
If the worst was to occur, there would have been 67 deaths as opposed to the four that had occurred. Yet four deaths from arsenic poisoning based on a vengeful scheme would seem like enough to take what matters most from any single individual, their life.
However, we're not a trail, judge, and jury, as the case still remains open to this day. Hopefully she'll give in to her crimes and accept the consequences of her actions, rather than acting as a coward and begging for a release that will probably never occur. It's safe to say that she is not the only person who has ever attempted such a crime, and that each of us should understand and know one another, especially when we're trusting our lives with the food provided by others...
All Hallow on the Eve 2026 - Unknown True Crimes - The Wakayama Curry Poisoner
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