Chi-tenjō 血天井

The blood ceiling: boards overhead that were once the floor of a room where men killed themselves, showing the marks of their hands and feet. Several temples in and around Kyoto show one, and have done for two centuries. An illustrated pilgrimage guide of the Edo period listed three of them and concluded that what visitors were being shown was the natural figuring of the wood grain and not a staining by blood — the debunking was printed in a book written to send people there, and the temples went on showing the ceilings anyway.