The victims of the devastating tsunami and earthquake that struck Japan in March 2011 are back—in ghostly form—haunting Japanese cab drivers in the area, according to The Asahi Shimbun newspaper, as reported by the Mirror.

At least seven cabbies in Ishinomaki, north-east Japan, have reported passengers hauntingly speaking to them while seated at the back of the cab and then suddenly vanishing.

The stories were gathered by Yuka Kudo, a student of sociology at Tohoku Gakuin University, as her school research project.

Kudo said the drivers she talked had similar stories about their ghostly passengers.

One of the drivers said he even recognised his ghost passenger since they came from the same area hit by the disaster. He said she was a young woman dressed in a coat who climbed into his cab near Ishinomaki Station and told him: "Please go to the Minamihama (district)."

The driver told the woman the place she wanted to go to was "almost empty" and asked her if she really wanted to go there.

The woman then replied in a trembling voice, "Have I died?"

The frightened driver then turned around only to find an empty backseat.

Another cabbie said a young man boarded his cab and asked to be taken to "Hiyoriyama," which means mountain. The passenger refused to speak further and only pointed at the direction he wished to go in.

The driver sped off but when he reached the place and pulled over, the man had disappeared.

Kudo said all the drivers she spoke believed they were picking up genuine passengers because they each started their meters before setting off.

She said the cabbies described the "ghosts" as those of young people.

Kudo said these "young people feel strong chagrin [at their deaths] when they cannot meet the people they love," which could explain why they want to go back to the scene of their death even in their ghostly state.

"As they want to convey their bitterness, they may have chosen taxis ... as a medium to do so," Kudo said.

The cabbies said they did not feel threatened by their ghost passengers. One of the drivers confided that he lost a family member in the tsunami that swept through the region.

Another reportedly said that he would willingly accept a ghost as a customer again.

The 9-magnitude earthquake was the most powerful quake to ever strike Japan and the fourth most powerful one in the world. It spawned a tsunami with waves of up to 133 feet in height, which swept six miles inland, killing nearly 16,000 people and destroying thousands of homes and buildings.