Every year on the Watanagashi Festival, a strange pattern of deaths occur without fail. The pattern is that one person dies while the other is "demoned away" (literal translation of the phrase 'onikakushi') to calm Oyashiro-sama's anger. This is widely thought in Hinamizawa as "Oyashiro-sama's Curse", due to the fact that the victims are either directly or indirectly connected to those who supported the Hinamizawa Dam Project. In most scenarios, the main characters have no idea who is behind the murders, however the entire village or someone in the village is always suspected to be behind it, especially the Sonozaki family. The motive behind the killings is also never entirely clear, except revenge against enemies of Hinamizawa. As the years go by, however, the connections to the dam proje