With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

While the places mentioned are all in London, the Waste Land uses both Occidental and Oriental allusions as needed. Therefore, it is enigmatically possible that the St. Mary Woolnoth scene is actually an Ōma-ga-toki (The Hour of Meeting Demons)

The appearance of yōkai during ōmagatoki is said to be accompanied by a few signs: a cold wind blowing; a strange smell in the air, like that of fish or blood; a sudden onset of darkness; a sudden chill that causes one’s hairs to stand on end.

Later on in the poem, Eliot speaks of the Violet Hour. Neither light nor dark, the Japanese term referring to the moment is Tasogare, representing instability, a time of day when things have a higher tendency for going weird and your eyes start to play tricks on your mind. Another word for twilight – the time when encountered phantoms appear and the common folks avoid letting their children go outside also known in the Chinese characters "Wang Mang time."