It’s October, time again for some spooky shows! Let’s start it off right with one of the most archetypical spooky shows you could hope to find: Ghost Hunt.
Ghost Hunt is the story of a group of various spiritualist types who are hired to investigate hauntings, perform exorcisms, and so on. Over the course of the show, we see them take on several major cases, through the perspective of new member (as of the end of the first arc), Mai Taniyama.
Said initial arc begins with a haunting at Mai’s school that she’s roped into helping resolve. Here, we meet all the major players: teenage sourpuss and master investigator Kazuya Shibuya heads Shibuya Psychic Research, joined by his assistant Lin Koujo (also brooding, but actually an adult). They have the help and/or rivalry (rivalry at first, full cooperation as the show goes on) of a ragtag bunch of misfits. There’s Ayako Matsuzaki (a shrine maiden called out on being a little too old for the role), John Brown (a catholic priest oddly not called out on seeming way too young for the role), Houshou Takigawa (a Buddhist monk far too worldly for the role, and in fact out of the sect that trained him because of it), and Masako Hara (a famous TV psychic and spirit medium teen girl).
The best word for the cast is serviceable. And to be frank, this isn’t the kind of show that needs them to do more. All of the also-rans can carry at least a couple scenes and help to resolve at least one of the cases over the course of the show. They have distinct voices and help with Mai’s own growth and arc, which is enough. I mean, when you think of the classic Ghost Busters, they’re not that different, having loud personalities that make for great scenes. Now, there is a difference in standards where Ghost Busters is a two hour movie and Ghost Hunt is a 25-episode anime series and thus ten to twelve hours roughly speaking, but I think Ghost Hunt is fine on this score… just at the sort of level where I’m not going to talk a lot about our Miko, Monk, or Priest going forward. I think the Monk’s case kind of explains why: He’s referred to as “monk” far more often than by his name. Maybe it’s a mark of respect, but it also means that the writers didn’t need him in a lot of scenes for who he was rather than what he was.
Mai, Shibuya, and to a lesser extent Lin and Masako, however, will bear mentioning going forward.
That digression handled, let’s get onto the cases.
The first one is, again, at Mai’s school, involving a haunting in, what else, the old school building. The principle wants it cleared up so the place can be safely demolished, Mai has to help Shibuya because she’s at least a little responsible for Lin being injured out of this one, and there’s one girl in Mai’s class who claims to have a powerful sixth sense delivering messages from the haunting ghosts. The others are called in after Shibuya’s first investigation doesn’t quash the matter, and they all prove relatively powerless against whatever it is. Mai, however, despite being to her knowledge a normal schoolgirl, manages a lot more intuitive saves than perhaps she should.
In the end, the truth of the matter turns out to be paranormal, but not a haunting: it turns out that the other girl from Mai’s class doesn’t have a sixth sense (a topic she was bullied over) but does have extremely powerful latent telekinesis, meaning that her stress and subconscious wishes were causing the paranormal incidents as a matter of “poltergeisting”, which allows the matter to reach an end.
As for Mai, she’s tested after the incident and Team Shibuya discovers that she actually has potent but untrained sixth sense. Over the course of the show this manifests primarily in the form of prophetic dreams and visions, but at the risk of jumping the gun somewhat she proves capable of picking up bits and pieces of other spiritual traditions and using them, such as some of the monk’s mantras or a couple miscellaneous spells. She does spend the whole show more or less as a newbie, but at least it’s easy to see how she has potential and is useful to the team.
The second case is a short one regarding a possessed doll, which starts out seeming a lot like a certain famous twilight zone episode, but which ends up being actually more like The Ring, having the true story that comes out be one of a dark ghost in a well (hidden beneath the house) acting as a siren to children. It’s suitably creepy and does more to establish Mai being part of the team despite her schoolgril status, as well as numbing the sense of rivalry with the other spiritualists to the point where they’ll cooperate from here on.
The third story takes place at a different school, and involves curses being leveled against the teachers and students who mistreated a supernatural believer. This ends up being a more character-driven mystery, and leads to a girl who can bend spoons with her psychic powers (sometimes, as is the crux of the issue) and a teacher who once had the same ability and was humiliated on live TV as a child. The teacher’s spite, in particular, seems to be at the root of things, and dealing with her is more important than finding any ghost (given that there aren’t any).
After a little one-off comedy-heavy episode about a ghost in a public park causing some small pranks, we move to another little story, this one dealing with some orphans at a church, one of whom is intermittently possessed by the ghost of a dead little kid, forcing the party (with extra focus on John since church is his wheelhouse) having to find out what the ghost kid wants and help him find peace.
We then go back to school for a much meatier arc. The problem at the school, in keeping with the theme, appears at first to be a haunting but is actually something else supernatural. When investigating all the extremely creepy and/or evil goings on, the team soon zeroes in on a practice going around the student body that appears to be a modified version of Kokkuri-san.
For those who don’t know, Kokkuri-san is a children’s game endemic to Japan that has a mechanism and theme not unlike a hybrid of Ouija (which has more refined props) and MASH (which fits the schoolyard pencil-and-paper divination vibe): participants would use pen and paper to create a pattern of characters with a small coin used in place of the Ouija-board’s pointer. Like Ouija, it has a lot of spooky associations.
The modified version in the school here, though, is even more ominous: when a sheet is actually tracked down, the spiritualists identify it as being a well-formulated enough means of cursing that one of them, who had actual power (notably Lin, who is himself a practicing onmyouji), could probably kill somebody with a single sheet rather than the vast number being blindly created by the student body. But that still leaves a few things that have to be worked out: what are these reproductions doing, who got them started, why… and what are the people involved going to do about it?
As to what they’re doing, the practice has summoned a vast number of spirits and entrapped them in the target location, the school. There, they reference another mythical means of cursing (in which a jar full of poisonous insects is buried to allow them to battle to the death, last one standing has all the evil), reproduced here on a grand scale by a confluence of an entire student body of unwitting pawns. If allowed to fully mature, this curse will almost certainly be an unparalleled disaster.
As to the who and why, we get a fairly sordid tale involving a student who committed suicide having planted the seeds, which proves something of a problem.
Shibuya’s solution at first seems dangerously heartless: he intends to rebound the curse onto its caster, ending it. But who cast the curse? Not the dead boy (his soul seen by Mai to be devoured in the conditions of the school) or the teacher or her spoon-bending protege… but rather, every student who did the little divination game. Mai gives him quite the earful, and while he argues the moral stance of rebounding the curse even on unknowing casters even when it might kill them, he really could have explained that he was planning to use mystical substitutes to spare any real people from undue danger beforehand, rather than leaving it to be a twist.
So, at this point you may think you have a handle on Ghost Hunt. It’s a show that does indulge its spooky scenarios, often with some degree of tragic backstory, but it does seem mostly harmless. Then the last two arcs (which are four episodes each) decide to hit a little different.
The first of these is a haunting that seems largely based on the Winchester House. For those who don’t know, the Winchester House is a famous haunted house, built by the family behind the Winchester gun company on the advice of a medium who suggested the angry spirits of everyone killed with their guns were coming, and needed to be neutralized through the maintenance of a labyrinthine home. This manor, which Shibuya and several other psychic groups are called to investigate and ideally cleanse, is very similar in structure, an absolute maze of nonsensical rooms and corridors.
The actual clues end up pointing towards an individual referred to as “Urado”, which is later determined to be a reference to “Vlad”, as in Dracula. The Urado spirit still haunts the deepest, sealed parts of the manor… and it is still claiming victims, including two of the fellow investigators and nearly members of the Shibuya team. For the first time in this show, we have someone die during an arc rather than leaving with the same number of living and dead we entered with… and the haunting isn’t resolved, either. The vampire is determined to be too powerful, and it’s all the survivors can do to pull out and leave, though a post-script suggests the threat is ended when the whole place burns down shortly thereafter. It’s much darker even than the previous arc, and in a new way.
That overall tone continues into the final arc, which deals with a haunting afflicting a family and their home. It starts with a possessed child, but even when Mai prevents a kid from committing suicide (by using her increasingly formidable mystical powers) it turns out more people are afflicted by the vengeful spirits, and not everyone is able to be saved. Shibuya himself even ends up in a magic-induced coma for most of the arc, forcing the team to deal without him.
The full tale seems to involve star-crossed lovers put to death in times past, a neglected shrine… and zombies. The dead and damned go all out in this one, trying to drag our leads and what remains of their charges to the grave in sequences that are sometimes hard to discern whether they’re nightmares or reality.
Eventually, Naru comes to, and we find out that rather than being a highly knowledgeable normal as he had been presented as for most of the series, he actually has an extremely potent but nearly uncontrollable power. The situation is dealt with through each of the friends helping out (even the powers of our miko, who had typically acted entirely as a jobber for the ghosts, work out. The reason given is actually pretty neat: she has a deep connection to tree spirits and there were no living trees at any of the other sites). The forgotten shrine is handled and the horrible curses born of a sordid past or three are properly sealed away, at least from doing any more immediate harm.
At this point the show just kind of stops. I’ve said this about other shows, especially Slice of Life affairs, but it’s not as though this arc is any more “Final” than any of the others. It does go bigger and scarier and more climactic so I accept it, but Mai is still going to be working with Shibuya Psychic Research, the others are still friends (and in fact the focus on this being her big weird new family seems stronger) and no doubt they’ll deal with plenty more troublesome hauntings in the future.
The essentially episodic, status-quo-heavy nature of the work I think is ultimately to its advantage. Ghost Hunt asks very little of you, and while Mai does experience some progression in terms of her familiarity and practice with the supernatural, there’s an extent to which you could watch the stories in any order and be nearly as satisfied… which is really all this show feels like it wants.
Ghost Hunt is, at its heart a show that plays things very safe. It’s not Ghost Stories that is outright for children, but there is a degree to which even when death is introduced as a possible present-tense occurrence in the last couple of arcs that it has the general vibe of a saturday morning cartoon or other similarly friendly and welcoming fare. True, we’re dealing with hostile paranormal occurrences, but there have been at least a couple actual saturday morning cartoons like that.
In the end, I give Ghost Hunt a B, rewarding the fact that it actually does a little work with its leading characters and tries to fit in some very legitimate spookiness. If you’re in the mood for something just a little grim and ghastly this Halloween season, give Ghost Hunt a try.