The Pokémon franchise is full of ghosts and spirits even outside of their Ghost-type Pokémon, and the appearance of such paranormal activity dates back to the first title. In Red/Blue, a young girl NPC in Lavender Town asks the player about an unseen white hand on their shoulder after inquiring whether they believe in ghosts (Figure 1). In the battle with the Ghost-type specialist Phoebe in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire (2014), a ghost girl appears behind her in a chair – the camera then tracks towards the player character as if sharing the ghost’s point of view. In one of the franchise’s most famous and unexplained mysteries, in X/Y, a ghost appears behind the player in a lift in Lumiose City, freezing the game to state ‘no, you’re not the one’ before floating away.
Figure 1
The novelty of ghost stories in the franchise is that, even in a fantastic world so unlike our own, they remain similarly unexplained: they have no bearing at all on the games’ narratives, and remain as markers only of the past and the lost. Their inclusion, especially in a game intended for young audiences, warrants an investigation, and it’s appropriate that one of the franchise’s most effective engagements with the paranormal comes through a side-quest in which the player investigates spooky goings-on in-game.
This event takes place in Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon (2017), and it is interesting for the ways it plays with and reinforces many of the tropes of ghost and horror narratives. The side-quest is kickstarted by the player interacting with an NPC Youngster, who states: ‘Hey, hey! Do you know? Recently, ghosts have been appearing in the Trainers’ School. Everybody got scared, and nobody will even go near the school at night.’ This whispered hearsay, delivered by a young child, suggests the campfire and narrative properties of the ghost story, an oral tradition in which mysteries are shared and the horror is amplified through continual reiteration.
To accept the quest, the player returns to the Trainers’ School location, and the soundscape has noticeably shifted to that of a horror score – low strings, almost echoing a cry, and an occasional foreboding chime. There is a single NPC, a young girl, standing with the Ghost-type Drifloon, who speaks to the player in broken English: ‘Everyone scared. At night. School. There are seven rumours, seven mysteries. You check for me. You solve!’ This is later explained as the girl being foreign, but the unnatural expression combines with the sound to generate an uneasy feeling about a space that was familiar and sunny earlier in the game. To consolidate the appearance of horror, after the young girl presents each mystery, she offers the same warning: ‘But careful… You in danger. I’m sad.’
Figure 2
The side-quest takes on the form of a debunking, in which the player investigates one of the mysteries and discovers its rational explanation. The mystery ‘scary lights’ claims that unexplained lights and the sound of crying are present at night – when the player investigates, their camera is locked into a long-shot at the school doors, and the figure of a girl is visible passing in the background (Figure 2) while dialogue describes unexplained voices nearby, both standard tropes of ghost narratives. However, it is revealed that the far more mundane explanation is a young lady crying as she burns love letters she wrote. Several mysteries are revealed to be the actions of Ghost Pokémon, while the threat of Lord Slimy (from whom you hide in a dark locker as its sound and proximity gets closer, another classic horror trope) is explained as the janitor’s grandson’s Grimer. One of the mysteries, the diary of a haunted house that seems to reflect hauntings in the real world of Alola, turns out to be a joke played by the Drifloon, transforming a horror novel into reality (something that speaks to the blurring of the lines of real and fake in works such as John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness [1994]). In each case, the mystery plays with the lexicon of the horror genre, before providing a rational explanation.
After the player solves six of the mysteries, the little girl states that she is unable to remember the seventh. She thanks the player for solving the mysteries, presenting them with an item, before offering some dialogue: ‘I came from far away. Here.’ She implies a troubled background, before saying: ‘I want to protect school. Great.’ The player is interrupted by the school’s security officer, and the camera pans to the left, just obscuring the portion of the screen where the girl and her Drifloon stood. It pans back to reveal them gone, and the security officer states that the player has always been alone – the absent shot composition really foregrounds the girl’s disappearance (Figure 3). The narrative framing evokes the protector ghost, a spirit that remains in the place in which they died. This is made clearer if the player returns to the beach and speaks to the Youngster, whereupon the seven mystery is revealed – what happened to a student who was taken away by a Drifloon?
The ghost story of the girl is never explicitly provided, and so the player is forced to use oral and written knowledge to speculate on what might have happened; there is no easy solution, nor way to debunk the ghost explanation, as with the other six mysteries. The Youngster’s testimony is one such example, and he suggests that there is a written record of the event hidden somewhere in the Trainers’ School. The player can find this journal in a bookcase, which features just two entries – the first, a reference to the girl leaving the school with a Hypno (a Pokémon that created an illusion in one of the mysteries), and the second, a description of a Drifloon coming to the school ‘to pick up the new girl’ (a deliberately vague statement, which might refer to her both leaving school and being physically carried away by the Pokémon). As the region’s Pokédex suggests that Drifloon carries both children (and, in some cases, Pokémon) to the afterlife, there is a heavy implication that the Drifloon murdered the little girl and potentially the Hypno too. However, it remains essentially ambiguous, a fundamental tenet of the ghost story. Whereas six of the mysteries were debunkable, this final one lacks that same neat resolution.
The frequent inclusion of ghosts in Pokémon is an interesting element of worldbuilding, that aligns quite closely with the common understanding of the paranormal and how it is framed within ghost media. The seven mysteries serve as a fantastic example of the ways that ghost stories are transmitted and transformed throughout the oral tradition, and how the paranormal can be rationally explained (or not). By the nature of the side-quest, many players may never encounter the ghost of the Trainers’ School at all, and for those that do, a paranormal event surprisingly typical of the franchise awaits them. It serves as proof that, even in a world where the most fantastic creatures and events can be identified and logged, there are some mysteries that will remain beyond explanation.
Dr Reece Goodall is a Director of Student Experience at the University of Warwick, where he completed a PhD thesis comprising an industrial and theoretical analysis of contemporary French horror cinema. He has previously written for French Screen Studies, Horror Studies and Animation Studies, and is the author of the forthcoming monograph French Horror: Media, industry and culture and the editor of the forthcoming Horror Spoofs and Parody: Dying of Laughter.
