Anime is awash with ghosts and yokai, but much of anime is more about fighting them or turning them into something comedic than actually dealing with horrific haunting and spiritual infestations.
That said, if you do enjoy melancholy tales of hauntings and urban legends twisted and melded in new ways, you do have a spare few ghost hunting anime that can fill the void.
Ghost Hunting Anime
Ghost Hunt
Ghost Hunt, though a bit older in this day and age, is still one of the pinnacles of ghost hunting anime almost specifically due to how it tells its ghost hunting story.
The story follows a girl who wanders into a ghost investigation and ends up breaking some equipment. She is then forced to be the mysterious, handsome ghost hunter’s assistant and helps him with his cases. While this does indeed have the ghost hunting, spookiness, and dash of romance the premise promises, perhaps the best thing about the series is that it is realistic.
Minimal special powers are involved here. The ghost hunter is is using techniques and equipment that ghost hunters in the real world use, though to a much more effective degree. It’s interesting to see real life melded into fiction, and Ghost Hunt does craft some interesting, and at times, spooky hauntings.
Dark Gathering
Modern anime is a bit starved of ghost hunting stories with isekai and fantasy sucking up all the air in the room, but Dark Gathering is a bright spot—or perhaps, a dark spot—in the slowly abandoned genre that shows its fullest potential.
The main character is a college boy who hates ghosts and has only recently been coaxed out of being a shut-in by his childhood friend. After meeting her cousin, a young girl whose mother was allegedly killed by a ghost, this young child pulls them both into her passion—hunting and capturing ghosts in order make a dangerous amalgamation that she thinks can rescue her mother from the ghost that took her.
While the art style is the cute potato people of the moe age of anime art, the ghosts and the stories that surround them do the horror genre a great justice by actually trying to be scary and messed up.
Mononoke
While most ghost hunting anime is modern-set to explore the hunting and unraveling of various urban legends-turned-real hauntings, Mononoke is a ghost hunting tale set in an older age.
While there are plenty of Feudal-set series about people dealing with yokai in various ways, Mononoke is one of the few series that don’t approach ghosts and spirits with immediate violence. In Mononoke, a wandering spiritualist happens upon ghosts and yokai where he then deals with the problems they are causing. In order to disperse the entity, he must first find its Form, Truth, and Reason before it can finally be exorcised.
With stylized visuals and a mature story-telling, Mononoke certainly falls into the avante garde genre for “art anime,” but it tells intriguing and complex stories.
Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun
How many hauntings can one school possibly have? You will find out in Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun.
In this series, a girl happens upon the legendary bathroom ghost of popular Japanese urban legend—Hanako. However, while Hanoko is traditionally a girl, this ghost is a boy who haunts the school and deals with various spirits and urban legends that also haunt the school.
While often silly and even a bit romantic, Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun can punch with the best of them sometimes in terms of creepiness. However, this is definitely more focused on its other elements than the ghost hunting.
Psychic Detective Yakumo
While often lumped in with Ghost Hunt because it too is also about a brooding, mysterious ghost hunter who gains a chipper, trouble-prone heroine to often save, Psychic Detective Yakumo is a ghost hunting anime less using ghost hunting techniques to discover ghosts and more about using a unique supernatural ability to deal with them.
While that seems a recipe more for a supernatural action anime than the more horror and mystery focus that most want a ghost hunting anime to have, Psychic Detective Yakumo still has all the mystery and horror when it is tracking the source of the haunting, it just does away with the ghosts with a little more flair.
Mieruko-chan
“Ghost hunting” is perhaps not the best term to describe what Mieruko-chan is as a story. The more appropriate term would be “ghost enduring.”
Mieruko-chan is about a high school girl who can see spirits. She finds them horrifying, and often tries to pretend they are not there so she does not get haunted by them. The trouble comes when she sees spirits attached to people, particularly her friends, and she must carefully try to get those people away from them.
Why include this ghost enduring anime on a list of ghost hunting shows? Well, because aside from a spare few on this list, the ghosts in Mieruko-chan are legitimately horrifying in their designs and demeanor. So much so, it puts other ghost hunting anime to shame.
Ghost Sweeper Mikami
From a much older age of anime, Ghost Sweeper Mikami was cleaning house before its ghost hunting contemporaries were just a twinkle in the eye of their creators.
The series follows a paranormal detective agency that follows a smoking hot lady and her perverted assistant as they solve supernatural problems for people. You wouldn’t be wrong to assume is is full of provocative women and ecchi-adjacent comedy that somewhat taints any spookiness to be had in those cases.
Muhyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation
Find your self possessed or otherwise maligned by a spirit? Who you are you going to call? Some scruffy, rag-tag bunch like the Ghostbusters?
No, screw that noise. Call a lawyer because you have legal avenues to explore.
Muhyo and Roji are a couple of lawyers who specialize in magic law. This means if a spirits has wronged you, you have recourse for legal action!
While that actually sounds very interesting and unique, magical law is just exorcism by another name. Still, this series has charm and comedy in its characters, and some interesting supernatural mysteries.
Do you have more anime recommendations about hunting ghosts? Let fans know in the comments section below.
