Ghost Hunt

Monk: It seems like the origin of the curse wasn't the roku-bu spirits.
Naru: It's the Okobusama, isn't it?
Mai : H-How did you know?
Naru: Because my brain's better than any of yours.

Mai Taniyama, an Ordinary High School Student, accidentally breaks a camera left in an abandoned school building. The camera later turns out to belong to Kazuya Shibuya, a.k.a. Naru, and in order to repay him for the camera, she must take the place of his injured assistant in Naru's perfectly-legitimate ghost-hunting business.

Mai and Naru are accompanied by an Australian Catholic priest, a spirit medium, a Buddhist monk, a self-styled Shinto priestess, and Naru's really tall and really quiet assistant Lin. The series was originally published as a series of novels by The Twelve Kingdoms author Fuyumi Ono; it was later adapted into a manga, and then a 25-episode anime.

Totally not to be confused with Ghost Hunters, the live-action TV show where guys run through empty houses with night-vision cameras.

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Tropes used in Ghost Hunt include:

• Accidental Murder: Eugene Davis. During an investigation in Japan, he was run over by a car as he was crossing a road. However, he was still alive. Apparently, what actually killed him was when the female driver panicked and threw his body in a nearby lake, thereby drowning him, all by accident. This results to Naru, who was Gene's younger twin brother, becoming the Angsty Surviving Twin.
• All Myths Are True: Among the main cast are a Shinto Miko, a Buddhist Monk and a Catholic Priest who successfully use rituals from their respective religions to interact with spirits and perform exorcisms.
• All There in the Manual: There are several things about Naru that are either vaguely hinted at or not brought up at all in the anime but are explained fully elsewhere.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Mai likens both Naru and Masako to this at the beginning of the Forgotten Children arch in the manga.
• Asian Rune Chant: Takigawa, aka Bou-san, uses these regularly.
• Badass Adorable: John is one of the most effective of the exorcists in the group and can at least be seen once punching spirits with holy water.
  • Mai also starts to count.
• Badass Normal: Naru never showcases any overt supernatural ability (apart from an academic knowledge of magic) and goes through practically the whole anime solving cases with little more than wits, ego and a healthy amount of scepticism. The trope is subverted in the last episode, in which we find out he has supernatural powers, but using them taxes him so much that he doesn't want to.
• Badass Unintentional: Mai, whose main powers are powerful information gathering tools and thus allow her to find the info needed to solve things.
• Battle Aura: Naru gets a white one with Dramatic Wind right before destroying a god-possessed statue.
• Better Than It Sounds
• Big Brother Mentor: Monk hits this early on for Mai, Ayako follows up soon after as a Cool Big Sis
• Big Damn Heroes: If we had a 500-yen coin for every time Monk burst through a door and shouted "Naumaku sanmanda bazaradan kan!"... Unusually for this trope, though, it's usually in the middle of the episode, to show that things are getting dangerous. Naru usually takes the lead in the finale.
• Bishonen: Pretty much every main / recurring male character in the series (i.e. Naru, Lin, Takigawa, John, Yasu)
• Blood Bath: Based on both the Elizabeth Bathory legend and Vlad the Impaler, one of the scariest villains was a Japanese Lord who bathed in the blood of numerous servants in the hope of extending his life and took up the moniker "Urado" (Vlad).
• Bonding Over Missing Parents: In the light novels, Mai asks Naru if he employed her because they were both orphans.
  • Naru admits the fact and offhandedly tells her that people in similar situations should help each other out, and that he first found out about the fact that she was an orphan from her high school principal, way before she actually told SPR about it in the Urado case.
• Breather Episode: Right between "The After School Hexer" (The second legitimately creepy arc in the series) and "Silent Christmas" (A bit of a Tear Jerker) comes "Ghost Story in the Park!?", the series' only one-episode arc and the only episode to contain almost nothing but Comic Relief.
• Burial At Sea: After the resolution of the Forbidden Children arc, Eugene Davis was found in the bottom of the nearby lake. Apparently, his murderer dumped his body there.
• Celibate Hero: John. He is a Catholic Priest after all.
• Character Name Alias: Naru. In the final volume of the manga, SPR discovers that "Shibuya Kazuya" is apparently only an alias for Oliver Davis, a famous British parapsychologist.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Mai.
• Cool Big Sis: Ayako begins to develop into this around the second arc.
  • Madoka seems to be this as well.
• Creepy Child: Creepy ghost children to be precise.
• Creepy Doll: One arc is called "The Doll House." 'nuff said.
• Demonic Possession: Several times.
• The Doll Episode: Yup, there's one.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: In the final arc.
• Expy : C'mon, when you first see Lin tell me you don't think of Hatori Sohma !
• Fake Nationality: John Brown, an Australian, is voiced by the very American Jason Liebrecht, whose Australian accent is less than stellar.
• Fiery Redhead: Ayako Matsuzaki.
• Furo Scene: Mai has one, but it's very brief and she's only seen from the shoulders up. Ghost Hunt isn't big on Fan Service.
• Ghostly Chill
• Gratuitous English: Right away in the first episode, a bunch of "technical terms" pop up in English that Shibuya needs to translate for Mai. Makes you wonder why he didn't just say them in Japanese.
  • ...Because he's Naru?
  • Justified in that Naru was adopted by a married couple of parapsychologists in England, raised there and actually is the famed Oliver Davis that gets mentioned from time to time. As such, he's probably been speaking mostly English for most of his life.
• Hidden Badass: Monk. You start to get a hint of how powerful he is in the last arch of the anime and in the following arch (manga only right now), Naru gets a close look at his vajra and decides that he's been underestimating Monk.
  • Many of Ayako's rituals seem ineffectual early in the series; but in the final episode she performs a massive cleansing that frees the multitudes of angry spirits that have been trapped where they are. Ayako's limitations are justified in that she requires live trees to perform her cleansing ritual, which are less prevalent in the city. This is a legitimate handicap when you consider that Shinto is a religion that revolves around nature. Even if the requirements are met, however, the specific trees require a six month rest period before they can be used again.
• Ho Yay: Invoked by Yasuhara in the episode he's introduced in. When Monk teasingly insinuates that Yasuhara and Mai like each other, Yasuhara states that he does like Mai--but he likes Naru better, and he likes Monk best of all. He then admits that he's joking.
  • Later on, though, there is actual Ho Yay between them, some of it perpretrated by Monk himself.

Monk: Yasuhara is among [the students to be cursed]. Do you think I'm not worried, too?

• Idiot Ball: Justified in that this is Mai's first year as a spiritualist and she gets better as time goes by, but she has a real trouble remembering that she doesn't have "just dreams" while on cases and thus sometimes decides something vitally important isn't worth saying. Actually, this might be an Aversion of Instant Expertise that is so often seen in fiction.
• I Just Want to Be Special: One character's desire for people to notice them winds up creating a poltergeist and injuring several characters.
• In-Series Nickname: Naru, given to him by Mai from the Japanese word narushisuto, or narcissist. Can also be an Insult of Endearment.
• Insufferable Genius: Naru.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Naru is critical, harsh and is rather arbitrary in his decisions, but it is very clear that he generally has the safety of his friends first in mind.
• Kansai Regional Accent: Father Brown speaks in Kansai-ben because he spent his first few years in Japan in the Kansai area and thought it was standard Japanese. In the English dub, he just has an Australian accent.
• Ki Attacks: Some of the spells manage to resemble this. Especially the one fired off by Naru against a god in the last episode.
• Mood Whiplash: At times it can move from a serious, almost frightening, paranormal story to a romantic comedy and back so fast you wonder what just happened.
• Multidisciplinary Team: we have a Medium, a Shinto Miko, an Onmyodo, a Catholic priest, a Buddhist Monk, a girl with Psychic Powers, and Naru. It's too many people for it to be the setup to a joke so it got turned into an anime.
• Narcissist: Naru. Hence the nickname (The japanese pronounce the word like 'naru-ciccist').
• Nice Guy: John.
• Not a Morning Person: Naru He slept his way through most of vol. 8 and 9 as he was being possessed by a spirit. Lin knocked him out with a few good ol' spells. The characters were fully aware that he was going to be in a bad mood when he woke up and they dreaded having to go face to face with him. Lin and Masako will never be the same...
• Not Using the Z Word: Averted. After fending off an attack by a horde of possessed corpses, Monk exclaims "What is this, a zombie movie?"
• Older Than They Look: John. When Mai met the nineteen-year-old priest, she initially assumed him to be as young as twelve.
• Old School Building: The setting for the first story in Mai's school.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Naru.
  • Monk
• Onmyodo: Lin is revealed to have this ability.
• Ordinary High School Student: Mai.
• Out of Focus: Generally, the series is pretty good about it. However, there are a few moments where you wonder just what character X had to do offscreen for so long.
• Peek-a-Bangs: Lin.
• Phenotype Stereotype: John Brown, an Australian.
• Poltergeist: Since one of the characters has a desire to be notice ends up manifesting a poltergeist that injured several of his peers and strangers.
• Power At a Price: Naru appears to have no paranormal powers, but in actuality, he's an extremely strong psychic with dangerously powerful psychokinetic abilities that can easily be lethal to others. Unfortunately, Naru's SO powerful that a human body can't take the stress of wielding that much psychic energy. The one time he displays his psychokinesis to a noticeable degree (to destroy a god-possessed statue), Naru ends up collapsing from temporary respiratory and heart failure.
• Power Nullifier: Ayako Matsuzaki seems like she's a fake spiritualist for the first 25 episodes until she exorcises eight malevolent ghosts at once. Turns out all her power comes from her affinity for trees and all their previous cases were indoors, or the trees were "dead" trees.
• The Power of Love: How Mai purifies the teacher and dead children in the cursed school.
• Psychic Powers: Mai displays precognition, postcognition, clairvoyance and astral projection.
  • In story arch of the manga after the last arch made in the anime, Mai singlehandedly performs a purification.
• Relationship Voice Actor: The dub voice actors for Monk and Ayako are Roy and Riza.
• Ship Tease: Quite a bit with Naru and Mai. Also, there is Ayako and Monk, further ship-teased by Mai identifying them as Team Mom and Team Dad respectively.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: From a psychic, to ghosts, to a super ghost that grew more powerful by feeding on other ghosts, to a spirit so twisted that's moved beyond a mere ghost and became some sort of demonic monster, to finally a freaking god!
• The Stoic: Naru and Lin.
• Surprisingly Good English: An American investigator in The Bloodstained Labyrinth. You only hear it in the Japanese dub, though.
  • Said investigator was supposed to be English, but since he's explicitly a fake, this is not surprising.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: If it's a Japanese-related Ghost story, you can bet this isn't far behind. Ghost Hunt does not disappoint.
• Student Council President: Yasuhara who also acts as the Sixth Ranger or in this case the eighth.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: One of the more refreshing things about this series is how deadpan serious everyone is about their particular forms of mysticism and what they're dealing with.
• Team Dad: Mai likens Monk to this at the beginning of the Forgotten Children manga-arch. as they're getting Naru discharged from the hospital after the Cursed House.
• Team Mom: Mai likens Ayako to this at the beginning of the Forgotten Children manga-arch.
• Tempting Fate: Near the end of episode 10, Mai muses about how it would kind of suck to have psychic powers, and that she's glad she's just an ordinary high school student. Turns out she's an Ordinary High School Student, all right.
• Tall, Dark and Snarky (Naru)
• Television Serial
• Tsundere: Mai shows hints of this. Though she leans toward the Dere side of things.
  • Naru's mentor Madoka seems to have shades of this though she also leans towards Dere.
• Twin Telepathy: Oliver and Eugene Davis. However, it was mentioned that their Psychic Link got weaker as they grew older.
• Who You Gonna Call?: The Shibuya Psychic Research Center is basically the Ghost Hunters (of Sci-fi channel fame).
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Naru never tells anyone what he's planning, especially late in a case, despite consistent pestering from the others. On the rare occasion he does divulge what's on his mind, he's always wrong.
• Violence Detector: Mai consistently has dreams which explain the natures of the various hauntings and the histories of those who have suffered, making it possible to solve them later.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Mai is not pleased to discover that Naru is willing to turn a death curse onto six hundred relatively innocent students (hoping that the curse would dilute itself and "merely" severely injure them rather than kill them. Maybe) just to guarantee the life of one Jerkass teacher -- his justification being that, unwittingly or not, they still invoked a powerful death curse. Naru instead takes a third option and diverts the death curse to six hundred hitogatas of innocent students, leaving everyone unharmed.
• Work Off the Debt: Subverted when Mai eventually learns that the camera she broke was insured. Naru just led her to believe otherwise because he wanted a free gofer.
• The Workaholic: Naru and Lin.
• You! Get Me Coffee!: Mai's occasionally on the receiving end of this joke.