Gakkou no Kaidan

Years ago, all of the ghosts in a haunted schoolhouse were banished by a certain student. Now, they're back—and they want revenge...

Satsuki and Keiichirou Miyanoshita are two siblings recovering from the tragic loss of their mother. After moving to their mother's hometown, they learn that the local school they have transferred to is an old building—one said to be haunted. Despite initially brushing it off as a silly rumor, the two soon discover that ghosts are indeed real and that they're after them! Gakkou no Kaidan is the creepy tale of the lives of these siblings and their newfound friends as they try to survive the school's ghosts—with a little help from their pet cat along the way.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Amanojaku Main

Nakao, Ryusei Japanese

Koigakubo, Momoko Main

Sakuma, Kumi Japanese

Miyanoshita, Keiichirou Main

Mamiya, Kurumi Japanese

Aoyama, Hajime Main

Honda, Takako Japanese

Miyanoshita, Satsuki Main

Kawakami, Tomoko Japanese

Kakinoki, Reo Main

Tsumura, Makoto Japanese

Imai, Mio Supporting

Nakayama, Sara Japanese

Okabe Supporting

Saiga, Mitsuki Japanese

Sakata Supporting

Aoyama, Yutaka Japanese

Datto Supporting

Uechi, Aki Japanese

Katsumata, Hideo Producer

Hagino, Ken Producer

Abe, Noriyuki Director, Sound Director

Kosaka, Harume Episode Director, Storyboard

Reviews

Mar 12, 2025

Beta_Kronykal

Recommended

I am giving it an 8, but only for the dubbed version. The show itself is really mid, plenty of cliches, nothing special. However, the dubbed version changes the game entirely. It elevates the show from a mediocre ghost hunting anime to a lovable, funny as hell official parody. What's more, the dubbed version really plays well with the animations and scenes.
Got quite a few laughs out of me. The only downside I can think for dub is the plethora of references that I don't get, since they seem to be aimed at an American audience. Other than that, a memorable experience.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Mar 21, 2025

-sigil-

Mixed Feelings

I watched the dub, obviously, and I am certain that most people are here for the dub as well. The background of the dubbed version should not come as a secret to anyone. I mean, a few clips of this anime can get over a million views elsewhere. Repeating the backstory of how the dubbed version came to be would be unnecessary as it has already been repeated ad nauseam. However, most of the backstory seems to exaggerate some claims that are sourced from an at best, second-hand account. For the sake of providing a more vague explanation, the dubbed version was simply less constrained ... by the rules set by the original network. The dubbed version is not completely free to do as it wishes, since it still has to abide by the general story presented in the subbed version. So, after a bit of tweaking, the localization turns the anime from a generic set of ghost stories (hence the name) targeted towards youths into a black comedy.

A generic series gets a generic title, with its literal translation being “School Ghost Stories,” which does a good job at setting the precedent for the entire series. The structure of each episode is formulaic which makes this series comprehensible, but rather boring. Firstly, the start of the episode presents a problem that is related to the old school. Then, the group of kids are incentivized to investigate the problem, which takes place in the school house most of the time. Then, they encounter the cause of the issue, which is a ghost that terrorizes the kids for at most a couple minutes. Then, the kids use their wits to either find something laying around or cast a spell which dispels the ghost. Finally, the episode concludes with a witty comment from one of the kids. The story is all around fine, and definitely a bit underwhelming, but that’s not why people are here.

Ghost Stories attempts to fix the rather boring plot structure through its dubbing. The series is contingent upon how clever it is, so the dubbing would either make-it-or-break-it. Personally, I didn’t find it to be as clever as some people make it out to be. Most of the jokes either consist of being politically incorrect, make fun of the animation used, or reference pop culture. Sure, the sub is occasionally funny, but for a series that gets praised for its notorious dubbing, it's quite underwhelming. Politically incorrect humor can be funny if it's done well. So, in spite of this, Ghost Stories tends to be lazy when it comes to this type of humor. A good chunk of it boils down to “you are [pejorative],” because most of the humor is "safe edgy." Besides that, pop culture references are a bit of a mixed bag because they don’t withstand the test of time. Ghost Stories humor is essentially edgy Family Guy humor without the cutaway gags. To illustrate this, Hajime resembles Glenn Quagmire to the point where it seems purposeful, to the point where he even copies his “catchphrase” in episode one. I can see it now, a group of edgy manatees helped write Ghost Stories by moving colorful idea balls into a specialized compartment.

The only off-putting aspect of the art is Leo’s character design. Unfortunately, it’s not the nose, mostly because the English dub can only change so much. Besides that, the characters are well designed for a show originally aimed at youths. Additionally, a lot of the ghosts have neat designs as well. Not much else stood out, as both the background and the audio are unremarkable.

There’s not much else to say about Ghost Stories that hasn’t been said already. From now on, let’s keep the talks of the dubbing’s history and an explosive weapon that set off in Japan to a minimum. The formulaic structure of the anime made many of the events that took place feel repetitive, which made a good chunk of the series uninteresting. The dub tries to add some witty lines to make the lackluster story tolerable, but at most it’s just a chuckle here and there. Ghost Stories seems to be a test for those with low attention spans. Much like Family Guy, the compilation clips that are out there on the internet are bait. It’s a series worth watching for the sake of knowing where the jokes come from, but besides that, it doesn’t offer much.

Thanks for reading, you’re the bomb!

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Sep 24, 2022

MrConnman123

Not Recommended

Ghost Stories is a weird one, this review isn’t about the show itself but rather its English dub which should be a red-flag straight away.
Y’see, when Ghost Stories was being localized, the localisers basically had full creative control over it, since it was a very Japanese-centric show with heavy themes of Shintoism and whatnot, the chances of it appealing to a western audience were slim (also Steven Foster moment) so they made a gag dub which is praised as being supposedly “hilarious” and a go to example for Redditors defending localisation changes and English dubs.

Thing is …it’s not that funny, don’t get me wrong, it ... definitely has its moments (the lip-flap joke in particular is great) but I feel like most of Ghost Stories’ fanbase came from people who watched compilations on YouTube and not y’know, the actual show…
The actual show only has like 2 or 3 good jokes per episode and that novelty-factor quickly dies when you realize that in-between you just have dated pop-culture references from 2005, a bunch of boring shit, generic sex jokes and laughably out of date internet memes which almost loops back around to being ironically funny…almost…

But even then I’m just not a fan of localisation changes from a fundamental level, I’m someone who believes in preserving artistic vision and integrity no matter how lacklustre or subpar it may be.
Not to mention how the localisers basically had to lie about the show being a flop in Japan in order to paint the dub in a good light, it also gave the English-speaking anime community the idea that the original Japanese version is some kind of infamously terrible anime, now I can't say either way since I haven't seen the original Japanese version but I feel that it's un-fair that the original show has such a terrible reputation arbitrarily.

Now there’s an argument that could be made saying that the show is better off being remembered for being terrible than being forgotten and fading into obscurity but personally I think it would’ve been better off having been forgotten rather than having lies spread about it and a mostly unfunny dub that shits all over the artistic vision made by people who probably have Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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	Poll: Gakkou no Kaidan Episode 19 Discussion Ranivus - Apr 1, 2010	33 replies	by donmai64 »» Mar 17, 3:59 AM
	Poll: Gakkou no Kaidan Episode 15 Discussion Ranivus - Mar 28, 2010	29 replies	by Zish_jaya »» Jan 30, 2:07 PM
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	Poll: Gakkou no Kaidan Episode 13 Discussion Ranivus - Mar 28, 2010	23 replies	by breddie_sucks »» Dec 9, 2024 8:18 AM
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