Gakkou no Yuurei

“Gakkou no Yureei” is one of the best series of the genre I’ve watched, way scarier than the “Junji Ito Collection” which is one of my top titles of the genre but leans to the creepy side more than the scary side. Some of the scenes are truly horrific, especially when the ghost/spirits died of horrendous injuries.

It is worthy of note that all these stories are based on REAL LIFE EVENTS, they’re all true stories that happened ON JAPANESE SCHOOL GROUNDS. They’re based on the accounts of the people to whom they happened, or of people who know/knew them. There’s several stories on each episode.

It ... is incredibly hard to find it in its completed form. Most sites only uploaded the first episode - I suspect this is because they’re animé sites and this series is A MIX OF ANIMATION AND LIVE ACTION. Only the first episode is full animation and the sites haven’t bothered to explain this on the description.

It’s even harder to find it with English subs, and when we do find it, there’s only the option of auto-generated captions that we must set up manually. Half of the captions are missing because of this and they’re literal translations so you got to put your brain + common sense to work if you want to fill the gaps.
It is a quest for the truly determined so don’t expect a spoon-fed session with all the hard work done for you.

But overall the stories are so good that I settled for what I found and counted myself lucky.

This show is a very well calculated work. Separate stories within episodes last for no more than 15 minutes, which is a perfect timeframe for the purposes of the show - enough to get to know the characters, not enough to overstay its welcome. Overall, it has the same feel to it as "Tales from the Crypt", but without a charismatic host and with a genuine intention to scare you.
I personally found the live-action sequences more touching than animated ones, but a lot of those felt sincere and dramatic too.
Another thing that earned this show my respect is that they knew when to ... stop. It had good ratings, so they probably could do more than 6 episodes, but it's at the 6th one when their crisis of ideas becomes apparent - they reused the same story as in one of the previous episodes, virtually unchanged. Again, fortunately it only happens once.
But that also brings me to the only drawback of the show - its novelty wears out rather fast. After a certain point, you start to realize very soon where the story is going and the intrigue is gone. Still, I was moved by a lot of stories from here even after there was no longer any mystery in the plot.
Unfortunately, because it says "school ghosts" in the title, the stories are limited to school / school students, which shows, like the mountain lodge episode where the characters could be just about anyone, but they introduce themselves as Higashi High School just to put down this checkmark. I also remember another story where the actress looked like she was in her 30s, but still wore a serafuku and pretended to be a high schooler. It's also quite hilarious, thanks to the live action sections going back to back with animation, to observe as the schoolgirls' skirt lengths go from mini in animation to "you can barely see her socks" in live action.