Ghost Hunt, by Shiho Inada & Fuyumi Ono

Since it's been a real scorcher this summer, especially this last week, let's cool down with a month of ghost stories.

(There's a method to this madness: in Japan, a popular summertime tradition is telling ghost stories. Supposedly, the chills you get will help with the heat. xxxHolic dealt with this theme in volume 2, which the Mooresville Public Library has in its omnibus collection of the series.)

The Ghost Hunt series began as "light novels," a term for novellas geared towards jr. high and high school students, written by Fuyumi Ono--an author best known for her Twelve Kingdoms series, four of which have currently been translated into English. It was then adapted into a manga by Shiho Inada, and later turned into an anime as well.

Ghost Hunt is a horror series with a heavy focus on eastern religions, specifically Buddhism and Shinto (a specifically Japanese religion), and on Japanese superstitions. It's set in modern Japan and centered in Tokyo, although the characters travel around the country to solve cases. It's the story of the Shibuya Psychic Center, a ghost hunting company which investigates and solves supernatural phenomenon. The company is run by a teenager named Kazuya Shibuya (nicknamed Naru) and his assistant Lin. He employs part-timer Mai Taniyama, the heroine who met Naru when he came to investigate an old building with more than its fair share of accidents at her old school; and he also hires a core group of other people on a case by case basis, including a Buddhist monk, a Catholic priest, a Shinto miko (also known as a "shrine maiden;" a miko is a girl who serves ceremonial roles in Shinto shrines), and a psychic medium. Together, they investigate psychic phenomena and exorcise and purify places of the ghosts haunting them; however, the ghosts usually don't go quietly.

This series is a case where I was really thrilled to see the anime come out, because some of the stories are even better when animated. For example, one story is set in a mansion designed after the Winchester Mystery House in California (the house of Sarah Winchester, daughter of the creator of the Winchester guns; she was convinced that she was haunted by the ghosts of everyone who had ever been killed by one of those guns and therefore kept her house under construction for 38 years straight in order to ward off any ghosts trying to find their way in); that story was already scary in the manga, but the anime kicks it up a level because you're able to see a lot more clearly the crazy design of the house as the characters travel through it.

The Ghost Hunt manga is being published by Del Ray, while the anime has been licensed and translated by Funimation. The light novels, unfortunately, have not been translated into English.