Ghost Hunt Volumes 3 and 4

Volume 3

The former monk tells them about a friend of his who goes to a high school where one room has what might be a cursed desk. Four people who have set there have met with the same type of accident. There have also been other incidents at the high school involving illnesses. There have also been even more odd incidents involving objects.

The possibility arises that the events could be traced to a particular curse a student put on a teacher who refused to believe her psychic abilities after she had objectively demonstrated them. Mai and Shibuya are in a room at the school when a girl seems to come through the floor from above, upside-down. She disappears before her whole body is revealed, though.

It seems like someone has been cursing the teacher and the students and using something related to a voodoo doll. Kaisai is the girl who originally cursed a teacher and Shibuya thinks she's the one behind the problems, but Mai thinks she's innocent.

Mai and Shibuya end up at the bottom of a well. They manage to find out who is behind all the problems, and it's not Kaisai. They also test Mai and find out she's definitively has strong intuitive ability.

Volume 4

The back of the book talks about one of the stories where 'a stinky smell sickens an entire classroom.' This reminds me of something that really happened in a local high school around fifteen years ago. There was a stinky smell that kept happening in a series of classrooms on the third floor of the school on one wing of the school only. The smell was overpowering, so much so that, even after opening the windows, students and teachers had to evacuate that section until the smell cleared.

By the time investigators would get there, though, the smell would be gone. The people from the board of education claimed everyone was imaging things, but people gradually got sick from the odor. This went on so long and so intensely that a plan was drawn up by the school administration to completely shut down one side of the school, changing the days schedule and putting all the students into one half of the school. This came within one day of being put into effect when the cause of the horrible smells was finally found.

The school is old, and there were some rotten pipes in the walls of the home economics room. Whenever they would their sinks, the stuff built up and the smells came out.

So strange smells really do happen.

The story opens with stories of a school having trouble, including a dog thats a ghost but that bites students. While they are at the school they find a student that has just been attacked by the dog and they see the ghost dog. The ghost dog is not the only ghost that's been seen, either. There was also a student that had committed suicide at the school a year previously. There were also fires in the dressing room every twelve days, and a strange smell in a classroom that made half the students ill.

The result of this was that some students began refusing to become to school. The investigators find out some students had been playing an ouija-like game involving fortune telling and a fox spirit.

One interesting thing about these novels is that, at times, totally rational explanations for things that at first appear strange are given, much like most UFO sightings are really easily-identified objects seen under unusual conditions.

Mai sees the spirit of the boy who killed himself.

Then there's a side story about an investigation at a church. This one concerns a possible spirit of a missing boy. A boy shows up and seems to be possessed by the spirit of the other boy. Then the spirit seems to shift to Mai's body. Then Mai goes missing and they have to look for her.

The mystery of what happened to the young boy originally is solved.