Мектептегі Әуестер: Аманжоку мен Періштелер Әлемі

2000 anime series

, also known as Ghosts at School, is a Japanese series of children's novels written by 常光徹. It was published by Kodansha, starting in 1990. The series is a collection of popular school ghost stories in Japan, rewritten specifically for a young demographic. A video game was also produced. Nevertheless, it received notoriety in the succeeding years with its official English dub, which mostly replaced the original script for the series with pop culture references and dark humor.

Ghost Stories follows Satsuki Miyanoshita, who moves with her family to the hometown of her deceased mother. On her first day of school, Satsuki, her brother Keiichirou (a first grader), Hajime Aoyama (their neighbor), Momoko Koigakubo (an older schoolmate), and Leo Kakinoki (a classmate and friend of Hajime's with a penchant for the paranormal) visit the abandoned school building adjacent the current school complex and discover that the building is haunted. It is soon after revealed that Satsuki's mother was responsible for sealing several ghosts who haunted not only the school but also the town, which are now inadvertently being released due to urbanization taking place in the surrounding area. Satsuki's mother left behind a book detailing how to exorcise the ghosts once and for all. In her first confrontation, Satsuki faces a demon called Amanojaku, but in the process, he is sealed within Satsuki's pet cat, Kaya. Although Amanojaku does not want to help Satsuki at first, the danger soon threatens to envelop the town and it is left up to Satsuki, her friends, and Amanojaku to stop the ghosts. With Amanojaku's help, the friends finally are able to exorcise the ghosts.

Fuji TV, who owned the series' Western distribution rights, approached ADV Films to produce an English dub. Fuji TV gave the ADV Films staff very few constraints when writing the new version, the only rules were "don't change the character names (including the ghosts); don't change the way the ghosts are slain (a reference to Japanese folklore) and, finally, don't change the core meaning of each episode". The English script was written by Steven Foster and Lucan Duran and allowed for ad lib by the English voice actors. According to Foster, whoever showed up to the recording studio first for any given episode could improvise anything they wanted, those that came later had to build upon the tone and jokes established earlier. The original Japanese audio and literal subtitle translation are also included. Volume 1 was released on 22 October 2005. On 28 August 2013, Discotek Media announced that they acquired the series' license and would release it in 2014 with the ADV dub and the Japanese audio with English subtitles. The complete series was released on a three disc set on 25 March 2014. Ghost Stories and its dub were also released on the anime streaming platform RetroCrush in February 2021.

Dhruv Sharma of Screen Rant praised the characters of Ghost Stories and their developments as "well written", though he wrote that the animation style was "a bit dated". /Films Hoai Tran Bui called the dubbed version of Ghost Stories the "best and worst anime dub", describing it as "raunchy, wildly inappropriate, [and] self aware".