The temptation to copy and paste the entire lyrics of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Creepy Doll’ as a episode 4 summary, if you are not familiar with the song. It’s about a man who buys a doll at an antique store. He brings it home and it’s haunted and torments him, when he goes to burn the doll at the end of the song. It replaces itself with him, and he ends up burning to death instead. How does this relate to the episode at all? Well, mostly the doll and the fact that they do in fact try to burn the doll to no avail.
Otherwise there really isn’t any similarity. Mai, Naru, Hosho and Ayaka are hired by the owner of a house to come investigate their house. The complaints run along a similar vein as the last episode, doors opening and closing, strange noises, things moving. It’s so similar in fact that Mai immediately passes it as a human caused poltergeist. Ayaka believes it’s a earth spirit, but i’m going to be real with you. She’s almost never right, i’m hard pressed to remember if there is a single episode in this series where she is correct in what she says.
Naru, to test Mai’s human poltergeist theory. Does the hypnosis trick he did in the first 3 episodes, he says a vase in the room will move during the night and leaves the vase in a marked area. Though instead of the vase moving at all, the rug and furniture in the little girl of the houses room is pulled away from the wall and all the furniture including the carpet is overturned in the living room. Leaving it looking less like a poltergeist caused by a human and more like one very angry spirit.
The group finds something to home in on and focus their investigation around when they discover that the little girl, Ayumi has been talking to her doll Minnie. Now a little girl talking to her doll on it’s own is pretty normal and not worth noting. You might even take the strange things she said about her step-mother being a witch and trying to poison her and her aunt as a child rejecting her father getting remarried. Until Mai actually hears the doll talking.
Until the doll moves on it’s own on the camera and then sets itself right when they go to check on it. Until Hoso tries to burn the doll and it comes out like there was no fire at all. Then you kind of have to accept that this doll is super possessed.
So Naru calls in the two remaining characters we haven’t brought back from episodes one through three. John Brown, the priest and Masako, the television physic medium. The minute Masako enters the house, she nearly faints from the sheer amount of angry spirits in the area. Saying she had never seen a house with so many, all of them for the most part children. Which matches up to Naru’s research that many young kids died in the house prior to this.
They drive the spirit out of Minnie using John, exorcising the spirit from the doll but not putting it to rest. Ayumi and her aunt leave the house and Hoso goes to cleanse it, when he does though. Many spirits begin to appear and they are not pleased. In particular, a large black mass that appears to be older. Perhaps the core of the malice?
I really like this set of episodes. The whole ‘creepy doll’ trope has some charm too it, and I even get a mild scare at the end of episode 4 when the dolls head rolls off and Mai screams in terror. Ayumi and her aunt Noriko make for a much more pleasant side cast then Kuroda did, as both of them seem rather genuine in their fear of the spirits threats rather then someone who was merely seeking attention. We’ll see next week how this arc wraps up. If I recall, it’s rather dark though it’s been a long time and my memory is a little fuzzy.