TRASH DYKE NATION

Pokemon "Nightmare Fuel"

Pokemon, while inarguably being a series made for children, has it's fair share of spooks. I wanted to document some of those here, both canon and urban legend, as well as some fan-made projects. However, I find it a little too easy and overbearing to just say "this pokemon has a scary dex entry and THIS pokemon has ANOTHER scary dex entry!" so for the purpose of both giving the other instances more of a spotlight and for fear of missing some entries, the pokedex will be excluded from this listing. Plus if I included them, that'd practically be the entire list, and you can already find several lists of messed up dex entries online. That being said, let's get into it.

I'm gonna be taking this gen by gen (up to gen 8, because I don't know as much about the 9th gen's spooks), so let's start with the Kanto region. Generation one is full of kinda weird and spooky instances. The obvious one that comes to mind is Lavender Town. Just... The whole thing. SO many myths came out of this little town, but first lets go over what actually happens there. When we first enter the town we're greated by an unnerving tune, something unlike the rest of the entire soundtrack. In-game, we're informed that Team Rocket has murdered a Marowak, leaving it's child Cubone orphaned. This is already really dark, and establishes that pokemon do canonically die in this universe and are also ocassionally slaughtered in cold blood. We also have to fight said Marowak's ghost in a graveyard, as it cannot pass on into the afterlife as it is vengful and angry. This actually takes advantage of a fairly common trope in children's media where animals, aliens, and other non-human anthropomorphized creatures are used as the subject of violence rather than humans to be able to tell a darker story.

Of course everything having to do with Lavender Town is fuel for some crazy urban legends and creepypastas, especially in the late 90s and early 2000s. The one that comes to mind to me immediately is the ghost hand mentioned by the girl directly outside of the Pokemon Tower (the aformentioned graveyard), who says she sees a hand behind your back. This became the product of so much talk and speculation it was later referenced in the anime.