Lavender Town (Japanese: シオンタウン, Hepburn: Shion Taun, Shion Town) is a fictional village in the 1996 video games Pokémon Red and Blue. Stylized as a haunted location, Lavender Town is home to the Pokémon Tower, a burial ground for deceased Pokémon and a location to find Ghost-type Pokémon.
The background music of Lavender Town is renowned for adding to the town's creepy atmosphere. In the 2010s, it gave rise to the "Lavender Town Syndrome" creepypasta, a fictional story about hundreds of Japanese children dying by suicide after listening to the track from high pitched tones that only they could hear. Lavender Town has become well known for the variety of creepypastas associated with it, which has been the subject of analysis.
Appearances
Lavender Town is a village that can be visited in Pokémon Red, Green, Blue, Yellow,[1][2] sequels Gold, Silver, Crystal,[3] and the remakes thereof.[4] Lavender Town is the player's first encounter with the concept of Pokémon dying,[2] and is one of a few towns in the Kanto region not to feature a gym.[1] It is home to the Pokémon Tower, a graveyard filled with mourning trainers and hundreds of tombstones for deceased Pokémon.[5][1] In Lavender Tower the player character can come across the Ghost-type PokémonGastly and Haunter.[5] The tower is the only place where they are available for capture.[6] During the story of Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow, the player utilises the item Silph Scope to deal with and view the Ghost-type Pokémon. The village is haunted by the spirit of dead Marowak, murdered by the villainous Team Rocket, which is searching for its orphaned Cubone, a type of Pokémon that can be found at the tower.[2][7] Cubone's story is expanded on in the remake Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! by having the player assist in reuniting the Cubone with its mother.[7] The Pokémon Tower was replaced by the "Kanto Radio Tower" in Pokémon Gold and Silver, although a smaller burial site called the "House of Memories" is now present.[5]
The Pokémon Tower appears in the 23rd episode of the first season of the Pokémon anime series titled "The Tower of Terror", where Ash, Misty, and Brock search for Ghost-type Pokémon for the Gym battle against Sabrina. Lavender Town also appears in the Pokémon Adventures and The Electric Tale of Pikachu manga series.[5] Lavender Town later features in Pokémon Origins' second episode, which focuses on re-telling Cubone and Marowak's subplot from the games.[8]
Junichi Masuda composed the music for the games, including that of Lavender Town.
The chiptune background music of Lavender Town in Pokémon Red, Blue, Green and Yellow versions has garnered much interest due to some listeners finding it unsettling. The town's theme uses many sharp, atonal notes, which creates an eerie atmosphere.[9][10] Jay Hathaway of Gawker stated that leaving the music on loop caused them to feel a "vague sense of dread".[11]
In the early 2010s, an urban legend claimed that hundreds of Japanese children had committed suicide in the 1990s as a result of the music in the game, speculating that binaural beats and high pitched tones only audible to children caused headaches and erratic behavior that led to their deaths,[11] with other "recorded" side effects including insomnia, violent behavior, and brain hemmoraging.[16] A fabricated illness was dubbed "Lavender Town Syndrome" (with the phenomenon also being referred to as "Lavender Town Tone", "Lavender Town Conspiracy", and "Lavender Town Suicides"[17]) and the original story went viral after a creepypasta version of the story was spread on websites such as 4chan. Various people have added details to make the story more convincing over time, such as photoshopping images of ghosts and the Pokémon Unown (a species of Pokémon resembling the alphabet, which are used to spell "leave now") into spectrogram outputs of the Lavender Town music.[11][18] It is also claimed that the song was quietly changed for international releases of the games.[10][11] Certain versions claim that the games’ director, Satoshi Tajiri, wanted the tone in the game to "annoy" children instead of cause harm, while others claim Nintendo was in collaboration with the Japanese government.[17]
Other creepypastas carried links to the Lavender Town Syndrome. The creepypasta "Lavender Town and Pokémon 731" linked the Syndrome to a Pokémon programmer attempting to brainwash children for military purposes, only for the process to fail, resulting in the children's suicides. It also featured an unofficial Pokémon species titled "Pokémon 731," which appeared in corrupted cartridges of the games. Pokémon 731 would later go on to inspire other fan creations associated with Lavender Town.[19] Examples included the Buried Alive, a half-buried zombie that was supposedly a scrapped "final challenge" for the Pokémon Tower area,[10] the White Hand, a highly detailed, decaying hand that would cause those who viewed it to become violently ill,[10] and the GIF animation Haunting.swf. These were meant to be representative of 731, and some later creepypastas would merge the three together into a single story.[19] Other creepypastas gave varying fictitious accounts about the Syndrome, with one linking it to Satoshi Tajiri's childhood traumas, while another depicted a composer attempting to recreate the "original" Lavender Town melody and dying after completing it.[19]
The spread of Lavender Town Syndrome is believed to be due to its association with the Dennō Senshi Porygon incident. The episode resulted in many children across Japan suffering from seizures, and its correlation with Lavender Town Syndrome's events being considered to have provided "grounding" for the creepypasta.[17] Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku also stated that the incident supposedly taking place in Japan would have required a proficiency in Japanese to fact check, resulting in the incident being hard to verify and thus more realistic.[1] The paper "'Lavender Town Syndrome' Creepypasta: A Rational Narration of the Supernatural" described the creepypastas as being used to re-enchant the games for older fans of the series who had grown up on the original games; it felt as though the corruption of this childhood aspect was used in order to convey an element of horror in the story. The various creepypastas' attempt to rationalize their supernatural phenomenon via the usage of a mix of fake and real documentation was additionally stated to add a layer of realism to the stories, making them more convincing and engaging for those interacting with the stories, while also building the creepypastas' mythical aspects.[19] Mark Hill of Kill Screen additionally stated that the ability for fans of the creepypastas to be able to add their own variations to the tale aided in its spread, as it allowed the story to be retold in a variety of different fashions.[20]
Reception
Den of Geek writer Aaron Greenbaum wrote that Lavender Town proved to be highly memorable, stating that the unsettling atmosphere and theme music of the area helped ideas such as creepypastas involving the area flourish and embed themselves in the minds of players.[10] Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku stated the creepypastas related to Lavender Town worked primarily because of the Lavender Town theme already being a theme that elicits an uneasy feeling in listeners. She stated that while Lavender Town's various unique aspects— such as the burial grounds, possessed trainers, and the revelation that Pokémon could die— were unsettling and memorable on their own, she found that these aspects, in conjunction with the real-world feasibility of the creepypastas, allowed them to take on a strong following.[1]
The story involving the ghost of the Marowak in Lavender Tower has been praised. TheGamer's Stacey Henley highlighted the story as one of the Pokémon franchise's strongest and earliest narratives, though felt later references that implied this story affected all members of the Cubone and Marowak species diluted its narrative impact.[21] Cian Maher of Bloody Disgusting highlighted the expanded emphasis of the story in Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!, praising the focus on Cubone's plot and the resolution with its mother. He stated that the shift in focus from horror to the storytelling helped make Cubone, normally considered a "scary" element of the franchise, have an investing and engaging storyline. While Maher found Lavender Town's horror to mostly subdued in the games, he felt that the replacement of the horror with the Cubone story helped tell "a cathartic tale telling the story of the bond shared between parent and child," with the aspects of horror from the original games being "flipped on their head."[7] The book Death, Culture, & Leisure: Playing Dead analyzed this storyline for its depiction of ghosts, describing how the contact involved with talking to ghosts was capable of bringing healing for both parties in the story. They highlighted how it showed the dead not as "inanimate or hostile bodies," but as separate beings with their own agency still remaining from when they were alive. They described the event as being an emotional high point in the game.[22]
