EP020

← EP019 : Tentacool & Tentacruel

Original series

EP021 : Bye Bye Butterfree →

The Ghost of Maiden's Peak

EP020   ゆうれいポケモンとなつまつり The Ghost Pokémon and the Summer Festival

First broadcast Japan August 12, 1997 United States October 2, 1998

English themes Opening Pokémon Theme Ending

Japanese themes Opening めざせポケモンマスター Ending ひゃくごじゅういち

Credits Animation Team Ota Screenplay 首藤剛志 Takeshi Shudō Storyboard 井硲清高 Kiyotaka Itani Assistant director 井硲清高 Kiyotaka Itani Animation director 志村隆行 Takayuki Shimura Additional credits

Screenshots on Filb.de

The Ghost of Maiden's Peak (Japanese: ゆうれいポケモンとなつまつり The Ghost Pokémon and the Summer Festival) is the 20th episode of the Pokémon anime. It was first broadcast in Japan on August 12, 1997 and in the United States on October 2, 1998.

Spoiler warning: this article may contain major plot or ending details.

Synopsis

In the beginning of the episode, Ash and his friends are traveling by a ferry from the holiday resort of Porta Vista to Maiden's Peak. Ash notes that they're going to land soon, but Brock moans that he doesn't care about seeing land again as he has missed the summer season and has to wait a whole year for the next one.

After docking, they find out that they've just arrived there at the time of the annual Summer Ending Festival. When they decide to go and enjoy it, Brock sees a beautiful girl up the distant cliff. He immediately falls in love with her, but after being run over by a group of tourists he notices that the girl has disappeared. Pikachu is the only one that seems to notice that the girl is actually a Gastly, but Ash and Misty seem not to notice her at all.

As usual, Team Rocket follows Ash and company to Maiden's Peak. They come up with an idea to look around for dropped coins, and while pondering it, James sees the same girl Brock saw before, only by the water. Jessie slaps James to regain his attention. As they leave to look for the coins, James takes a final look at the dock, noticing the disappearance of the girl.

During the festival, Ash, Misty and Brock meet an old lady. She warns Brock that he should beware a young, beautiful girl who will lead him to a cruel fate. After the old lady calls Misty a scrawny blabbermouth, she decides that they should be somewhere else instead of being insulted.

Meanwhile, Team Rocket puts their plan into action, though they do not seem to find anything. Then James notices a penny lying on the walkway, but as he approaches it he is interrupted by the old lady, which Ash and company met just a moment ago. As in the case of Brock, she mentions the young girl to James. Then an Officer Jenny appears and takes away the coin James found. When she suggests that they go down to the station with her to fill out a report, Team Rocket stammers that it's all right, they don't need to go down to the station, and then they flee the scene.

Both Ash's crew and Team Rocket head for the Shrine of the Maiden. They see the shrine's greatest treasure, the painting of the maiden. Brock and James both realize that the girl in the painting is the same girl they saw before, and both attempt to approach the painting but are blocked by the man presenting the painting to the audience. He then tells the story of the maiden, who waited on the cliff for her loved one to return from the war, and eventually turning into stone.

The two groups go to take a closer look at the aforementioned cliff, and Meowth formulates a plan to steal the painting with the intention of selling it for a lot of money. They decide to swipe the painting later that evening. As night falls, Brock is still at the cliff. Misty tries to make him forget the stone so they can go back and enjoy the festival, but Brock insists on staying a little bit longer, so Ash and Misty leave him sitting there. When it's about time for the local Pokémon Center to lock the doors for the night, Brock still hasn't returned from the cliff, unlike they had planned. Ash decides to go look for Brock, but Nurse Joy holds him back, giving Ash a short lecture on the importance of sleep.

In the middle of the night, Meowth tries to wake up Jessie and James so they can try to steal the painting, but the two are not very eager to wake up. Suddenly a strong wind starts blowing, and the doors of the Maiden's Shrine are blown open. The ghost of the maiden floats out from the inside, causes Meowth to fall asleep and then wakes up James. She also shows herself to Brock, telling him that she's been waiting for him. Brock replies that he has been waiting, too.

Ash and Misty start looking for Brock on the next morning, while Meowth and Jessie start looking for James. Ash and Jessie then meet face-to-face and notice that they both are looking for a missing person. Jessie performs the Team Rocket motto all alone, but then they hear James saying his lines. James is thrown from inside the shrine, followed by Brock. As they try to get Brock and James back to normal, the old lady appears again, reminding them of her warning about the ghost of the maiden. Ash's Pikachu shocks James and Brock to get them back to normal.

They get inside, and the old lady states that all young men have fallen into the curse while passing through Maiden's Peak. They decide to protect themselves from the ghost by buying a bunch of anti-ghost stickers and sticking them around the shrine and the two cursed ones. However, when the night comes, they note that the stickers do not work, and like on the previous night, the ghost of the maiden appears. Ash and others try to prevent Brock and James from being pulled out by the maiden.

After being shot with a bazooka by Jessie, the ghost of the maiden summons several skull-like ghostly apparitions. Ash tries to identify them with his Pokédex with no result. However, he accidentally points the Pokédex at the ghost of the maiden, and Pokédex identifies her as a Gastly. Since Gastly's disguise has been revealed, it transforms back to its normal form. Ash then challenges it to a battle.

Ash commands Pikachu to start the battle, but Gastly summons a living mouse trap to scare Pikachu off. Meowth states that mouse traps don't work on him, but Gastly summons a ball for him to play with, distracting him. Jessie then sends out Ekans, only for it to be scared off by Gastly's newly summoned mongoose. James commands his Koffing to attack with the Poison Gas attack, but the mongoose stomps it down.

Ash decides it's his turn to try again and calls out Charmander. Gastly summons a fire extinguisher, and Ash has to call Charmander back, mainly because Charmander was too busy running from the water to battle. He then calls out both Squirtle and Bulbasaur, but Gastly summons a Venusaur and a Blastoise, which causes Ash's Pokémon to get too scared to do anything, and just because it thinks it's fun, it combines them into a hybrid called Venustoise. After repeatedly being beaten by Gastly, Misty tries another strategy. She uses a cross, garlic, a stake, and a hammer, comparing Gastly to a vampire. However, the sun starts to rise once again, and as Gastly hates sunlight, it disappears, saying that the ghost of the maiden and the old woman will return next years festival.

On the following night, the festival continues on. Ash and friends have fun, and everything is back to normal. As the episode ends, the true ghost of the Maiden emerges from her stone self, thanking Gastly for keeping her legend alive in the town.

Major events

• James's Koffing is revealed to know Poison Gas.

For a list of all major events in the animated series, please see the history page.

Debuts

Pokémon debuts

• Gastly
• Venusaur
• Blastoise

Characters

Humans

Dare da?

• Ash
• Misty
• Brock
• Jessie
• James
• Ghost of Maiden's Peak
• Officer Jenny
• Nurse Joy

Pokémon

Who's That Pokémon?

Venustoise

Who's That Pokémon?: Gastly

• Pikachu (Ash's)
• Meowth (Team Rocket)
• Bulbasaur (Ash's)
• Charmander (Ash's)
• Squirtle (Ash's)
• Ekans (Jessie's)
• Koffing (James's)
• Gastly (talking Pokémon; debut)
• Venusaur (illusion; fused with Blastoise to form Venustoise)
• Blastoise (illusion; fused with Venusaur to form Venustoise)
• Venustoise (a hybrid of Venusaur and Blastoise)

Trivia

The mongoose

• The priest says the great war the maiden's lover went off to happened 2000 years before the episode's events.
• One of the creatures Gastly transforms into is a real mongoose.
• The outfits that Ash, Misty, and Brock wear during the festival reappear in the fourth Japanese ending song, Pokémon Ondo.
• The similarly named Maiden Peak is a real mountain in Oregon.
• The Maiden's Peak statue is almost identical to the Orichalcum statue that was a plot device in early episodes of the Slayers anime series.
• There are many Japanese cultural references in this episode, especially during the festival at the end.
• The festival is also the first time Misty is seen with her hair down.
• The Gastly in this episode is the only known one to date that is able to speak and shape-shift.
• This is the first episode to feature another Pokémon, other than Meowth, that is able to talk without telepathy.
• The kanji on the fire extinguisher Gastly uses to extinguish Ash's Charmander's tail flame was left unedited in the dub.
• In the Arabic dub, this episode was removed for unknown reasons, likely because of the extensive representation of spirits and ghosts in ways that are against Islamic culture. It was also removed from the Korean dub.
• After Jessie shoots the ghost with the bazooka, she coincidentally makes a reference to a future episode.

Errors

Ash's miscolored hat

• James commands his Koffing to use Poison Gas, which Koffing could not legally learn in a Generation I game unless it was traded back from Generation II. At the time of the episode's original airing, no Generation II game had been released yet, meaning that at the time of this episode airing, Koffing was completely unable to learn Poison Gas by any means.
• When Ash says "We lose. It's just too strong", the red part of his hat is white.

Dub edits

• Most Japanese words on festival signs are removed.
  • The fan that Misty held had its kanji erased.
• Also, Misty (or, at least, someone who sounded suspiciously like her) shouted "Let's go to the ferris wheel!" twice in the scene; specifically, right up to the part where Brock says "She was the most beautiful girl I've ever seen...".
• The penny was originally a ¥5 coin in the Japanese version. However, the ¥1000 and ¥5000 bills in the old woman's cash register were left unchanged.
• The o-fuda they wear were referred to as "anti-ghost stickers" in the dub.
• Brock's "Hey! Let me go!" line in the dub was actually "You guys...!" in the Japanese version. The Japanese implied that Brock was in a trance and his friends broke the trance.
• Ash says that, since Gastly is a Pokémon, he can battle it with his Pokémon in the Japanese version.
• The ball that Meowth was playing with had the word "Matatabi", meaning "catnip", which was erased from the dub.
• The mongoose says "Mongoose" in the vein of a Pokémon in the original instead of "Dinner time!"

In other languages

Language		Title
Mandarin Chinese		幽靈神奇寶貝和夏天廟會 / 幽灵神奇宝贝跟夏天庙会
Czech		Duch Dívčího Útesu
Dutch		De Geest van Maiden's Peak
Finnish		Neidonkallion aave
French	Canada	Le fantôme de la jeune fille
	Europe	Le fantôme de la jeune fille
German		Die verlorene Seele
Hebrew		אגדת העלמה והרוח agadat ha'alma veharuach
Hungarian		A Hajadon-fok kísértete
Italian		Il fantasma della scogliera
Polish		Duch z Dziewiczej Góry
Portuguese	Brazil	O Fantasma do Pico da Donzela
	Portugal	O Fantasma do Pico da Donzela
Romanian		Fantoma Fecioarei de pe Stâncă
Russian		Призрак Девичьей Скалы
Spanish	Latin America	¡El Fantasma del Pico de la Doncella!
	Spain	El fantasma de Maiden's Peak
Swedish		Spöket vid Maiden's Peak
Vietnamese		Oan hồn trong ngôi làng

← EP019 : Tentacool & Tentacruel

Original series

EP021 : Bye Bye Butterfree →

This episode article is part of Project Anime, a Bulbapedia project that covers all aspects of Pokémon animation.