Ghost Marriage

Ghost Marriage (幽婚, yuukon) is a term that appears in Fatal Frame V and Fatal Frame: A Curse Affecting Only Girls. It refers to the act of posthumous marriage, tying a pair's souls together so they can be together in the afterlife.

A Curse Affecting Only Girls

In the novel, ghost marriage was practised at a shrine near Saint Loudun's Academy for Girls, for the benefit of soldiers who had died in the Russo-Japanese War and their families. It is the origin of the curse that only affects girls, where kissing photos and placing them side by side was practised as a simple love-charm. In 1905, the Headmistress and Mio Takaishi decided that ghost marriage was their only hope of being together, and placed their photos together in a special album before going to commit suicide together. However, the Headmistress survived, and Mio placed a curse on her. Photos placed beside Mio's in the album would be joined in a darker version of the original ghost marriage - rather than ensuring that the two pictured individuals would be together in the afterlife, it would draw the living girls into the limbo where Mio was forced to stay forever.

Fatal Frame: The Movie

Though the ritual is not named in Fatal Frame: The Movie, it is described here for the sake of convenience. In the movie, it is a kind of ritualised suicide pact. Two girls who were in love and wished to be together would have their photographs taken at Kusanagi Photo Studio and each would kiss the other's photo. The photos would be enshrined there, and the two girls would drown themselves in a nearby lake, to be joined eternally in the afterlife.

Fatal Frame V

In Fatal Frame V, a ghost marriage ritual was formerly performed on Mount Hikami. Once a shrine maiden had fulfilled her duties and been put inside a casket, she would be forced to relive all of the pain and deaths she had seen, trapped in the rift between life and death until finally dissolving into the black water. In order to relieve the maidens' loneliness and suffering, therefore making them able to fulfil their roles as pillars for longer, men would be brought into the mountain as bridegrooms. The man would be led to the House of Joining and choose his bride from paintings of the shrine maidens who had been put into boxes. For that time only, the maiden's spirit would return to the world of the living. If the match was successful, the man's soul would remain in the casket with her, and his body would be interred in the Forbidden Valley. If it failed, his soul would be enshrined in an unmarked grave and his body consigned to a reliquary in the Womb Cavern, while the maiden returned to her casket alone to await another partner.

Ghost Marriage is also the name of a game played by local children. They would hide each other's dolls, and the designated Outsider would choose a partner of the opposite sex and search for that person's doll. The ghostly children that haunt the Shrine of Dolls continue to play this game after death.