Fact-Checking the "Cursed Song:" Lavender Town Syndrome (Pokemon Red and Green)

This is a lighthearted video and thread, nothing too serious. This whole topic is mainly just for fun.

However a fact-checking video / thread, like this, is actually needed.

Because there's a ton of false information out there, about this. Especially YouTube, which has many videos about it that are blatantly wrong / inaccurate.

I looked into this because the urban legend caught my curiosity:

The story is that in Japan, 1996, over 100 kids killed themselves... because of a song that's sad and creepy, in the Game Boy's new game, Pokemon Red and Green. Therefore, the song was changed before the game's international release.

...Naturally, my first impulse was to find the song that the legend is about, and see what the big deal is!

So I started looking into it, and it was surprisingly tricky to figure out the truth, because maybe half of YT vids about it, are just blatantly wrong, such as featuring the wrong song and calling it the original.

So eventually I cleared things up, and then I made a vid of facts about it. I will write out the content, right here in this post. BUT my vid also has the ORIGINAL "cursed" song. So I recommend playing the song while reading about it, lol.

Here's my vid with the original "cursed" song (on my non-monetized YT channel):






...OK, now that the cursed song is starting to hum and beep its way into your soul, here are 8 facts about this song, and its urban legend.



1. This song (in my vid) is the actual original song, that the legend is about.

And this is important because many vids contain a different song, and call it the original... which is stupid, lol.

The first step is figuring out exactly what we're talking about, lol, which is this song in my vid, which is absolutely the ORIGINAL version, which the urban legend is ABOUT.




2. is the fact that the song really WAS limited, to ONLY the Japanese, original version of the game. So that part of the legend, is true.



3. The song sounds sad and creepy, on purpose! (So it's not just weird, for no reason.) The song was INTENDED to sound sad and creepy. Because it's background music for a CEMETERY of Pokemon, i.e. it's basically a pet cemetery. It's a place to remember our dead pets, basically, with all the mix of sad and happy emotions and memories, that it brings.


4. The tragedy of kids killing themselves in Japan, because of the song... just never happened.

We're forced to this conclusion because the lack of evidence is so absolute. There's just not a scrap of evidence anywhere, of any kind, that the tragedy ever happened.

For example, Japan's census numbers do not show a jump in 100 child deaths. Nor was there increased child-mortality rates, starting in 1996, when the original game released (with the "cursed" song).

Likewise, the supposed tragedy was never mentioned in any kind of news, or media, from TV news programs, to newspapers, books, magazines, etc.

And while such a lack of news / media attention, might be interpreted as a government cover-up...

...The lack of evidence is so complete, that it goes beyond ideas of cover-up. And forces us to conclude that it just never happened.

There's just not the smallest scrap of evidence of any kind: Not a funeral eulogy, or a funeral mass card... There's not a single person who has come forward with a secret family-history of the tragedy, which has been secretly passed-down, ever since 1996... There's no one who knows anyone who supposedly was affected by the tragedy.

The lack of evidence is just so absolute that we know that it just didn't happen.

We can just blame the urban legend on creepypasta stories.



5. The song really WAS changed, for the international release, PROBABLY because the original is so legitimately unsettling.




6. But beyond its strange composition, the song is otherwise unremarkable.

That is, there's nothing unusual about the song, in a technical sense.

Despite the urban legends:
There are NO harmful sounds in the song, for anyone's ears, or speakers!

There are no special high-pitched tones, and no binaural beats.

There's no point in the song, when it suddenly ROARS with static, or does anything that jumps out! (There ARE fanmade versions of the song, with such things, to go along with the creepypasta stories.)

I also point out that anyone can download the original song, and anyone can see the song's visual read-out, in a simple spectrogram (like if u put the song into iMovie, it will show you the song's spectrogram image, automatically).

And so you can see that there's nothing unusual in the song's visual read-out. It really just shows the rhythm of the song, which looks surprisingly consistent and regular.

There's no point at which anything unusual happens, in the spectrogram's visual image of the song.

So there's no spike of strange tones or anything, which stands out, in any way, at any point, throughout the song's spectrogram image.



7. ...And suffice it to say, there are NO secret images, hidden in the song's spectrogram image (as the legend goes).

So as cool as it would be: No, there is no hidden image of a ghost. And no hidden message.

(Now, there ARE YT vids that show such things, in a fan-made altered version of the song, which was made to go with the creepypasta stories.)




8. My last fact is that the song really DOES have some surprisingly unsettling, AUTOMATIC effects on your emotions!! Even after knowing that the urban legends are total fiction.

Regardless, the song is still so strange, with such odd noises thrown in, and most importantly, the song was made with the INTENTION of sounding creepy and sad.

So after everything, the composers' intentions still come through the odd music, and unexpectedly so, with such simple hardware. The little Game Boy really does drone out a song that has fairly automatic effects on your feelings.

You may feel sad for no reason... even at a later part of the day, without knowing why you feel sad.

You may start thinking about your past, deceased pets, before you realize that the REASON you're thinking of it, is because of earlier playing this song, and thinking about its theme of GRAVEYARDS, which the song is really meant to evoke.

Yes, the song is basically graveyard music, for a pet cemetery. That's why it sounds so sad, and strange, and otherworldly. Because it's meant to.

Even the song's "spooky" parts are intentional because Lavender Town does contain ghosts. (And of course, it's only natural, that ghosts would linger around a graveyard.)

So that's the long and short of it. The Lavender Town theme manages to make the Game Boy drone out an unsettling song, which evokes feelings of sadness, and spookiness... because the song is MEANT TO evoke such feelings, and it really does, quite automatically.

And it's to the credit of the composers & developers, not some "curse" or supernatural reason, nor is there any technical or mechanical reason, behind it.

Well, that's that lol. Hope people enjoyed because it is a fun topic, and it does need factual clarity, to understand what the urban legend is really all about.

Also I wasn't sure the best sub-forum to put this. So mod's can feel free to place this somewhere better than the videogames section.

Hmm, maybe this should have been posted to the urban legends section?

Mod's can put it wherever it makes the most sense.

Alright I figured that the best place for this is actually the section for urban legends. So I reposted this in urban legends.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Probably best thing if this thread gets locked, and conversation can go to that thread, in urban legends.