What happened in The Girl From the Well by Rin Chupeco - Recaptains

The basics

Title: The Girl From the Well

Author: Rin Chupeco

Series: The Girl From the Well #1

- The Girl From the Well (2014)
- The Suffering (2015)

Add it: Goodreads

Goodreads Summary:

A dead girl walks the streets.

She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.

And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.

Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out.

Read a full summary of The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco below. If you can’t remember what happened in The Girl From the Well and you need a refresher, then you’re in the right place.

what happened in The Girl From the Well?

• Like the synopsis suggets, there’s a dead girl called Okiku walking the streets hunting killers. She comes across a man who has lots of ghosts (of dead children) attached to him… He’s clearly a killer.
• A boy called Tark moves into Okiku’s house. His mother tattooed him when he was younger and now she’s in a psychiatric ward. She can’t really remember what happened.
• Tark’s cousin, Callie, is a teaching assistant. Tark joins her classroom.
• By the way, Tark starts seeing Okiku almost right away. It’s always out of the corner of his eye though.
• There’s a murder in the neighbourhood. They don’t know who did it.
• The creepy child snatcher talks to a policewoman’s daughter. Thankfully he doesn’t take her.
• He does take Tark, though, and Callie goes to rescue him. It’s all very heroic but Tark is drugged and Callie gets captured. Thankfully, Okiku is around to save them both. She kills the child snatcher.
• Callie talks to Tark’s mum, who talks about ghosts and things. There’s a super creepy woman in black, and a nice woman in white (Okiku).
• Tark’s mum then dies.
• Tark’s mother had an obsession with doll collecting, apparently. Callie asks Tark’s father about all this but he’s oblivious.
• Tark and Callie finally talk about ghostly things. He’s been seeing the masked lady in black since he was a child. He can’t remember anything before he got the tattoos. Once, one of his bullies was found dead. Everyone figured this was linked to him so he had to leave the school.
• Tark’s tattoos have been fading. Callie thinks this has something to do with the ghosts, and the woman in black breaking seals.
• Tark and his family move to Japan for a fresh start. Unfortunately, there’s a creepy thing about dolls, so this whole thing isn’t quite behind them.
• Callie learns that Okiku is the start of all the creepy legends. Apparently a spurned lover threw her into a well and killed her.
• While Callie visits a castle, she learns a bit about Okiku’s history. At the same time, Okiku recalls what happened to her, with her lord sending her away to be killed. Callie visits the well.
• A creepy ghost crawls out of the well towards Callie. It’s not the Okiku who is narrating the story.
• There’s a whole thing about some teenage boys murdering a teenage girl but it was based on a real story and I don’t really want to go into it here. But yeah, that happened.
• Tark has to be taken to people who are in the know (they’re basically exorcists). They tell the story of an old exorcist lady who bonded with a ghost and became the woman in black. Tark’s mother sacrificed Tark (because he was an innocent baby) to trap the woman in black before she could do Damage.
• That’s why Tark has those tattoos.
• Anyway, the exorcists try to do their thing and free Tark from his torture but it turns out one of the seals was sealed with Callie’s blood, so the ritual doesn’t go to plan. The woman in black makes a break for it but it’s okay because Okiku is there to help. The woman in black is defeated.
• Callie and Tark decide they have to look after the creepy dolls so no one else can get their hands on them. Tark is only a little bit haunted now, which is nice.

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