In The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, you’ll spend roughly half the game wearing a dead man’s face. The game doesn’t sugarcoat this. Every single transformation scene comes with a shriek, a lurch, and Link suddenly having to figure out how to work with a body that belonged to someone else until very recently.
Over the three days of Majora’s Mask, there’s a looming moon with a face so terrifying that you spend most of the game very deliberately not looking up, a moon that’s about to wipe out life as you know it. But somehow, it’s not the scariest thing in the game. That title belongs to your collection of extremely odd outfits. So — what makes one of the game’s 24 masks definitively haunted? Three criteria come to mind: It holds a dead person’s spirit, it carries a curse, or if it simply looks like it’s crawled out of a nightmare. The nine below run from merely unsettling to excruciatingly haunted. Put one on at your own risk.
9
All-Night Mask
Side effects may include: Being physically unable to sleep. It was built as a torture device, after all.
On the Final Night of Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, once you’ve stopped a thief from robbing the old lady at the Bomb Shop, you’ll find that the town’s Curiosity Shop has a new item for sale: The All-Night Mask, available for just 500 rupees. It’s got an odd look to it, with the perfectly circular eyeballs and red pupils and all. Wear it and you can try to fall asleep, but you just won’t be able to. “Pretty creepy, huh?” he adds. You can check in with a Gossip Stone to fill in the backstory: The mask was created as a torture device of insomnia. Link’s only use for it, fortunately, is staying awake through a benevolent grandmother’s stories. But, uh. What was it used for before that?
8
Mask of Truth
Side effects may include: Gossip Stones that won’t stop talking, and a spider curse you have to break to earn it.
You earn the Mask of Truth by breaking a curse. Deep in Termina’s Southern Swamp, there’s a house on an island with a door covered in spiderwebs. Burn those webs, step inside, then kill 30 Gold Skulltulas — and you’ll free a trapped man from a lifelong fate of listening to those twitching spiders. Put on your new Mask of Truth, and the Gossip Stones scattered across Termina will start talking. Or perhaps they’ve always been talking, but now you can just hear them? If ignorance is bliss, the Mask of Truth puts an end to your happiness quite quickly. Termina has three days left. That makes the stones very chatty. They’ve got stories, and they’ve been waiting for an audience.
7
Garo’s Mask
Side effects may include: Attracting hostile Garo spirits. And making nearby ReDeads bust a move.
Some of the masks in Majora’s Mask are useful (cough, the Bunny Hood). Some are less so, like the Mask of Scents, but have intriguing stories or quests attached, at least. Garo’s Mask is both. To get Garo’s Mask, you beat the Gorman Brothers in a horse race. The mask itself is a gold face under a purple hood. Wear it, and you’ll attract the attention of Garo spirits — desert-dwelling, ninja-like spies who do not love the Kingdom of Ikana. When in Ikana, these spirits attack you on sight, but once defeated they drop hints about game progression. Garo’s Mask also makes ReDeads pirouette on demand instead of shrieking at you, which is an extremely helpful bonus for navigating the Ancient Castle of Ikana. Even if it is a little odd and mesmerizing watching zombies stop everything to suddenly do ballet.
6
Stone Mask
Side effects may include: Guards that can’t see you, just like the wounded soldier who gave it to you.
On the road to Ikana, a wounded soldier named Shiro lies injured in a plain circle of rocks. He, too, is so plain and unnoticeable that he’s invisible to passersby, even while waving his arms, begging for help. If it weren’t for Link and his Lens of Truth, that might have been Shiro’s fate indefinitely. Luckily, you can spot him, hand him a healing potion, and give him the confidence to stand out from his surroundings a bit more. He gives you the Stone Mask as thanks, which makes you invisible to guards and most enemies. While this is an incredible asset, especially for the Pirates’ Fortress, imagine what would happen if you didn’t see Shiro. He’d likely still be there, just hoping that someone, anyone, would give him a moment’s notice.
5
Kamaro’s Mask
Side effects may include: Losing your face and breaking into spontaneous dance.
Majora’s Mask may have a thing for odd, enforced dance routines. Venture out into Termina Field at night and find Kamaro — a dancing spirit — near the path to Snowhead. He’s crying, mourning his unfulfilled dreams. If you play him the Song of Healing, you’ll help him out, possibly, by trapping his dancing talent inside a new mask that looks exactly like him. Pop on the mask yourself, and Link will start doing an energetic, hypnotic dance routine. Since it replaces Link’s face with another and possesses his limbs, however briefly, it does feel haunted…even if the result of this particular haunting is an impromptu dance party.
4
Captain’s Hat
Side effects may include: Undead soldiers taking your orders.
At the end of Ikana Graveyard sleeps a gigantic skeleton named Skull Keeta. That is, until you decide to play the Sonata of Awakening right in front of him. Suddenly, you’re chasing a skeleton through the dark, shooting arrows at it to slow it down while you’re getting stuck behind incredibly inconvenient laser wall barriers. Catch up to him, beat him, and he’ll grant you access to a chest that holds the Captain’s Hat, which houses his spirit. Wear it, and the nearby Stalchildren will mistake you for their captain and open graves on command. If you can get past the idea of putting on someone else’s spirit like a hat — fairly mandatory for this game — you’ll find that pulling rank comes with privileges. Even for the dead.
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3
Gibdo Mask
Side effects may include: A polite conversation with a mummy.
Pamela’s father is, tragically, halfway through the process of becoming a mummy. The young girl doesn’t quite know how to handle this (relatable) so she’s hidden him in a closet (also relatable, but horrifying). After he pops out of that closet in one of the game’s most memorable jumpscares, you have the opportunity to break the curse by playing the Song of Healing. Do so, and Pamela’s father will leave behind the Gibdo Mask. This mask makes Gibdos, the game’s version of zombie-mummy hybrids, talk to you. Which is terrifying, yes, but a necessary evil if you’re hoping to figure out what’s going on beneath a particularly haunted well nearby.
2
Majora’s Mask
Side effects may include: Possession, a grudge against the whole world, and a falling moon.
Most of the collectible masks in Majora’s Mask come with some version of a trapped spirit and the ability to be possessed or transform into something (more on that in a moment). The mask that gave the game its name is no different. Lore has it that a vanished tribe made Majora’s Mask by sealing the spirit of an ancient demon inside for hexing rituals, as you do. No one in the game is quite sure why this happened.
But when the mischievous Skull Kid steals the mask and puts it on, bad things start to happen. The mask manipulates its wearers with a conscious malice of its own, exploiting their negative emotions, loneliness, and resentment to cause chaos — and, possibly, the world’s end. But this shouldn’t really come as a surprise: The mask’s former owner, the Happy Mask Salesman, did in fact warn you that its power is deadly. And as we all know, when someone with the world’s creepiest smile (Are you okay, Happy Mask Salesman!?) tell you that something is deadly, you listen.
1
The transformation masks
Side effects may include: Becoming a dead man and being welcomed home as him.
As you play through Majora’s Mask, you’ll use the Deku, Goron, and Zora transformation masks so often that they’ll feel routine. You might start to think of them as normal, or forget where they came from. Allow me to fix that. Three masks, three funerals, three beloved dead: The Zora Mask contains the spirit of Mikau, guitarist of the Indigo-Gos, who you found dying on the beach. The Goron Mask is Darmani the Third, who died trying to reach Snowhead. The Deku Mask is — probably — the Deku Butler’s son. When you put on each of these masks, you turn into these real people, enough that NPCs around you recognize you and are excited to see their friend again. This is both haunted and heartbreaking. And, if the shriek that accompanies every transformation cutscene is to go by, extremely painful.