Since its debut, The Legend of Zelda has never shied away from curses, ghosts and the walking dead. But it is in the series’ optional side quests that Nintendo most freely unleashes horror, tucking dread beneath the bright, whimsical surface of Hyrule across generations of games—from the spider-infested alleys of Kakariko Village in Ocarina of Time to the lightless depths beneath the earth in Tears of the Kingdom. What follows is a tour through nine side quests that prove some of the franchise’s most unsettling moments hide not in dungeons or boss fights, but just next door.
The pattern has defined the series for decades: give players a sunlit world to explore, then reward their curiosity with something rotten lurking underneath. In the main story, fear lives inside dungeons and encounters; in the side quests, that fear has migrated into ordinary homes and forgotten corners, where stumbling upon it feels far more jarring.
Curses That Crawl Out of the Dark
Nowhere is this more evident than the House of Skulltula in Ocarina of Time. Years before the game’s events, a wealthy family was—according to local rumor—cursed into spider people for their greed. The only cure lies in destroying 100 Gold Skulltulas, oversized golden spiders that cling to walls and trees across Hyrule Field and its most claustrophobic dungeons. But the true horror arrives when you step inside the family’s home in Kakariko Village and find half-spider, half-human hybrids hanging limply, awaiting help from a stranger.
A similar unease permeates Ikana Canyon in Majora’s Mask, where a young girl named Pamela hides her father in a basement closet. He is midway through transforming into a Gibdo—a zombie-like undead creature—and the game never tells you directly. Instead, players must sneak belowstairs and endure the moment the closet slams open to reveal the half-mummy bursting forth. The Song of Healing can break the curse and yield the Gibdo Mask, but only if players remember in the throes of their fright.
The Unseen and the Undead
Sometimes Zelda’s terror lives in what you never fully see. At Romani Ranch in Majora’s Mask, a young archer trains to defend her home from “Them,” an alien presence that drifts toward the barn each year around the Carnival of Time. Modeled on folklore like West Virginia’s Flatwoods Monster, these silent figures approach slowly from dusk until dawn—and fail to protect the barn means your friend is whisked away and returned without a memory.
The Ghost Ship in The Wind Waker offers a different flavor of dread: a pale vessel gliding across moonlit waters with its own haunting theme. Because locating it depends on reading context clues and lunar phases, much of the fear comes from sailing the Great Sea in confusion—until that ghostly ship finally rises from black water.
“They come every year around the Carnival of Time to steal cows,” says Romani, bracing for invaders no one else believes exist.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Souls, Statues and Sad Ghosts
Twilight Princess turns tragedy into horror through Jovani, a man who sold his soul to the ghostly Poes for wealth and was turned to gold alongside his cat. Freeing him requires collecting sixty Poes across Hyrule—many only visible in Wolf Link’s form—and even then he is left weeping in Telma’s bar once his girlfriend has moved on.
In Tears of the Kingdom, the Bargainer Statues lurking throughout the smothering Depths trade weapons and armor for Poes—the souls of the dead. Incomprehensibly gigantic or half-buried in cliffsides, these silent figures make wandering the dim green darkness genuinely terrifying, a far cry from the sunlit overworld above.
Not every scare lands as dread; some simply linger. The Lost Ghost in Link’s Awakening trails players as an adorable pink spirit hoping to reach its grave, while Phoeni—the ghostly hand that rises from the Knight Academy bathroom in Skyward Sword—merely asks for a piece of paper, ultimately delivering a bittersweet tale of unrequited love.
A Legacy of Hidden Horror
Across these entries spanning Link’s Awakening through Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda has consistently proven that its most memorable chills arrive off the beaten path. Whether players brave the spider family’s parlor, bargain in the Depths for the souls of Hyrule’s dead, or simply close the closet on Pamela’s father, one thing remains constant: it is always worth checking the closets in the basement first.
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