The Best Supernatural Anime of All Time, and What to Stream Free Now

Every culture has its ghosts, but few take them as seriously as anime. The supernatural genre lives on the thin line between our world and the one just past it, the spirits at the edge of sight, the curses that outlast whoever cast them, the gods still wandering a country that half-forgot them. What separates a great supernatural anime from a merely spooky one is that it gives the unknown rules and weight: a haunting that means something, a monster that used to be a person, a power that costs the one who wields it. The best of them aren't really about the ghosts at all. They're about grief, memory, and what the living owe the dead. Here are the ones that define the genre, and then the supernatural series you can start streaming free on AnimeSphere this minute.

The all-time greats

These are the pillars of the genre, the shows fans point to when someone wants spirits, curses, and the world just past our own done right. Not all of them are free everywhere, but each is worth tracking down, and each is a yardstick every new supernatural anime still gets measured against.

Mob Psycho 100 (2016)

A middle-schooler with world-breaking psychic power only wants to be normal, and gets his life advice from the small-time con man who employs him as a fake exorcist. Studio Bones turns explosive spirit battles into a genuinely moving story about self-worth, wrapped in some of the most inventive animation of its decade.

Natsume's Book of Friends (2008)

A lonely boy inherits a book his grandmother filled with the names of yokai she defeated and bound, and spends the series quietly returning those names one by one. Melancholy, gentle, and unexpectedly warm, it's the softest supernatural anime ever made, and one of the most beloved.

Jujutsu Kaisen (2020)

To save the people around him, high-schooler Yuji Itadori swallows a rotting cursed finger and becomes the vessel for a thousand-year-old monster. MAPPA's sorcerers-versus-Curses action is some of the sharpest of the modern era, built on the idea that our ugliest emotions literally take shape and hunt us.

Bleach (2004)

Ichigo Kurosaki inherits a Soul Reaper's powers and takes up the duty of guiding lost souls and cutting down the Hollows that devour them. A cornerstone of supernatural shonen, its stylish afterlife and endless roster of spirit-swords made it one of the defining anime of the 2000s.

Yu Yu Hakusho (1992)

A teenage delinquent dies saving a child, then earns his life back as a "Spirit Detective" policing the border between the human and demon worlds. Yoshihiro Togashi's breakout grows from ghost-story mystery into one of the greatest fighting anime ever made, and it has barely aged a day.

Mononoke (2007)

A wandering, unnervingly calm Medicine Seller hunts vengeful spirits, but cannot draw his blade until he uncovers each one's Form, Truth, and Reason. Rendered in hallucinatory, textile-like art unlike anything else in the medium, it's supernatural horror as pure, hypnotic craft.

xxxHOLiC (2006)

Watanuki, cursed to see spirits he'd rather not, is hired by a mysterious dimensional witch who grants wishes for a price he can't quite afford. CLAMP's episodic run of Japanese folk-horror and morality tales is beautiful, eerie, and quietly wise about the shape of human desire.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (2019)

After demons slaughter his family and turn his sister into one of them, Tanjiro joins the Demon Slayer Corps in search of a cure. ufotable's staggering animation made it a global phenomenon, but it's the tragic humanity of the demons, each a broken person underneath, that gives it real weight.

Noragami (2014)

Yato is a broke, no-name god doing odd jobs for a five-yen offering, dreaming of a shrine to call his own. Bones balances slick phantom-slaying action with a surprisingly tender story about worship, loneliness, and the ache of being remembered.

Shiki (2010)

A wave of unexplained deaths creeps through a remote mountain village, and the lone doctor who investigates uncovers something far older than any disease. A slow-burn vampire horror that keeps flipping which side the real monsters are on, it's among the most quietly devastating supernatural anime out there.

Watch free on AnimeSphere right now

Not every show above is free everywhere, but plenty of great supernatural anime is streaming free, legally, on AnimeSphere right now. The list below is pulled live from our own catalog: every supernatural series with official free episodes available at this moment, ranked by how much of it you can actually watch. It updates itself as new titles and episodes go up, so what you see is always current, no dead links, no piracy, no paywall. Scroll down and tap any cover to start watching.