01Summary

A ghost is an appearance. The word records what was seen, not what is present.

Ghost cases are common in report and rare in confirmation. Most resolve into ordinary causes: error, fabrication, grief, sleep disturbance, a draft, a settling house, a known phenomenon wearing an unfamiliar face. Confirmation requires an anomaly that repeats, or corroboration that survives an ordinary explanation.

Confirmed cases share no single cause. Some remember, choose, and speak. Some repeat one fixed event with no mind behind it. Some exist only through an object or a place. Some fasten to a living person and travel. Some were never human at all, and wear the dead as camouflage.

The objective is not to prove a place is haunted. It is to determine what is present, what sustains it, whether it can choose, and whether its presence endangers the living.

Treating every ghost as a person can be dangerous. Treating none of them as people is worse.

02What They Are

Use the narrowest classification the evidence supports. More than one may be present in a single case; an aware dead may share a house with a mindless repetition, and neither is the other.

• Echo. A fixed repetition with no awareness. It does not see you, and it will walk through where you stand as though you were not there.
• Remnant. An aware, memory-bearing dead. It can recognize, choose, protect, conceal, and lie. It is not always the whole of the person who died.
• Anchored Dead. Bound to a source — remains, an object, a place, a truth — that may sustain it, localize it, or imprison it.
• Attachment. Bound to a living person rather than a place, and follows them. Often mistaken for a haunted house.
• Farewell. A single appearance at or near a death. It rarely returns and rarely needs anything.
• Faded One. A ghost worn down until only emotion and impulse remain after the identity is gone. Frequently more dangerous for it, because nothing is left to reason with.
• Storm. Not a ghost. A living person moving objects and breaking glass under extreme stress, usually without knowing it. The response is protection, not exorcism.
• Imitative Spirit. Never human. It assembles a familiar face from what the witnesses already know, and █████████.

03Anchors and Boundaries

An Anchor sustains, localizes, contains, or grants access. It may be remains or a grave, an object or a photograph, a place of death, a promise, a concealed truth, a bloodline, or a living witness who carries the memory. One Anchor may do several of these at once.

A trigger is not an Anchor. It only changes the odds: an hour, an anniversary, a song, a change in the weather, a renovation that disturbs what was quiet. Record each role separately, because the song that summons the figure is rarely the thing that keeps it.

Every haunting has boundaries — a room, an hour, a single witness, a device, a family, a distance from the Anchor. Test one at a time. A closed door is not a supernatural wall merely because nothing has crossed it yet.

04Manifestation and Harm

Ghosts appear as they died, as they were, or as they wish to be seen. Clothing and carried objects are usually projected identity rather than surviving matter — a uniform is a self-image, not cloth. A change in appearance may mean escalation, manipulation, or Fading.

Manifestation appears to cost something. The stronger the activity, the more it tends to leave in the room: localized cold, static, drained batteries, a door that moves against the air. None of these proves a ghost on its own, and all of them have ordinary causes that must be ruled out first.

Incorporeal does not mean harmless. Direct killing is uncommon; most deaths are indirect. A witness falls, crashes, follows an apparition into danger, or acts while terrified or influenced. Emotional pressure can magnify grief, rage, calm, or despair until a household reorganizes itself around the haunting and the damage can no longer be told apart from the cause.

05Contact and Termination

Ghost communication is incomplete. It may come as speech, a whisper, a knock, a moved object, a failing device, a dream, or a single word that carries far more weight than meaning. Keep contact low-risk: one speaker, short and literal questions, adequate time, no provocation. Promise nothing about release, reunion, forgiveness, or what waits after.

End every session clearly, and record whether the activity ends with it. Terminate at once if the manifestation asks for blood, injury, invitation, secrecy, or isolation; if the same message begins arriving through more than one person; if the identity changes to fit a listener's fear; if anyone loses time; or if the Anchor moves.

06Handling

Use the least destructive action that protects life. The order is fixed: observe, stabilize, communicate, resolve, separate, dissipate, contain, and only then destroy — each step taken only when the one before it has failed or cannot keep people safe.

Resolution does not guarantee disappearance. A Remnant may understand its death and choose to remain. An Echo has no mind to release. Do not promise that naming the dead, returning an object, or solving the killing will set anything free; the story of the unfinished task is often one the living imposed.

Threat is assigned to the incident, not the type. A gentle Echo that no one can see coming has still put people under trains. Destruction requires authority, and when it is done the Vigil records only that the detectable manifestation ended — never what, if anything, was destroyed beyond sight.

A ghost may be a person, part of a person, the memory of a person, or something that learned the shape of one. Do not decide which because the face is familiar.

Ghosts & Hauntings · Operational Reference GH-01 · Watcher rank and above.